15.5.13

The land of leftovers


Uyuni is a land full of leftovers, every piece of forgotten and conflict resides here. As a child when it was time to clean my room I would always stuff the odds and ends under my bed and then my father would come in with his garden rake and pull them out. A single pile of the forgotten, and what to do with it, where to put it.


That's Uyuni to me, great salt flats that act like snow, mountains and mountains and volcanos, freezing nights and days, a little bit of night sky hidden behind a mass of stars, rock formations that can't decide if they're coming or going, and creatures stuck together by a child's imagination roaming the landscape. 

FYI I want to live here: 


So the "thing" to do while you are roaming the flats of salt is play with perspective, here's my go:









 It looks and acts like snow, and it's so cold here I feel like it is snow, but its not.



Everything is made out of salt here, there are dangers to having a salt house.


Even tourist kitch is made out of salt.

 Wild llama relatives roam the flat lands, they have a salt lick as far as the eye can see.


Me and MadMax at an abandoned train yard.




The journey took about three days, bumpy landscape, no showers and the bitter cold, but there were three kinds of flamingos.


I was stuffed into a landrover with 5 other people, they were of a good sort, it made the travel pleasant.



It's a long way down from some of these climbs.


Some places were over 5,000 meters



 At 8am in the painful cold we stripped down to our bathing suits and jumped in a natural hotspring with the birds. I think this was one of the biggest challenges, I hate the cold, but having been cold for weeks now add in not showering or even changing my clothes for the past four days won, it was time for a soak.





2 comments:

  1. Wow what a landscape! And such great photos!

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    1. Thank you Philippa, it was a great three days, cold and stinky but worth every moment, you should try and make it out to this wild place one day, you'll find some dancers!

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