Salar de Uyuni and beyond
In the south of Bolivia, there is the largest salt flats in the world. It’s 10,500 square kilometres of flat, lifeless terrain — the remnants of a prehistoric lake before it dried up some 12,000 years ago. It’s in every world-travel book for good reason, so it had to be on our agenda.
The thing is, I wasn’t expecting that 2 days of the 3 day trip actually ventured down through the desert to the South; and what an amazing addition it was.
But first things first; the salt flat is incredible. There’s simply no debating that. Lumped in a 20 year old Landcruiser with 3 rib-tickling Yorkshire lads was an experience enough, but coupled with an absurdly alien terrain we had a day to remember forever. The perfectly flat landscape disappears off into the distance, the horizon only broken by the odd mountain that appears to float due to the heat waves, creating a mirror-like illusion.
Sometimes the ground is wet and sandy, and sometimes harder than rock. We visited an ‘island’ — a protrusion of rock and dead coral only 400 meters wide, which used to be the lake bed. Only then do you realise that the salt flat is actually just a solidified lake. It’s like an evaporation experiment at school, only on an enormous scale.
We took many perspective illusion photos — a must, apparently. Most of them as cringe as the next. But we came away with a few we were proud of. True to stereotype, the Yorkshire threesome managed to capture the perfect lighting and angle to create the illusion of a tiny human dangling of the end of a giant’s penis. As much as I’d love to share the hilarity, I think this calls for the reader’s imagination…
With the Salt Flat in the rear-view mirror, all of nature’s land-morphing techniques spread out before us and the landscape took an amazing transition.
We saw a giant red lake, filled with blooming algae. We visited bubbling vats of muddy lava, in the crater of one of the area’s 30+ volcanoes. There were steaming lakes filled with sleeping flamingos and a lone Andean fox searching for food over rolling hills of barren, infertile desert.
It was so unexpected that it took the breath away. We’d drive for an hour and be in a new landscape. When the sun’s angle changed, it adjusted the colours and atmospherics. The dust pulled up by the cars added to the eeriness.
Rattled bones, covered in dust and skin drier than Gandhi’s flip flops, we arrived at the border of Chile elated. A trip I’d highly recommend.
