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Salar de Uyuni is the world´s largest salt lake and one of the major highlights of our travels so far. It´s definitely on the gringo trail and there´s a train of 4WD leaving every morning from Uyuni with eager tourists on board. We tried as best we could to find something a little bit different and it was an absolutely amazing trip.
The Salar itself took up two days of our 4 day trip and being there is like visiting a different planet. The salar is over 11,000 square km in size and goes on for as far as the eye can see, white and flat with strangely beautiful hexagonal shapes across it (these shapes are actually how the water escapes from a lake beneath the salar). The salar was formed when a huge lake dried up thousands of years ago and all of the amazing scenery was formed by the activities of the lakes and the volcanoes in the area. The sunset and sunrise over the salar were amazing to see as nothing blocks your view and all of the salt changes colour with the changing colours in the sky. I´ll let the photos speak for themselves.
The local towns all live off the salar in one way or another either through tourism, mining of the salt or using the salt to build salt hotels and trinkets for the tourists. We visited one of the salt hotels (which is illegally built in the middle of the salar) and everything in it is made of salt, the beds, walls, chairs, tables, very strange and very cold!
Another island we visited was right in the middle of the salt flats called Isla Ichahuasi (or fish island), its covered in cactus and coral looking rock and the views of the salt flats all around it were amazing. We even saw some crazy people cycling (on push bikes!!) through the salar.
We stayed on an island in the salar made by the Volcano Tunupa and climbed up for an hour or so to get to a good viewpoint. The volcano is really beautiful with amazing colours around its crater of yellow, reds and pinks. We both wished that we had time to climb up closer but unfortunately not this time. We visited the cave of the mummies which our guide claimed was from 1200 BC (we´re not so sure) and basically saw the skeletons of people who died of starvation and the cold thousands of years ago all curled up in the foetal position and much smaller than anyone nowadays. One of the mummies still had her plaits attached to her skulls. A bit creepy!
Another very impressive site was the gruta de las galaxias which was only found 5 years ago by 2 local men. As the entire salar used to be a lake when the lava hit the freezing cold water it created the strangest shapes, almost like really delicate embrodery but made of out rocks on the ceiling of the cave. Outside the cave the lava petrified plants from the lake and preserved them so it seems as if you{re walking on the seabed but without the water! And we visited another creepy burial place called Cueva del Diablo where all of the graves were left uncovered. Yuck!
The colours of the lagunas in the area is amazing with arsenic and other minerals turning the water bright blues, greens and even white in places. Laguna Colorado was one of the most spectacular with burnt red water caused by the algae and plankton in the lake and with 3 different types of flamingos all around the edges of the lake. Laguna Verde was another highlight with beautiful calm green waters which perfectly reflected the volcanos in the background.
Our 3rd night of staying in the Salar was definitely the coldest with temperatures around -10 degrees celsius and holes in the roof of the very basic accomodation we were staying in. Note the very attractive photo of Gareth and I in our sleeping bags with hoods and all. The next morning we had a chance to view the geysers nearby for sunrise, with puddles of boiling mud, water flowing out of the earth at 90 degrees and stupid tourists walking right through it all! Thankfully there were hot pools nearby where we all stripped off to our togs (which was a very hard feat in the freezing cold) and spent almost an hour warming our bones in the steaming waters - now that is how every day should start!
We passed through huge areas of desert and saw the Valle de las Rocas (valley of the rocks) and Arbol de Piedra (stone tree) which are these crazy rock formations that have been created because the volcanic rock is so easily eroded by the sand whipping it from all sides in the desert. Strange but beautiful.
Then it was our 4th visit to the Chilean border where we were on the edges of the Atacama desert. The funny thing is that Bolivia used to reach all the way to the Pacific ocean until the Pacific war over 100 years ago when they lost their coastline to Chile. They obviously feel this even now and we passed a town on our trip that renamed itself Villa Mar (Town of the Sea) after the war in protest, not that it did much good!
We also saw lots of wildlife. Our first encounter was in a town called Colchani, where Maartje (a Dutch girl in our group) got spit on by a vicuna (a type of llama) when she got too close, not once mind but twice! We all had a laugh at her expense especially because the vicuna seemed to take a shine to her boyfriend Guide. We also saw lots of ostrich type birds, thousands of llamas and vicunas and lots of very beautiful flamingos around the lagunas.
The crazy part about the Salar de Uyuni is that that salar is just one part of the amazing scenery in this area, we had no idea that we would see amazing rock formations, beautiful red snow capped mountains in the middle of the desert and gorgeous amazingly coloured lagoons. It is definitely one of the most diverse areas of the world and it was an amazing experience. We hope you enjoy the photos including the standard funny salar photos!
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