Day 27: Uyuni - Salt Flats

South America » Bolivia » Potosí Department » Uyuni
May 25th 2011

Published: May 29th 2011

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ElRach

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This morning we were picked up by our guide who explained what we would be doing for our day at the salt flats. We drove to a train graveyard first, which was on the way to the salt flats. It was a bit ghost like, but pretty fun climbing in and out of the old trains. The whole area was covered in coral, because 1000’s of years ago the salt flats were under water. Then we drove to a salt mine, where they showed us how the salt is made and purified. A lot of the buildings were made entirely out of salt, which some of us didn’t believe until we licked the walls! After that we headed out onto the salt flats. It is the most amazing place, 100’s of kilometres of white salt, you feel like you are in Alaska on the snow. The water below the salt is 180m deep, and the guides showed us the salt crystals which formed below the surface. We stopped for a little while and took some cool pictures, then we headed to Fish Island, which has 200m of water below it. After taking some more pictures we had a really nice lunch

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at the train graveyard

cooked for us, then we went for a walk up and around Fish Island. It is absolutely covered in cacti, all different shapes and sizes. And the only reason its called fish island is cos its in the shape of a fish!

From Fish Island, we headed off in our jeep again for another hour towards the salt museum. On the way we stopped at an awesome area, where there was a layer of water on top of the salt, so the water reflected the sky. It was totally beautiful and you feel like you’re standing in the clouds. At the salt museum we found a NZ flag which we wrote our names on. Heading back towards Uyuni, we had one last stop at the salt piles, which was literally hundreds of piles of salt. After we got back to Uyuni we went out for dinner to the Mexican Cafe some of us had been to the night before, then we headed to the Extreme Fun Pub. This place was exactly how it sounds! It had the most insane drinks, and even more insane mugs that you had to drink out of! The whole day was really, really awesome.