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Published: July 12th 2006
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If you never clicked on the huge icon left of this text then now is the time. Clicked it? See the big white spot in the middle of the picture? That’s the
Salar de Uyuni with 10.580 square kilometres the world's largest salt flat. The salt is at the outer fringes only a couple of centimetres but closer to the middle up to 6 meters thick. That’s enough salt for all the soups in the world. The nice thing abut the Salar is that it also doubles as a huge canvas for tourists to take pictures. The salt is absolutely white it is nearly impossible to judge distances. Have a look at the pics and you know what I mean.
There is not much to do on the Salar apart from driving long distances, taking lots of pictures of tourists being silly and a visit to Fish Island. As far as I know Fish island is called this because it is shaped like a fish. This is hard to verify if you’re on land so we must believe the locals. Fish Island is one of the few (if not only) place that break the monotony of white. It was, as the whole
Cementerio del trenes
For some reason Uyuni also featured a train cemetery where all disused trains from long ago were brought to. They must have stopped using this site quite a while ago as all trains that are here were steam powered
area, once on the bottom of a sea which is hard to believe as the whole Salar is at an altitude of 3.650m. It must have been a quite tropical sea as the whole island is covered with remnants of coral reefs. Today it is overgrown with huge cacti’s which reach up to 12 meters and have the longest thorns I have ever seen.
The whole trip to the Salar starts in
Uyuni a funny little town in the middle of nowhere where I was wondering again (about the 50th time during this trip) what possessed people to think “gee this is a nice spot lets live here”. Saying that they have probably the best pizza I had during my whole trip. Not sure if that makes up for the freezing temperatures they have here in which they live without central heating and the desert that stretches around the town!
We, that’s is Jana a friend of mine from back in Colombia, two of her friends, two Dutch guys I met in Potosi, a driver and a cook were all squeezed into a quite new Land Cruiser and set of to do the tour. The first day was
Salt Hotel
There are in total two hotels built completely out of salt in the Salar spent visiting the train cemetery and the Salar itself. The train cemetery is a curious little place full of (you could have guessed) old trains. Not sure why they are “stored” in the middle of nowhere but they must have been there for quite a while as all trains are steam powered.
During the other two days we saw a variety of landscapes and local attraction including red, green and white coloured lakes, flamingos (what are they doing in the cold?), active volcanoes, hot springs, lots of rocks and scrub. The first night was spent in a small village in which we killed a few bottles of red and played cards till 2am in the morning. The next night was a bit quieter as it was colder (the oven was very popular) and we were very tired due to the altitude. The altitude also got me the next morning after we visited some geysers. These geysers are at the highest altitude of the trip at 5000m and that was exactly the time when my stomach decided that it doesn’t like last night’s dinner and disposed of it the way it came. Luckily from then on it just went downhill
(altitude wise) and I got better and better until we reached
San Pedro de Atacama our final stop. Before that we visited some hot springs in which we could have a bath. Sitting in the springs was the only time when I felt nice and warm during the whole trip. The problem was just getting out…
Next stop Buenos Aires
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