Salar de Uyuni

This Easter we took a bus 13 hours to Uyuni, a town at the edge of the world's largest salt desert. We were going on a three-day trip in a jeep through the salt flat, neighbouring deserts and a national park. Just outside Uyuni we stopped at a graveyard for trains that were used in the past to transport silver and gold from Bolivia to Chile and Argentina. The salar de Uyuni is as big as Sjælland and Fyn together, that means 10,582km2, with a depth of 120m of salt in the deepest part. During the wet season the slat flat is covered by a layer of water, which makes beautiful mirror effects. It is an impressive place. It's also the world's largest lithium reserve, which is used in our batteries, ceramic tiles, steel and aluminium production, and many other things. Salt is of course also mined here.

The neighbouring villages build their houses with salt blocks and use salt instead of cement. Often the few wooden materials used for making windows and such come from the huge cactus that are found in the area.

The train graveyard at the edge of the desert

Tourists swarm the graveyard for Easter holiday

Still today, the Uyuni salt lake is used to extract salt in a traditional manner

The Dakar race now goes through Salar de Uyuni each year

Lunch in the desert

Incahuasi (literally 'the house of the Inca'), a cactus island in the middle of a dried out sea. The Tunupa volcano is in the background

Andrés is in heaven...

Incahuasi was once an island in a vast sea covering the Altiplano that emerged when the Andes Mountains were formed. We found this awesome representation in a tiny museum on Incahuasi. 

Incahuasi with the Iruputuncu volcano in the background

At the edge of the salt desert, just behind the salt hostal where we stayed for the night. Andrés couldn't resist hugging a few more cactus

The hostal made of salt, with our Brazilian and Portuguese friends that we travelled with