25-27 October 2006
Truly one of the most amazing and strange places that we have ever visited. . . I don´t think that we can put together words that explain any better than the pictures what we saw. . . but I´ll try give some little bit of summary. . .
We left from the town of Uyuni, an old mining town. On the outskirts of the town, just before the salt flats, was a graveyard of trains with incredible ironwork and graffiti... a surreal start to our trip.
The Salar de Uyuni is one of the largest Salt flats in the world. . . Long ago it was actually the delta of the amazon river. Then, with a lot of plate tectonic activity, the Pacific plate crashed into the South American plate and the Andes Mountains rose up. The Amazon reversed course, flowing to the Atlantic, and a large number of inland lakes and seas were created along the Andean range. As some of these inland seas dried out, they created enormous salt flats. In this case nearly 100 miles across in some places, and with salt deposits up to 50 feet thick.
This salt is now collected by the people who live in the area. . . not a difficult process, drive your truck out a few miles, shovel the salt into piles, let it dry for a few days, come back and fill up your truck, drive it home, shovel it on top of a small oven to complete the drying process, grind it down, add some iodine (1 kg per 100kg) then spend time in front of a large pile of salt with many small plastic bags and a gas burner measuring it by hand and eyeballing the amount to about 1 kg. . .(see picture of woman above) This then becomes the table salt that is used in Bolivia. Large blocks of salt are also hacked out and used in construction and we were lucky enough to stay in one of the "salt hotels".
Not all of the Salar trip stays on the Salar proper. . . in the surrounding areas are a large number of small lakes, each with their own bizarre set of characteristics. Depending on the minerals and microorganisms that are in them, they are peculiar shades of unearthly colors. . . Red, green, etc. One of them is filled with what looks like enormous icebergs, our guide calmly informed us that it is filled with Borax. (http://www.desertusa.com/mag05/jul/borax.html and http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki//nBorax.) Flamingos in all of the lakes provided shocking contrast to the monotone landscape. Many of these lakes also had alkali flies living on the shores, which reminded us of the unique Mono Lake in northern California where Andrew worked as a Park Service employee and dabbled in research for many summers. http://www.monolake.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_lake and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_Lake_Committee.
There is also a large amount of volcanic activity in the area and we visited a geyser field early one morning. Unlike in the US, there are no warning signs telling you to keep back and we were able to walk right in among them, a bit scary, but truly amazing to look around and see all of the burbling and mud popping, and crazy colors. . . Leigh was heard to mumble the opening few lines of Macbeth. . . luckily the boiling caused no trouble.
All sorts of bizarre rock formations and colorful valleys abound in the area. From wet seeps with strange cactus-like ground cover and magnificent Andean duck and geese, to large expanses of completely barren desert with shocking colors of rock. Stands of large (15-20 foot tall) cactus rounded out the truly bizarre setting.
All in all a truly incredible experience (provided that you can stomach the 3 days bouncing along in a landcruiser over a wide variety of unimproved roads. . .
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Many thanks to Jerome, our Swiss friend, who allowed us to post his photos, as our disposable camera just could not do justice to this incredible terrain. Also, thanks to NASA for their permission to use an image of the moon walking, regardless of our belief that it was actually photographed here on the Bolivian salt flats http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/NOT_faked/ .
