The Salar de Uyuni

Without a shadow of a doubt, Bolivia has the most incredible natural scenery I have ever seen anywhere. The drive up to Uyuni from Potosi was an interesting one. For the three days that we've driven trough Bolivia so far, only about 300m of road has been tarred. The roads are HORRENDOUS. Not just bumpy and unmanageable in a big truck, but most of them winding and twisting around colossal mountains that are everywhere. It's an adrenalin rush just sitting in the back. These roads make Chapmans peak or the Transkei look like the N1 from Beaufort-West to Laingsburg.

Anyway, the scenery en route to Uyuni was spectacular. All you could do was stare out the window in awe. Bugger trying to read. It was like driving through an exhibition of the best landscape artist of all time. Gigantic mountains in the distance framed by the most dramatic blue skies littered with cumulo-nimbus and whispy higher clouds, sparse plateaus, dried bushes and scrubs dotting the red landscape, cacti everywhere like armies of scarecrows, llama's - the works. Tolkien would've loved this place.

So Uyuni was the next stop, famous for those Salt flats that everyone knows about. The biggest in the world, they cover an area of 12,000 square kilometres! And 30,000 years B.C. the salt flat was once a sea-bed to a sea that stretched all the way up to Lake Titicaca in the north. Incredible, and once again I'm lost for words as to how beautiful it is and how humbling it is to have the privilege to view something so amazing. To give you some idea of the size of the flat, we drove 74km into the centre of the salt flat to a place called 'fish island'(because from afar, with the mirage, it looks like a fish). Fair enough. Fish island is famous for it's giant cacti's that grow as tall as 8m. The tallest one ever being 12m high. What is also mind-boggling is that they grow 1cm a year, so that particular cactus was 1200 yrs old!

The least enjoyable part(for me) about visiting this incredible place was the importance placed on getting those infamous 'perspective shots' that everybody has a good laugh at. Pah! Well we managed to get a few on Robyn's camera but the pics here are from my camera so these will have to suffice for the time being. I'm just not convinced by these photo's, they seem to detract from the point of visitng the place in the first place. Okay so it's quite fun but not as fun as seeing the flats themselves.