Bolivia - Uyuni Salt Flats

After a great nights sleep in our salt beds we all rose early to drive out into the salt flats for sunrise, it was beautiful. Covering 12,000 square miles Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni Salt Flats) is the largest in the world. It was once a sea that extended all the way up to Lake Titicaca but disappeared around 10,000BC leaving this amazing, vast expanse of salt. The salt bed is 11 layers which are each about 10m thick... and it also contains about 9 million tonnes of Lithium... don’t we know about that!

We spent an hour or so taking photos, marvelling in our shadows and the cool perspective photos that we could achieve. We then travelled a little way to Fish Island which is a volcanic expansion in the middle of the salt flats that was once covered in water which means its terrain is made up of fossilised coral. This fantastic island, interestingly, was also covered in cacti. Because it rises seemingly out of the middle of nowhere Fish Island is great for a panoramic view over the infinite white landscape.

After breakfast we travelled further into the flats for more photo opportunities and then to the edge of the salt pan where they are extracting the salt, which they do by hand. It was interesting to see where and how the salt we take for granted arrives on our table.

We said farewell to Salar de Uyuni at this point and drove toward our final destination, a town called Uyuni. As we were leaving the Flats we stopped off in the small rural town of Colchani which sits right on the edge of the pan and comprises of the people who extract the salt and the processing “factories”. We also made a stop at the Train Cemetery outside Uyuni which is essentially a dumping ground for the old steam locomotives that were once the transport system for salt, sliver, and money and were some of the trains that Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid held up.