Framedlight

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 ...

Driving from the train cemetery it did not take long to get on to the salt flat. A remarkable place. Uyuni Salt Flat is the largest in the world at 4,086 square miles and the salt crust in places is several metres thick, lying over liquid brine. It is almost perfectly flat with the exception of a few islands such as Isla de Incahuasi, also known as Isla de Pescado or Fish Island which are the remains of ancient volcanos that protruded above the surface of a prehistoric inland sea - Lake Minchin which dried up to produce the salt. The sky was perfectly blue and completely cloudless and we could see views of very distant mountains. We drove on to the flat by the production area where the salt had been cut out and stacked up. At the top of this picture you can see the trucks loading up salt. Pauli drove us over to Fish Island (named for its shape) and set us out a wonderful lunch. There were six of us tourists all together with an Australian, a Canadian and a guy f...