One of the highlights of Bolivia was making it out to the salt flats. They really mean flat. Kerri was ecstatic to be able to jump over the mountains here.
The landscape is so flat that objects start to look weird through a camera.
Like a tiny Matthew hanging out in the shade.
Or other cars driving along side. At first they seem normal.
But then they look like little toys. Even more so as the salt is cleaner and just white as opposed to seeing the brown of the clay bottom.
The locals scoop the salt out of the salt flats.
Bake it to purify it, iodize it, and sell it to tourists and locals for use in food.
The salt is sold for $1/kg, which means that even though the people are allowed to mine the salt for free, it’s not worthwhile to export.
They also carve out big blocks, which are used to build buildings.
With more salt stuck in between the blocks as mortar.
There is a lot of salt.
Our first stop in the salt flats was to an area where there was shallow pools of water amongst the salt.
Kerri with her waterproof boots decided to go for a splash.
Splashing saturated salt water everywhere.
There were piles of salt potentially for initial drying, we never found out. More importantly they needed climbing.
They also needed hovering over. Kerri was much better at that than Matt.
We got a bit better the more tries.
Of course there was only one way down from a mountain of salt into a surrounding pool of water.
Our car could not handle all the stress of the desert and we got a flat. It was right where Matt was sitting and he heard a bang sound but didn’t notice any change in driving. The driver must have as when we got out it was sunk down completely.
Which left us stranded all alone in the Bolivian desert.
I mean the 16 of us, in two cars, one of which was working, and at least 4 spare tires, and tons of water, were stranded a whole half hour from civilization.
With a herd of guanacos looking on.
But it looks impressive.
Before we could go out to the cool parts of the salt flats we were taking to this tiny town. It was pretty much two rows of shops. At the far end was a salt museum. Although it was more of a salt building with other salt sculptures inside. I would call it more the Salt Gallery. This was a llama.
This was also a llama?
Obviously a work in progress. (Maybe another llama).
Downward facing dog yoga pose.
Seen from the other side.
A bird of some kind. Matt felt it could use a hat to look more fancy. It didn’t help and just made Matt look weird instead.
