Salar d´Uyuni

What a week. We´ve been on the 4x4m trek over the andes and through the Salar d´Uyuni. Photos are iminent. Its a bit hard to describe, a 170km by 120km by 6m lump of salt, blindingly white (unless you have yellow tinted sunglasses where it looks like a desert) and flat as a pancake. We nibbled a bit of it, and yes, it was salt. We stayed in a hotel made entirely of salt (except the outside bathroom of course) - salt walls, beds, tables... actually, the roof was thatched for the rainy season so I suppose it wasn´t 100% salt.


Isla de Pesca - Fish Island- was in the middle, with cartoon style 3 pronged cacti.

From what I understand, the entire Altiplano used to be a gigantic lake stretching from Titicaca to somewhere in Chile, 10,000 years ago. This dryed up for some reason, leaving all its salt in this salt flat. There´s a big salt mining operation going on, you can literally just plonk a shovel in the ground and you have a few kilograms of salt.