Uyuni

Salt is rather tough on the harvest vehicles.

Taking an overnight bus to Uyuni, Bolivia, we decided to book a tour of the famous Bolivian salt flats. The 3 day tour winds through the Bolivian high plains and mountains, exploring various lagoons, the salt flats, and microscopic towns. As soon as we disembarked from the bus, we were accosted by multiple agencies, seeking tourists to fill the last slots of that day's tour which would leave in 2 hours. We picked one that had a solid looking Toyota Land Cruiser as our high altitude, back country, off-road transport of choice. There are abundant warnings about picking an agency with a driver who doesn't drown his night in a bottle and a car that won't break down in the mountains (lest our fate be shared with those unlucky tourists who froze to death in the cab of their malfunctioning vehicle). Assuming that are chances were better than a roulette table might offer, we went for it! We used Lago Minchin.



A hotel on the salt flats made from salt bricks.

Uyuni has the same story of any other podunk town with a natural resource mined from the earth...it is small and depressingly static... Yet this town has tourists! I doubt mountain top removal sites receive nearly as much attention
Twenty foot diameter dust devils danced across the highland desert. The landscape is blinding without sunglasses, and removing them causes my eyes to fill instantly with tears.