Uyuni and the Salt Flats

Trip Start Aug 31, 2007
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Trip End Ongoing


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Flag of Bolivia  ,
Thursday, September 27, 2007

The bus ride from Potosi to Uyuni is via dirt road, but has the most brilliant scenery with huge plains and massive mountains in the background ... and lots of llamas along the way! The journey should have taken about 7 hours, but our driver was a bit of a speed demon & we got there early ... which would usually be a good thing, but we arrived at our hotel to find that the whole town was without power due to a huge storm 3 days earlier and it wasnt expected to be up for another couple of days! Uyuni is in the middle of no where, so maintenance is a long way away!

We came to Uyuni as it is the gateway to the Salt Flats ... the biggest in the world, it can be seen from space! 64 BILLION tonnes of salt, covering 12,000 square kms, at times 120 m thick, 150kms wide from east to west and 250 kms long from nth to sth. It used to be part of an ocean a very long time ago! There are a few islands on one side, but when you are in the middle of the salt flats, there are places that you cant see proper land The view on the way to Uyuni with llamas
The view on the way to Uyuni with llamas
 . Not a place you want to get stuck!

We had a two day excursion out onto the salt flats ... a train cemetery where all the old trains go to die, a factory where the salt is processed, the place in the middle of the flats where dudes manually shovel the salt into mounds to dry out for a week which then get shipped to the salt factories, we stopped at Fish Island which was covered in 1200 year old cacti, and visited some mummies in the side of a volcano which were about 500 years old. We also stayed in a salt hotel! Yes, a hotel made entirely out of salt ... the floor, walls, chairs, tables, even beds (with mattresses on top). It wasnt as pretty as you might think, the salt goes a bit grey once its been processed into blocks, so the hotel wasnt as stark white as the salt flats.

We had a lot of fun taking photos on the salt flats ... as the ground is completely flat and there is nothing to break the horizon, its fun to play with perspective and make crazy photos, like people crawling into a pringles can or people sitting on other peoples hands. We spent about 3 hours playing with various props, it was a lot of fun!!!

Leaving Uyuni wasnt so fun ... night train to Oruro, then 4 hour bus ride to La Paz ... we were tired little travellers on arrival at midday!
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