South America and South Africa

The last three days I made a tour to the Salar de Uyuni (elev. 3,660 m), which is with 12,000 km² (half the size of the land Mecklenburg-West Pomerania) the largest and highest salt-lake in the world in the South-West of Bolivia. It is surrounded by volcanoes, multi-coloured lakes, and the big nothingness. The trip started in Uyuni a little town in the middle of nowhere which was in better times in the last century a major railway junction.The first stop was at the train cemetery where old trains found their final destination in the desert.

From there we went to the Salar de Uyuni with its blinding white endless salt-crust. At the borders of the salt lake the layer of salt is about 30 cm thick whereas it is at the centre up to 45 m. The salt is formed to pyramids to dry for further processing.

The next stop was at the Isla Incahuasi, a small island covered with tall cactii, some of them up to nine meters high and considering the annual growth rate of approximately 1 cm almost 1,000 years old. The Galaxy Cavern with its bizarre stone structures was our final destination for day one.

The next morning we continued our tour through the big nothingness of the Bolivian Altiplano. It was a great experience to cross the desert for hours, so different than anything in Europe. Sometimes we could see strangely shaped rock formations caused by volcanoe eruptions along the dirt-road, some of the volcanoes still active.

Several lakes, some of those coloured in red, green or a pale blue due to algae or minerals/metals dissolved in it, provided habitats for hundreds of flamingos, a bird species one normally wouldn’t expect to see in the desert and an altitude of more than 4,000 m. (Unfortuntaly I got sick that evening, the first time since I started my trip, so that I didn’t feel well enough to take more pictures. The best views were anyway on the first two days.)