Thursday 2 October 2008

4x4s on the salt

We left La Paz to head south to the Salar de Uyuni, or, to call it by its Gringo name, the Salt Flats. It´s basically 4000 square miles of flat salt plains, formed when a huge prehistoric lake dried up leaving the largest salt plain in the world.

It´s a terribly desolate and remote place. With no roads, and white salt stretching far into the horizon in every direction, it´s dazzling in the bright sunshine and closely resembles snow.

We signed up to a three day tour of the Flats where we would travel by 4x4, sleep in a salt hotel and freezing cold dorms (where the temperature dropped to minus 20c), see the clearest night sky in the world, be whipped by dust storms, witness green and red lagoons and have a bizarre limbo competition in the middle of nowhere with some newfound friends.

But first... here are the token touristy Salt Flat photos of us taken by our friends Dan and Jo, playing with scale and perspective of this odd place...