1st May - an Afternoon with a Rock Tree and a Coloured Lake

Oh the joys of digital photography! I took so many pictures on our salt flat tour it has taken an age to sort and process them. This is the problem with tours that are not  photographic. You might get only 15 minutes at a location, so the tendency is to shotgun the area in case you miss something . There is simply no time to absorb and digest the information in front of you.
You probably would not believe this, with the number of photographs I am posting, but I use the blog as a small 'sorting agent'. I find that seeing my photographs in a different location helps to distance them and make me more objective.  Deleting photographs is so difficult.

After lunch we drove for about an hour through the Siloli desert till we reached some strange rocks, carved by the wind in to weird shapes. We had been alone in the desert until then, but the rocks drew in a host of four wheel drive vehicles and their tourist occupants who were busy climbing over the stones to get good pictures of themselves.

Crossing the Siloli Desert

Having reached the rocks I spent some time trying to get shots without pieces of people's anatomy in them. Apart from my daughter of course.

The main rock formation is the Arbol de Piedro, or Stone Tree. A really interesting formation which was set off by the clouds gathering in the blue sky.

Then back in the Toyota again and a 40 minute drive across the track to the next attraction. 

Llamas by the side of the path

We reached the Laguna Colorada, or coloured lake and parked on a rise overlooking it.The lake is coloured a pinky red by the micro organisms living in its mineral rich water. It is only about a metre deep and on the far shore we could see heaped white mounds of salts including borax (sodium borate). We could also see yellow sulphur fringing the water. The whole of the tour area is very rich in minerals. The Salar de Uyuni is thought to hold 50% of the worlds lithium, so there must be extreme pressure to exploit it. As we were driving back to Uyuni we came out of the park and here there is extraction of borax and mining going on.

There were a few flamingos taking advantage of the lake. These are residents as the bulk of the birds migrate in the winter season. In the summer the lake is packed with them, which would be good to see. The sky was full of angry clouds, but there was no rain.

We discovered we were to spend the night in a lodge on the other side of the lake. This was a normal (i.e. not salt) building in a little hamlet with a shop and several lodge buildings.

It started to get dark before we had dinner so Mairi and I scrambled up a hill above the buildings to get a better view of the sky and a glimpse of the lake in the distance. There was a bit of a sunset, but nothing over dramatic.

After dinner I went outside by myself to try and get some star pictures. It was an episode fraught with disaster. There was a whole complex of lodge buildings and the Toyotas seemed to spend all their time driving between them, headlights on full beam. It was bitterly cold and I discovered the next day that I had managed to break off the battery cover from the bottom of the camera. To cap it all, I had wandered a little way off from the lodge buildings, which were all identical and could not remember which one we were staying in. After visiting three and making an idiot of myself, trying to find out where our party was, I bumped in to Mairi who, knowing my propensity for losing myself had come out to find me!

In the end I decided to capitalise on the Toyota light painting and even got my own shadow in the picture!

We then slept in our dorm, snuggled in our down sleeping bags, waiting for the 5.00am start for geysers, hot springs and a painted desert.