Adventures with Trina, Part 3: Uyuni

Following our time on La Isla del Sol, Trina and I returned to La Paz for one night then headed south on an overnight bus to Uyuni. This little mining town is in the southwest, in the department of Potosí and near the border with Chile. Tourists arrive in Uyuni as a jumping off point to the tours of the salt flats (salar), lagoons, mountains and deserts of the region.

We set off on a three-day tour with Cordillera Travel. We were comfortably packed into a Landcruiser with Brenden and Allison, from Australia; Tony, from England; and Robin, from the Netherlands and with whom we had shared a ferry from La Isla del Sol to Copacabana. Our driver was Jhonny, younger than all save Robin, married with two kids, and totally great.

I'm just going to say, and then get to the photos, that Uyuni is the shit.

The train cemetery just out of town is filled with the evidence of a once booming international mining operation.

Jhonny checked on our LandCruiser frequently—the trucks took quite a beating driving through all that salt and sand and such.

Allison applied a (thankfully temporary) shrink ray to Trina and Robin. I always knew Australians were deviants.

And then they all got in a Pringles tube.

Trina and I did a bunch of jumping.

The Salar has an "island" of rocks and ancient cactus, some of them thousands of years old.

You see, it's this ginormous, um, gargantuan, um, LIMITLESS plain made of SALT. Apparently they could keep mining the salar for another million years, at present rates, and they still wouldn't use all the salt. (I might be misremembering this statistic, maybe.) Wikipedia tells us that Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world at 4086 square miles, was formed by the transformation of a few lakes 30,000 years ago, and contains 50 – 70% of the world's lithium reserves. Really, other than it being huge, who cares? You just need to go there and see it. It's incredible.

And this was just the first day! I haven't even started telling you about the salt hotels or llamas or rocks or lagoons or flamingos or vicuñas. Wow. More to come! For now, I give you the A Team.