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The night we returned to La Paz we headed to Uyuni by bus, taking 11 hours. We had already been warned about the terrible road surface and the hairpin bends! The freezing cold temperatures hit us as we disembarked from the bus and we were in desperate need for a hot drink. The small town of Uyuni is one of those towns which would not exist were it not for the large number of tourists passing through. As my Lonely Planet guide puts it, it is a ¨climatically challenged town.¨ But it is the portal to the world's largest salt flats. These salt flats span an area of 10,582 square km.
We arrived at the Red Planet office early to be told that our original start time of 10am had been pushed back an hour - "due to a typo" I just thought it's just Bolivian time keeping!
just outside Uyuni there is a train cemetery which bears the remains of the trains used when the nearby silver mine of Potosi was in its glory days (I heard that a significant fraction of the world's silver - 1/4, I think - was mined in Potosi). So, before heading off to see the salt flats we decided to go and have a quick look.
We explored the flats in a Jeep, heading first to Colchani, a small village where the locals treat the collected salt from the salar for distribution in Bolivia. We were shown the 4 processes the salt goes through to make it onto our dining tables.
There is so much salt in the area that even their houses are made of salt! After visiting this village we drove straight to an island in the middle of the flats and took some pretty impressive perspective pictures because salt is all you can see around you for miles. In some directions there are mountains that seem to have lakes or seas at their foot. This, of course, is only a mirage - a pretty cool one!!
Than we visited Inca Huasi, a volcano island, or "Iceland" as our guide kept calling it, which got my hopes up! The cacti on this island are very impressive growing 2cm each year with many over 9m tall!
Uyuni was truly spectacular, it was a shame we could only take a 1 day tour because of our tight schedule. This meant the same night bus back to La Paz instead! You can tell I was looking forward to it!!!
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Nana Won't do 5 again !