Uyuni and the Salt Flats

Uyuni is a little town in the middle of nowhere, where there is just about 2 hours worth of site-seeing. But it's from there that our 3 day/2 night tour began, stopping by the Salt Flats, several lagoons, geysers, and hot springs, apart from being in close proximities to various wild animals such as llamas and flamingoes! Our guides were a couple, driver Gregorio and cook Doram, who accompanied us the three days in the 4x4, food and hostals included.

Colchane

Right before getting the Salt Flats is an even smaller village called Colchane, where 60-70 families live off of exporting salt, raising llamas y cultivating quinoa (a type of grain commonly eaten that is a good source of protein). There we stopped by the "factory" where they purified and bagged the salt obtained from the Salt Flats, and by 'factory' I mean somebody's enclosed back yard. They collect it, dry it in ovens, mix it with iodine and bag it, to sell it for a mere $3 per kilo.

salt "factory"

After this short pitstop, we finally got to the Salt Flats, 4600 square miles of nothing but salt. Absolutely amazing. Words aren't enough to describe the beauty of what we saw. And it being the rainy season right now, it was all covered with water, making an endless mirror. Look off into the distance, you couldn't tell where the water ended and the sky began. AMAZING.

mounds of salt

cool reflections!

In the afternoon we went to the Train Cemetery. In the past, the wagons had worked with water and coal, but in 1952 more modern trains were put into use and the old ones were dumped in the middle of the desert. In any other more developed country, they would have disappeared, but not in Bolivia.

cemetery of trains

A couple more hours in the car and we finally arrived at our first hostel, located in an abandoned village, again, in the middle of nowhere. The couple people that lived there had no contact whatsoever with the world. I can't even imagine being a kid so removed from everything. What a life...

during a break before arriving at the hostal

scenery, at the hostal