Breath-taking. Utterly breath-taking. No pictures (not even mine!) can convey the shear beauty and wonder this spot on earth evokes. Truly amazing.
But I'll get to that in a second... our first stop was at the ol' Uyuni train graveyard. I had seen pictures and was really excited... I was going to see the actual trains Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had robbed almost exactly a century earlier!!! And I'm not talking about the 1969 film with Robert Redford and Paul Newman... I'm talking about the actual people the movie is loosely based on. And trust me, I can't even begin to imaging how Bolivia looked in 1908...
But I'll get to that in a second... our first stop was at the ol' Uyuni train graveyard. I had seen pictures and was really excited... I was going to see the actual trains Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had robbed almost exactly a century earlier!!! And I'm not talking about the 1969 film with Robert Redford and Paul Newman... I'm talking about the actual people the movie is loosely based on. And trust me, I can't even begin to imaging how Bolivia looked in 1908...
The train yard was amazing... I got upset we only had about 10 minutes to roam around... I mean wtf!! I just spent a day feeling like I was about to die, only to spend several minutes in a photographers paradise?! Damnit.
It's a great shame that people write graffiti all over the trains, but can't say tourists are high up on the R-E-S-P-E-C-T chain. I know I was/am a tourist too, and we have ALL been tourists at some point, but I think you know what I mean.Either way, it was time to get salt and dirty...
It is a truly great expansion of the mind to think about the time it took nature to to fulfill what I saw (and what you will see below)... enjoy.
It's hard to see, but the arrow in the image above is pointing to a jeep off into the distance... it's tiny, but it's there! Just so you get some idea of scale.
We first visited a place where they harvest the salt (above left), as you can imagine, it's not much of a process, they scrape it up into little piles to let it dry (see bottom), then haul it off somewhere, do something to it, and it's pretty much done... I mean c'mon, salt is salt.
Some info on the Uyuni salt flats1:~The world's largest covereing some 10,582 km² (4,085 square miles), which is roughly 25 times bigger than the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, USA.
~Some 40,000 years ago, the area was part of a giant prehistoric lake Minchin. When the lake dried, it left behind two modern lakes, Poopó and Uru Uru lake, and two major salt deserts, Salar de Coipasa and the larger Uyuni.
~It is estimated to contain 10 billion tons of salt, of which less than 25,000 tons is extracted annually.
~Due to its large size, smooth surface, high surface reflectivity when covered with shallow water, and minimal elevation deviation, makes an ideal target for the testing and calibration of sattelites.
Below you can see a satellite image of the area, the green arrow being the town of Uyuni.
View Larger Map
~It is estimated to contain 10 billion tons of salt, of which less than 25,000 tons is extracted annually.
~Due to its large size, smooth surface, high surface reflectivity when covered with shallow water, and minimal elevation deviation, makes an ideal target for the testing and calibration of sattelites.
Below you can see a satellite image of the area, the green arrow being the town of Uyuni.
View Larger Map
In some spots, water was still seeping out of the ground, which made me feel somewhat uneasy walking around... but I figured if the the jeeps could handle it, I'm sure little old me wouldn't break through.
We drove for at least an hour to visit an "island." It's not really an island anymore, but you get the idea... you can obviously imagine in the picture below how it used to look tens of thousands of years ago... 
After a walk around the "island," everyone got extremely creative...
In the bottle... ...and back out.
And of course the best one for last:
Our group taking it easy on the Bolivian salt flats!
What's funny is, that I put my camera on a 10 second timer, which meant that I had 10sec to press the shutter then sprint over and jump to finish the '!' . We had intended to write something like "Bolivia 2008" or just "Bolivia", but we couldn't figure out how to 'write' the letter 'B'... not that 'S' is all that easy!
The sun was setting (and it was starting to get damn cold), so I planted my Belgian flag and headed on.No, just kidding, the flag was there already, located right outside the Salt Hotel. Yup, that's right, a hotel made out of salt.
As the sun set, I took my final photographs for the day... it had been a good one, considering I didn't throw up, puke, hurl, have explosive diarrhea, or any combination there of. Tasty.
Left, is most likely the longest human shadow you'll ever see!
And right... well I didn't know if this was the hotel's pool or not, either way I wouldn't dare go in it... unless it was the world's largest margarita or something.
The next morning it would be back into the beloved bus and on to the mining town of Potosí, which was a massive raping station for the Spanish conquest. Legend has it, that so much silver was mined out of the mountain, the Spanish could have built a road with it back to Spain.
Now you know why the great cathedrals in Spain are so lavishly decorated! Though I'm still curious if they are talking about a road thats more like a 3-lane highway or a bike path...?
Either way, I was about to have some mean-ass American-style nachos. Or as I would call them: "buenas nachos."
1-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni
No comments:
Post a Comment