Uyuni Salt Flats Day 3

Exploring 10 Billion tonnes of Salt

The day started at 5am for a strict 5.30 leaving time to be on the salt flats before dawn. We had a few stragglers in the group but we didn’t leave too long after the fact. We took the same path (Salt piled 1 foot up and 2 4WD’s wide to keep us out of the water) that we took yesterday for sunset but this time drove much further out until there was nothing but mirror of a breaking dawn in front of us and stars just petering out behind us.

Hugo got us all to come out and start taking photos where, because we didn’t get the rain boots we thought we were getting, we each walked with a little trepidation out a onto the water. While this also ruined the perfect reflection it was never for long because the salt in this ‘brine’ is such a high content that the water settles again into the mirror after a minute or two.

Ya girl with 6 layers on - two merino, two shirts, fleece and puffer

After a everyone was satisfied with the sun rise Hugo piled us back into the warm car and drove out onto the water which was very rare for this time of year having usually evaporated already for the dry months.

The Salar De Uyuni is the largest salt plain on earth sitting at 3,600 meters and is also incredibly flat varying only 1 meter in hieght across its total 10,500m^2. While the areas we had driven around in the tour days 1 and 2 contained mostly Borax, this Salar was mostly just your usual table salt with a bunch of lithium below the surface.

We climbed back out now the sun was a little higher for more photos with the reflection and some with just the endless expanse of dry salt. Hugo was a star director knowing all the poses and directing all the group into doing some great photo shoots before giving us a geographical and history lesson on the formation of the Salar.

you can drive the equivalent of Gosford to Sydney in any direction and only see white salt

Our next destination was the Isla Incahuasi, an island in the middle of this expanse formed by volcanic rocks and hosting hundreds of cacti. It puzzled us greatly how it even exists and with little robins flitting about too seeming to feast on the crumbs left behind by many tour breakfasters.

There were two other amazing stops on our last day, one is this (to me) very random bunch of flags in the middle of nowhere. These flags range from football team flags to Naruto flags but mostly it was countries from all over the world. Daniel took a lot of pride in naming all the flags he could find and making sure I was listening to him too (Yes Dear!).

Our last and final stop of the tour was the train graveyard. This is just outside of the town and is littered with old coal engines and carriages who now sit sadly at at the end of the rail line no longer needed to transport salt or lithium away from the Salar for export (sorry Thomas).

In a last minute decision we decided to head back again that night to view the stars reflecting off the salt flats at 2am. 6 layers of socks wasn’t enough to keep our toes warm in the gum boots and our feet were painful blocks of ice. I also dropped my back up phone into the water getting out of the car in the dark…the salinity of the ocean is 3.5% - the salt flats? 5%

I now have no phone