Salar de Uyani

Do you know that moment, when you're standing at the edge of a beach and you look out into the ocean as far as you can see and the water just seems to stretch out into infinity?

Now imagine that every drop of that water receded, that somehow it got sucked up from the Earth, and all that remained to prove it was ever there was a bed of salt that it left behind.

That, in a nutshell, is the Salar: a sea turned into a desert of salt.



When we started the tour in Uyani, seven strangers and a driver, it was all fun in games. We left the ghost town to explore the first Bolivian railway. In a way that would never happen in the US because it would be considered a liability, we climbed in, on top of and around the abandoned railway cars, snapping pictures the whole time.




That playful mood continued when we got back in the jeep, but slowly winded down as we got closer to the Salar. It was like the Earth was flat and we had just driven to the end of it. In all directions, it was a complete white out.



While the long view, seemed static, the upclose view was more robust. In some areas the salt was in mounds, drying out under the sun before the locals could scoop it up and bring it to town to sell. In other areas, the salt arranged itself to form strange hexagonal shapes. At times , the salt looked like small balls of snow skating across ice. At other times, it looked like ground up cornmeal. There was even a hotel made completely of salt: tables and chairs carved out of it, the floor mainly a dusting of the mineral.



And, of course, no desert would be complete without an oasis. And it was like a mirage that this small island of cacti emerged from the completely white scenery. It had apparently been an Incan prayer ground, with the cacti dating back more than a thousand years.