Ok, so the reason for enduring the hellish bus journey and being in the hot, dusty desert town of Uyuni, is the remarkable surrounding geological formations, most importantly the incredible salt plains. We joined a tour and headed off in a jeep, for three days, to explore...
Our first stop, strangely enough, was a "train graveyard". Uyuni used to be an important transport hub for the export of locally mined minerals and metals. However, once the trade ceased and the trains were no longer needed, it seems they were simply left where they stood. The surrounding land has been reclaimed by the desert and so among the sand, in the middle of nowhere, are these huge, rusting trains. It's a pretty freaky sight and seems to bring out the kid in everyone as it is impossible to resist climbing all over them and making "choo choo" noises!
The sight of the salt plains themselves is one that is difficult to imagine without having seen it for yourself. Hopefully Ben's photos will give you some impression of the vastness of it. The sky is impossibly blue and apart from the vague outline of distant mountains on the horizon, all you can see, in any direction, is white! It's so huge that you lose all sense of perspective; you can't tell how big anything is or how far away (hence the fun illusion photos - Ben under my thumb, me in his palm etc :0)
Some of the salt is mined locally, so from time to time we came across a series of piles that had been dug out. It's pretty easy to see why salt isn't very good for you when you see it as large lumps of rock that have just come out of the ground! The salt is also used to make bricks for building, as well as all kinds of other kinds of crazy sculptures. Ben was very excited about staying in a hotel made entirely of salt, but to be honest I'm not sure that the salt-brick bed and sand-like salt floor quite lived up to his romantic expectations!
Just, it would seem, to make things even more bizarre, right in the middle of all the whiteness there are "islands". Literally jutting up from the "sea" of salt there are big rocky outcrops, covered in cacti! The cacti are like none I have ever seen before either. They are ridiculously tall, some over 40 metres high, and old, I mean really old. One of them is apparently over one thousand two hundred years old! How can a plant live that long?! (Please don't anyone actually try and tell me the answer to that question. I prefer to remain in ignorant awe. I find this technique quite useful in any number of situations!!)
Once leaving behind the salt plains we were in the desert. In preparation for this, Ben and I had replaced the remains of our previous hats with (controversially) caps bought from the local market. My pink, fake Nike cap cost the equivalent of a pound, Ben demonstrating his usual bargaining skills paid one pound fifty for his :0) I feel the need to explain this in order to justify the appearance of the terrible head-ware in some of the photos. Now under normal circumstances Ben would not, of course, be allowed to wear a baseball cap! But come on, it was the desert! I am, unsurprisingly, however regretting the decision to allow such a purchase to be made as the intended-specifically-for-use-only-in-the-desert head-ware has since been sported in any number of less appropriate environments! (I make no apologise to any cap-wearers among you - they look ridiculous! )
Anyway, back to the desert... It is filled with weird and wonderful volcanic sights; smoking volcanoes, geezers squirting hot steam high in the air, other-worldly bubbling mud pools, hot springs, strange rock formations and lagoons of different colours. We saw emus, llamas and vecunas and the wondrous sight of hundreds of pink flamingos standing in coloured lakes. (Photographing them, however, was made infinitely more difficult by a group of loud Germans who kept turning up close behind us everywhere we went. But I guess it's them we have to thank for the beautiful picture of three flamingos in flight, as it was them that had just scared them off!)
Ben:
There are some more photos from the tour here and some more fun illusion photos here
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