Framedlight

We drove back from Laguna Verde along the road we had taken and soon started to see the fabulous coloured mountains we had noticed on the way out. I was anxious that we were not going to stop but Pauli confirmed we would and eventually we drew to a halt on the strangely manicured grit. The road looked as if it had been raked. Perhaps it had? We only stopped the once. No traffic passed while we were there and we were in perfect silence while we looked at the strange mountains, eroded and streaked with reds, browns and whites. The road in into the Dali Desert We were in the Dali Desert, named for its exotic, surreal scenery. These were not the only mineral rich and coloured mountains in the desert but they were the ones we stopped by. On a hill to one side stood strange rock pillars, scattered like chess pieces across the slope. It was still only 9.00am, but it felt a lot later and we still had miles to go before we got back to Uyuni. We...

We left the lodge at 5.00 in the morning, driving out in to the dark past the Laguna Colorada, heading south towards Chile. Just before dawn we could make out the shape of steam billowing and mixing with the frosty air. We had reached the geothermic area of Sol de Manana or morning sun, very appropriate. We were up at 4580m so it was pretty nippy. We were given the customary twenty minutes to look around and I set up my tripod. The sky was reddening in the distance and I got some pictures of the general area and a geyser (although apparently not a geyser according to Wikipedia but a bore hole in the geothermal field). Mairi posed in front of the 'not a geyser' but Naomi came in a bit late and hadn't realised that I had asked Mairi to stand still for a long exposure. The sun was coming up fast as we drove off and headed for some more steam and hot springs past some beautiful mountains catching the warm early light. There was a lot of activit...

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 ...