Salar de Uyuni

The Uyuni Salt Flats are among my top 5 places in the entire world, although you could say they're of another world, because from the time you leave the town of Uyuni until when you return four days later you won't stop seeing incredible things like island of cactus in a sea of salt, a highway over a mirror of water, cold geysers, hot geysers, petrified forests, colored lagoons of green, blue, red, yellow and the thousands of flamingos that live there, curious animals like the viscacha, and the imposing sight of active volcanos over 5,000 meters high. In winter, the temperatures can sink to -20

The desert of Uyuni, located near to the salt mine with the same name, is a dry plateau, with an altitude of three thousand feet, with outstanding color. It is truly fascinating. To see this, take a tour, give it all back to the natural attractions of the Bolivian salt mine. The region is called the Lipez. It is a poor region that was abandoned when Uyuni ceased to be an important trade center. As it was located next to the border with Chile, many mineral trains out to there, but when diplomatic relations turned sour, they stopped working on the border rather than tourist traffic, and it is now a secondary point of the country.

The salt mines exploded hundredds of years ago in Uyuni, and the system has changed little since then. It's practically a craft task because the salt is collected by hand with shovels, then they move it by truck to the dryer, where they put on a fire that takes away the moisture and dries out the salt. Then they add iodine, since unlike sea salt, salt from the earth doesn't have iodine. After all that, the salt is packaged in endless days of 6 am to 6 in the afternoon in which two gentlemen make 5,000 packets of salt.

What more can we say about Uyuni – the peerless south-western corner of Bolivia’s altiplano?

We've exhausted every superlative and hallowed all hyperbole.

Yet some places remain so rich and bountiful they produce artists in the most pedestrian of passengers.

We become overwhelmed.

Flatter than a crushed penny, Uyuni’s salt flats stretch out into oblivion like rolled dough. Formed from the eventual evaporation of ancient Lake Minchin, and with a size bigger than Hawaii, the flats house more than 10 billion tons of salt, 25 000 of which get extracted annually. With deep deposits of lithium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium, Uyuni continues to power the Bolivian economy.