El Salar de Uyuni / The Uyuni Salt Flats

After Rurrenabaque we headed to Uyuni, which you can get to after a 10 hour bus ride south of La Paz. The small town of Uyuni is rather unremarkable except for the number of stray dogs you can spot at dusk. It's one of those towns which would not exist were it not for the large number of tourists passing through. As my Lonely Planet guide puts it, it is a ¨climatically challenged town¨ referring, I think, to the very arid conditions in the area. But beyond being a place to sleep, it is the portal to the world's largest salt flats. These salt flats span an area of 10,582 square km.

Just outside of Uyuni and before the flats there is a train cemetery which bears the remains of the trains used when the nearby silver mine of Potosi was in its glory days (I heard that a significant fraction of the world's silver - 1/4, I think - was mined in Potosi).

We explored the flats in a Jeep, heading first to a small village where the locals treat the collected salt from the salar

Train & Me

for distribution in Bolivia. There is so much salt in the area that even their houses are made of salt! After visiting this village and its many roughly hewn salt sculptures, we drove straight to an island in the middle of the flats (a mountain which is not salt). There was an emu there which was brought with a second emu as a chick to serve as a tourist attraction. The emu did not look like it was in very good shape. The cacti on this island are very impressive. They grow 1 or 2 cm per year (I heard both figures), making a 9m tall cactus between 450m and 900m (there were cacti of this size on the island).

After leaving the island, we stopped in the middle of the salar and took some pretty impressive perspective pictures. I hope to post the pictures when I find an internet cafe with decent uploading speed and a 2.0 USB port. The reason the salar is so good for the perspective pictures is that if you are in the middle of the flats you see nothing but salt as far as you can see. In some directions there are mountains

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which seem to have lakes or seas at their foot. This, of course, is only a mirage - the coolest mirage I have yet seen.

Then we were shown the patterns in the salt. The salt flats are pretty much flat, but due to heat (or was it water?) escaping from below the salt there are ridges in the floor which form polygonal shapes - mainly pentagons and hexagons. In some areas you can also see water bubbling through the salt to the surface.

Uyuni was truly spectacular, but I could only take a 1 day tour as I was already sunburnt beyond comfort.

Additional photos below

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