The south of Bolivia is most known for the salt flats near Uyuni. They get less than 300mm of water per year now, but over a milennia ago, the depression between mountain ranges was Lake Tunupa. After a long series of drying and flooding, alternate layers of clay and salt have been deposited in an area up to 12,500 sq km. The salt flats are slowly expanding as more salt and clay are deposited by the rivers coming down from the mountan ranges around it. Drilling reveals at least 120m of salt and clay, with suggestions that there were 11 major flood/drying cycles, and its thought that the salt could go down as far as 500m.
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| Polygons for daysssssss |
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| They would pile the salt up like this to dry so it can be taken and cleaned. There is a limited amount of salt that can be harvested per year, and because it is cleaned and processed by a few families in a village it is not high quality. Salt from the biggest salt flats in the world is hardly sold outside this area. |
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| Dakar 2016 went thru the salt flats the week before we were there! |
We watched sunrise from Isla Incahuasi. It's an island in the middle of the salt flats. It's covered with cactuses, and you can see fossils of all sorts of coral from when the island was covered in water.
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| The tire tracks going to the edge of the flats |
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| All the cacti! |
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| Cacti are so cool! Been saying this since I moved to AZ. |
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| Super cold, super early, sunrises over a flat desert with mountains in the background. Homesick anyone? |
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| It's got blooms! |
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| Weirdest of weird |
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| Nevermind. This is weirder. |
