Salt Flat Tour (Day 1)

Once we arrived in Uyuni we we exhausted. No sleep for days, being tossed around on a bus for 10 hours and nothing to eat but empanadas. We pretty much crawled to the nearest hotel. We managed to post up in a pretty decent spot as far as this town was concerned.

Uyuni is a town in the south of Bolivia. It's pretty much a gateway for tourists visiting the world's largest salt flats so they arn't to concerned about hospitality. We booked a tour with a company called Croque Tours the same day and fell asleep at 8:00 p.m. I know... boring.

The next day we woke up with the guys from Israel and got ready for our three day two nights through the desert. We hooked up with our driver, Lucas, and another traveler from Brazil.

We were riding in a Toyota Land Cruiser. Pretty comfortable compared to most of the other vehicles heading out that day. Lucas strapped the bags to the roof and we were off. I think we were 2 minutes in when I started thinking about what would be destroyed in our bags after Lucas rolled the vehicle onto its roof. Lucas was a crazy driver!

The first stop was what Lucas called the Train Cemetery. One of the major tourist attractions. It is located 3 km outside Uyuni. The town served in the past as a distribution hub for the trains carrying minerals on their way to ocean ports but in the 1940s, the mining industry collapsed, partly due to the mineral depletion so many trains were abandoned which created the train cemetery.

Then we started for the world's largest salt flat. Some interesting facts about the Salar:

• World's largest salt flat at 10,582 km²
• ^{Elevated 3,656 meters above the mean sea level.}
• ^{Formed as a result of transformations between several prehistoric lakes}
• ^{The crust serves as a source of salt and covers a pool of brine, which is exceptionally rich in lithium. It contains 50 to 70% of the world's lithium reserves}
• ^{The large area, clear skies and exceptional surface flatness make the Salar ideal object for calibrating the altimeters of the Earth observation satellites.}
• ^{Major breeding ground for several species of pink flamingos.}

We stopped at Incahuasi Island which is in the center of the salt flat. We had some lunch and hiked to the top. On the way up the air is so thin it was hard to breath and we had to stop to rest a number of times. While stopping we noticed some signs by some of the cacti. Some of them were actually thousands of years old.

After that we drove one hour to our first hotel. It was pretty basic due to its remote location. We only had 2 hours of electricity that night and one hour of hot water because the place ran on a battery charged by solar power. We went to bed shortly after the lights went out because our next day was to start at 7:00 a.m.

So far so good...