Simon & Louises South American Blog

Greetings…

After kicking back in Potosi, we moved onto a wee place called Uyuni, which is famous in bolivia for the tonnes of white powder it produces, which is exported all over the world and is a vital part of the bolivian economy. Indeed, they have so much of the stuff, you can even stay in a hotel made of it!!!

The Salar de Uyuni, or “salt flats” in English, are the largest in the world, coveriing some 10,582 km² (4,085 square miles). Some 40,000 years ago, the area was part of Lake Minchin, a giant prehistoric lake. When the lake dried, it left behind two modern lakes, Poopó Lake and Uru Uru Lake, and two major salt deserts, Salar de Coipasa and the larger Uyuni. Uyuni is roughly 25 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in the United States. Salar de Uyuni is estimated to contain 10 billion tons of salt, of which less than 25,000 tons is extracted annually. Salar de Uyuni is also the breeding grounds for three species of South American flamingos: the Chilean, James’s and Andean flamingos.

We started out for the day by visiting the train graveyard, where there was quite a lot of old rusting trains from the good old wild west days (Butch and Sundance met their match in Bolivia, very near here), when they would have been a principle transport system.

Afterthis, we set off to the actual Salt Flats, where the landscapes really are about as strange and twisted as you can possibly get on earth.

After the initial shock and awe had worn off, we then headed to the first Salt Hotel, which is in fact an illegal structure which you`re not supposed to visit. It`s shameful that we all happily do, no one ever complains to the tour companies about it, and thus we all help to degrade the environment a little bit more. Having said that, screw it, this is pretty amazing…

After we`d had lunch, we then set off to have a play with camera trickery, as it`s completely devoid of any background you can do some rather amusing trick photography…

Even though the salt flats literally are, just that, we still managed to get a shocking number of punctures!!! We had two, and every other car also had at least one! God knows how the tires managed to blow, but they did… they also deflate very quickly, from full to flat in about 10 seconds, though of course it`s better than a full blowout!

After a few rapid tyre changes, it was off to “fish island”, which seems like a very odd name for an island until you remember this was pretty much a sea/lake for thousands of years! It`s pretty weird to walk around see coral, albeit covered in cacti now!!!! No idea where they find the water from though!

We set off again, and stopped near some volcanoes, and the train tracks that lead to Chile to the west and Argentina to the east. Theres only a train every other day though, so we weren`t too disappointed when one didn`t go past!!!

After all this excitement, it was time to move on, and see some of the remaining water pools or lakes that are still there, where they have flamingoes! Apparently the reason they are pink is because the flowers they eat are pink!

Then it was off again, to see some rocks, which were very nearly the highlight of our lives. Apparently the main rock is supposed to look like a petrified tree, though I think you`d need to eat most of the cacti in the desert to make it so…

The next morning, we awoke at 330 am (which I was overjoyed at!) and went to see some geezers. Expecting to simply be meeting a bunch of cockneys, I was surprised at my misunderstanding…

The reason they look so dramatic and we look so cold is that it was -10c at that time in the morning, even without any wind!!!

After the geysers, we took some time out to kick back and relax in some natural springs! These were about 30c, so were great for warming ourselves up as it slowly got light!!!

After this, we were finally off, after checking out the last lake we were going to see!