The Salt Flat Tour

Altitude: 3800m 

Current Song: Dream On - Aerosmith

Ellen

We are in a Toyota Land Cruiser, rolling down a dusty, lumpy road. I am sitting in the cramped back seats with Letitia, a French girl of a similar age to me, who is accompanied by Patric and Nicholas, who are sitting in front of us along with George. Up front are our driver and Ivan our English speaking guide. Aerosmith is playing on the stereo and we are all very dusty having just visited the first stop on our three day tour of the Uyuni Salt flats - a train graveyard. It is striking and beautiful in a fall-out sort of way. Rusty carcasses of trains laid out in neat rows. Still mainly intact, apart from metal cut away by local engineers over the years. The silhouettes of the metalwork are familiar with their traditional stream engine shape, just with tourists climbing all over them like a tetanus-encrusted adventure playground. We are told that these are, in fact, British trains. Because of course they are. The Spanish originally colonized this area and enslaved the locals to work in the silver mines and used donkeys and alpacas to transport the goods across the country. A hundred or so years later,  the British came to mine the silver and other minerals and built the railway and trains to transport the goods. Because we bloody love trains.

Fascinatingly, the rounded, brimmed hat of the traditional Bolivian women's dress, is in fact, a British bowler hat. The British men working on the trains wore them (because an Englishman is never without his hat) and they were adopted by the locals. Finally, because men look ridiculous in bowler hats, only the women were left wearing them. I both love and feel a sort of national guilt about this fact. It really is the worst hat in British history. 

Altitude: 3800m

Current song: Can't get no satisfaction - The Rolling Stones

George

Radio turned up and connected via Bluetooth to the guides I-Phone, the land cruiser leaves a plume of desert dust behind us as it picks up the rhythm of the stones and rolls away from the small village where we just had lunch. Technically Colchani is a mining village, though likely one of the easiest forms of mining you're ever going to encounter. The 300 or so inhabitants of the village make their living from the duel enterprises of mining the salt from the flats, and from the tourists stopping off on their way by to watch a bit of salt processing and to buy little bags of salt at 1 boliviano a go. Quite why you would dream of buying a bag of salt when you are about to travel out onto the worlds second largest salt flat is a mystery to me, but I suppose it must turn a profit. Ellen bought two bags.

The sad thing about the mining industry around the salt flats is that the people here have, within easy reach, an almost endless supply of a material that nobody really needs. Despite the possible scale of the salt mining that could happen here, the salt is only ever sold within Bolivia. All the surrounding countries can extract their own salt from the sea, and in fact even within Bolivia the salt from the flats only accounts for a little over 80% of the total salt sold in the country. For that reason the mining process has had little reason to modernize and is still carried out largely by hand. Large saw blades are carried by land cruiser a few miles into the flats where half meter square blocks are cut straight out of the ground, loaded up onto a trailer and brought back to the village to be broken up, baked and sealed into bags ready for selling. The most advanced piece of machinery (not including the 4x4) is a rudimentary propane blowtorch used to heat seal the plastic bags - a 20 second process which we managed to have demonstrated in front of us, and have to pay another 5 boliviano for the privilege of seeing. Ellen's bags of salt look a bargain. 

Lunch was a combination of chicken and rice, which the guide tried to convince us was flamingo, (I'm still not sure either way as I was only given one leg), and, bizarrely, a twee iced cupcake for desert. We all crowded into a small restaurant made of salt bricks, sat on salt brick stools and ate off a salt brick table. The only things not made of salt were the windows, curtains and the table cloths which were glass, and brightly woven fabrics respectively. The food was good, but, genuinely, lacking a little in seasoning.

Before we left, Ellen and I just had time to look around the village. The main street makes for a strange sight in this otherwise, half ruined, basic, run down squat group of houses. Both sides of the street are lined with stall after stall, all selling the same colourful tourist tat, bracelets, mini statues, jumpers, hats and gloves all brightly knitted into patterns of llamas. Not for the first time I wonder how any of the families make a living when everyone is selling the same stuff, especially when is stuff i wouldn't expect anyone to buy in the first place. Of course, Ellen bought a pair of trousers and bought me a pair of gloves. She insists they are the "worlds greatest trousers". And speaking of worlds greatest, hidden behind one stall we found the following sign:

There are some signs you just can't ignore.

Altitude: 3800m

Current Song: Wisemen - James Blunt

George

Low pressure tyres on hard packed salt make a noise like distant rolling thunder and I find myself unconsciously glancing at a cloudless bright blue sky as our land cruiser pulls a little distance away from us. In the opposite direction the ground I'm standing on is cracked into pentagons and hexagons, split by the suns heat along rough crystal lines. I make a mental note to quiz 'Chemistry Steve' about this later as I can't work out why it would split into different shapes. The salt is, by vast majority, Lithium Chloride (in fact 70% of the worlds lithium is caught up in these salt flats) which quite apart from anything else should crystallise in cubes as far as I can work out. The guide doesn't have quite the knowledge to help me on this. "Yes. Crystals." He nods sagely.

[Ed. it turns out Steve is no help at all. "Cubes sounds right." I can imagine him nodding sagely. Any help greatly received - Dad I'm looking at you.]

In my excitement over salt, the factor I had hitherto overlooked about the salt flats was the flatness. And even while writing that I think it sounds ridiculous but it really is something to take the breath away, what little you have left from the altitude anyway. There is nothing. No tree or stone, not a valley or cracked crevasse, not even the gentlest of undulations. It is flat white perfection to the horizon. The only break is in the far distance where in some directions mountains rise. With nothing between us and them they seem other worldly, hazy and mirage like from the sheer distance. The light is refracted near the salt surface and the mountains appear to float on their own reflected points. We watch as another party of land cruisers fade into the distance and seem to rise off the ground into their own reflections. Their sudden jetbike Star Wars like appearance does nothing to dispel the feeling that we have stepped onto a hostile world.

I try to take a panorama of the nothingness, but my camera tells me that to take a panorama I have to "move the camera faster". I see no way of explaining to my camera that the whole horizon looks the same, so I give up.

Altitude: 3850m

Current song: You're beautiful by James Blunt. Why.

Ellen

We have been speeding over nothingness for over an hour. You can just about tell what speed the car is travelling at if you look out of the window and straight down at the closest cracks and crystal shapes in the salt as they whizz by. Any further out and there is no point of reference. The mountains on the horizon are so far away that they appear not to move at all, giving the impression we are on a treadmill of sorts, in the middle of nowhere, going nowhere. 

When we stopped to do the obligatory forced perspective photographs, it was difficult to convince myself that where I was standing was real. Really there are no sufficient words to describe it. It's flat. It's salty. It's named well. It feels like the perfect filming location for a Star Wars planet. It screws with your sense of distance and perspective. And it's SPIKEY. We should have guessed there was a reason our guide (and photographer for all of the traditional forced perspective photos) brought a nice rubber mat with him. The top of the salt is not the smooth, marble-like white that I had imagined, but actually varying sizes of crystals, all formed at different angles and all SHARP and HARD. Sitting on it for photos to be taken was a test of insurance. Leggings were a poor choice, and now have at least Four holes in the bum of them. The sun beat down with unapologetic fierceness as we were all shepherded about for the set photos that our guide seemed to think were our sole reason for coming on the trip. We obeyed direction like good tourists and shuffled left, right, back, forwards and mimed punching 4 inch tall dinosaurs. One of th photos of George attempting to jump-kick the dinosaur has gone straight into my top photos ever taken. I plan to get it blown up to A1 and frame it. It will be on our wedding invitations. I will keep a copy in a locket. It is the background image on my phone. I will paint it in oils.

George and I did our best to get a photo of me with the knitted versions of my dogs Lily and Daisy. We quickly realised that these photos are much harder to get right than they look. Of course, this difficulty came entirely from getting the perspective correct, and not at all from the slightly off, lumpy look of the hurriedly knitted dogs that have since been squished into the side pockets of my bag...

Now, back on the non-existent road (really, the driver could be going in big circles or figures of eight and we would not realise), we have a little more time to really look at where we are, rather than just take photos of it. And where we are is nowhere. Until, suddenly, we are not.

Out of the flat salt looms a large, sprawling, rocky hill, covered in hundreds and thousands of cacti, like spines on a hairy caterpillar. The sight is as bizarre as it is unexpected. As we speed around the headland, our hitherto sense of solitude and remoteness is shattered by the appearance of a Waitrose car park's  worth of Toyota Land-cruisers and their passengers sprawled around the base of this hill. Being not only the sole thing of note for miles, but the only THING, I guess this is not surprising.

The place is a national reserve and we pay 30 Bolivianos each (around £3) to enter. Our options are to stay at the base near the cafe and toilets or to do the full hour's climb/circuit. We set off. Ivan had explained to us that the salt flats are the remains of an inland sea, of which Lake Titicaca used to be a part. This sea has since dried up, leaving the salt basin behind. Thousands of years ago, the hill we are walking on was underwater and is, therefore, ancient coral. We are walking on ancient coral. Which is covered in cacti (each of which, we are told, is hundreds of years old, as they only grow 10mm a year) at nearly 4000m above sea level, in the middle of a flat, white, barren expanse. Looking at the ground, it is not hard to see the shape and structure of this once living rock - the pits and holes are regular and there are series of rings in the stone. George explains that the is because the coral grows from the center, meaning the outside is the oldest bit and the part which remains once the coral dies. The views from up here are brilliant, if a little same-y. One gets an excellent view of the tiny bug-like vehicles shimmering into the distance. We also pass a few bins/structures made from the wood of the cactus. It grows so slowly and has to be so tough to survive here that it creates incredibly dense fibered wood, that has the equally fun qualities of being very light in weight and containing attractive series of holes and lines. They probably won't let me take any of the ancient cactus wood with me though. Shame. 

In true Ellen and George form, we take too long at the top - George taking artsy photos of salt from above and me trying to sketch what is essentially a few close up spiky cacti and then NOTHING for miles until little silhouettes of mountains in the distance. In fact, I have not been doing anywhere near as much sketching as I had hoped. There is frankly too much to do and see to have time to sit down and draw. Photos will have to suffice and maybe I will do something from them once I'm back in the UK. I have good intentions. Sketch relatively unsuccessful and salt thoroughly photographed, we made a less sedate scramble back down to our group, just about insuring we are back in the Toyota in time to "get to" the salt flats for sunset. I'm still not entirely sure why we needed to drive a distance to get to a specific bit of the salt flat to watch the sun go down, but it was lovely all the same. We are unapologetic for the soppy nature of the video we took there. There are times and places that demand this sort of behavior.

Altitude: 4000m

Current Song: Carry on - FUN

Ellen

My bum is sore again. We are on the second day of our tour and have just stopped in a valley. I have to call it that because I don't know what else to call it. Up until now the scenery has been just dust and rocks with mountains and volcanoes in the distance. And salt. Beautiful, but mostly emptiness. Then suddenly we turn and begin to descend downhill and to our right is a flat valley with a floor of undulating grassy knolls, parted by small streams and dotted with llamas and Andean geese. It's like we have found the oasis, or if not Eden, than the river that leads to it. Green! Running water!  Our guide explains that as well as having wonderful wool, llamas are also eaten as their meat is totally fat free. They are also sacred animals and are often sacrificed for good luck. Certain tradesmen capture white, pink eyed llamas and sell them, mainly to drivers who want to stay safe on the roads. These drivers then take the llamas to a hill and get them drunk (honestly), then kill them and bury them. It's all a bit serial killer. We then wander around this place for 20 minutes or so, playing grandmother's footsteps with llamas. They manage to look surprisingly supercilious for such ridiculously shaped creatures. And so FLUFFY. I play hop-scotch over the springy mounds, quickly getting myself stranded on an island surrounded by muddy (and llama wee-y) banks and streams of fresh water. The ground is most similar to that of the mossy, heathery and springy British moorland. However, I discover that though it might look that way, it really REALLY doesn't feel that way. I sat down with my whole weight, expecting a cushioned tuffet of grass. What I am instead met with is the feeling of 500 or so stiff, pine-needle sharp points hitting my bum through my loose cotton trousers. I try and scramble to my feet, my imagined moment of tranquil oneness  with nature, forgotten. The trouble is that putting any other part of myself to the floor to push up is equally painful. I end up with a sore hand and knee, the latter of which actually bleeds slightly from a couple of pin-pricks. I hobbled over to George and warned him not to try and sit down as I was now suffering with stinging posterior.

My bum has had a rough time of it these last two days. 

But aside from the complaints of my arse, we are having an incredible time. Going from the freedom of travelling off our own steam to an organised tour was a bit of a shock to the system. We are suddenly with lots of people and basically being shepherded from one location to another, with set photo moments in between. For George and I, unapologetic lovers of peace and quiet and dislikers of *other people*, it is a little chaffing. But we are getting over that like nice normal social grown ups, and the fact of the matter is that everyone is very nice and being on this organised tour takes so much of the day to day stress and concerns out of travelling. We know what we are eating and don't have to go out and find it. We know where we are sleeping tonight and don't have to look up hundreds of reviews on trip advisor first. Dinner might be quinoa soup and mysterious Bolivian sausage dish and sleep tonight might be in a four-person to a room basic hut with no electricity and minus double figures temperature outside, but that's all part of it. And there is no way we would have been able to watch the sun go down over the salt flats or go swimming in the hot springs (like we are tonight) if we had tried to do this alone. 

Altitude 4300m

Current song: Elevation - U2

George

As we climb, I can feel my head starting to pound. Being a nice sensible chap, and also knowingly a magnet for catastrophe, it won't surprise you to know that previous to our trip to the salt flats I had done a little research as to how altitude sickness effects the body. Let me be the first to say that the NHS website is not the most reassuring, and completely unequipped to deal with the Bolivian high plateau. 

"If you have symptoms of mild altitude sickness, don't go any higher for 24 to 48 hours. If your symptoms don't improve or get worse during this time, you should descend immediately.

Severe altitude sickness is a medical emergency. Someone with severe symptoms should immediately descend to a low altitude and seek medical help."

The geography of the Andes makes descending to lower altitude impossible. It has taken us two days of almost solid driving so far to climb from 3800m to 4300m, and the only quicker route out would first require going higher by helicopter. As our 4x4 winds ever upwards I can see Ellen is feeling it too. Breath is harder to catch, even while just sitting down, and even the mildest exertion can lead to a bout of dizziness. Today our route takes us to the very southern tip of Bolivia, a land of volcanoes. The landscape changes dramatically, and suddenly, as we leave green valleys behind and climb into barren wilderness. The low desert brush gives way to wind rounded rocks, pale tufted grasses and strange bulbous green plants nestling on the sun bathed southern hillsides. In the distance there is a plume rising serenely from the side of  Ollagüe volcano, the first in a string of dormant, and some active, volcanoes that line the Chilean border. This is our first glimpse of the Pacific 'ring of fire' and to me my first indication that the Pacific Ocean isn't too far distant. 

Altitude: 4300m

Current song: Wisemen - James Blunt - again

Ellen 

With a small amount of fear of sounding like I'm on top gear, the Toyota Land Cruiser is a brilliant car. It's managing these tracks incredibly well. It also seems to be the 4X4 of choice out here as everyone is driving one.

We are high now. I feel fine until I try and climb any kind of incline. Then the air is very obviously lacking in oxygen. You just have to remember to breathe more...

We just stopped to look at a rock hard, bulbous plant that is about 2000 years old. It grows outwards at around 2mm per year and has the appearance of having grown over a pre-existing boulder, but is in fact organic matter all the way through. It also looks like it should be spongy to the touch, but like everything in this place, it is slow growing and rock hard. Having prodded it, if you told me it was made of cast polyethylene I would believe you. And in other news I have the world's greatest trousers.

Flamingos!!

Altitude: 4600m

Current song: Paradise - Coldplay

George

Slowly, but inexorably we go higher. This high up the vegetation has all but completely faded away. We are in a land of desolate sands and shallow lagoons, white and crusted at the edges by borax leeched from the surrounding hills. Flamingos  crowd into the shallow waters as the winds whip up the fine orange sand from the surrounding desert. The road we are travelling on is little more than the tyre tracks of the vehicles that have passed this way before. The fact we are driving at all is quite frankly astonishing.

For reference:

Highest point in UK (Ben Nevis) - 1344m

Altitude sickness normal lower limit (mild) - 2500m

Altitude sickness normal lower limit (severe) - 3600m

Highest point in the Alps (Mont Blanc) - 4810m

Highest point in Australasia - 4884m

Highest point in Antarctica - 4892m

Everest base camp - 5380m

Highest point in Africa (Kilimanjaro) - 5892m

At intervals the land cruiser pulls to a stop and we all scramble out, fishing cameras and lenses from under our feet. Up here, anything is an event worth stopping for. We pass volcanic boulder fields, strange rock formations shaped by nothing but the wind, fine sand and time and coloured lagoons, white, black, green and pink, each with a different chemical additive fed from beneath the surface. Each time we stop for just a few minutes, just enough to begin to get a feel for the place and then we are carried off again in a cloud of dust. It feels like moments in time outside of a capsule, we never stray too far from the vehicles, never lose sight of them, never take more than a few guided steps into what is a very hostile landscape.

Of all the lagoons we visit, the pink lagoon is where we spend the longest. A 20 minute excursion to sit by the lakeside and admire the view. Here is where the largest flocks of flamingos gather to feed on the red-pink algae that blooms in the lake. It is the algae that gives both the lake and the flamingos their colour. The long stop is partially due to the fact that this is the entrance to the Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve (it just rolls off the tongue) - the most visited national park in Bolivia despite being in the middle of nowhere. All around the entrance post - a small sandstone building on the lake edge with 2 rooms and a toilet - the hills rise into the distance. It feels like the ascent is only beginning despite already sitting at well over 4000m. Both Ellen and I get our passports stamped with commemorative stamps to say we've visited, and then head on upwards leaving me wondering what the legal position is on getting completely pointless stamps in your passport.

[Ed:  A passport is the property of the country that has issued it and should only be endorsed by an official of another country as proof of their immigration status in that country. Endorsements in a passport which are clearly not official are usually ignored as they give no immigration status, however endorsements which are similar to real stamps could be construed as a forgery and this could result in the person holding that passport being refused leave to enter the United Kingdom.

In order to avoid confusion and potential delay I would not recommend that any souvenir stamps are placed in an official passport.

S Hunter
Chief Immigration Officer"]

Altitude: 4900m

Current Song: every breath you take - sting

Ellen

We are at 4927 meters. What we lack in oxygen we make up for in dust. I tried to eat one of the 'coca toffees' we bought in Sucre to try and counter the altitude. It tastes awful and immediately makes my tongue numb. I have spat it out and am now slightly suspicious of the sweets. Probably don't want to come home from travels with a cocaine addiction. We have just arrived at our highest point - a geyser. Any imaginings I had previously had of this short stop off in our itinerary were immediately wiped out. I guess if I imagined anything it was a jet of steam or hot water out of the ground as I have seen on many a nature documentary. What instead we are met with is thick, billowing plumes of sulphuric gas issuing from a pockmarked and craterous landscape. We tumble, lightheaded and breathless from the car and blink at the most extra-terrestrial sight we have seen yet, the air thick with the eggy, acrid smell of sulphur. "Follow me!" Ivan calls happily as he trots across a narrow bridge of sandstone still left intact by the two eroding pits of bubbling, belching, wet, sulphuric clay on either side. "Try not to breathe in the gas, also!" he calls, "it is not good for you!". This is easier said than done when every breath I take feels like the first gasp as you break above water, but I stuff my scarf in front of my mouth and nose and barrel on. The unpleasant feeling from the altitude that I have been experiencing on the drive is quickly forgotten, however, as George and I wander around this incredible place, ducking and weaving out of the way of the gas being blown sideways and peering into craters, only to be met by grey/green mud being flung up by violently escaping gas. The ground is warm to the touch. This place is volatile and lifeless. We are still crouched by one gas vent, trying to record the hissing sound, when Ivan calls us to hurry up - he and the rest of the group are already back at the Toyota. Slightly irritated by how rushed the stops seem to be, George and I silently agree that we are only here once and will finish what we are doing. However, when we finally rise from our spot and head back, we find we have missed the opportunity to follow Ivan back across the easiest path, and so instead find ourselves a little lost and going around the long way, walking against the wind. With this slight exertion I suddenly feel the full effects of the altitude again and have to pant my breaths. It is a deeply unpleasant feeling. Since we arrived at altitude in Sucre we have been working slowly higher and I have been trying to adjust my breathing correctly. The trouble is that despite the lack of oxygen, the body gets confused and doesn't always automatically breathe more deeply or regularly to compensate. So you have to concentrate on it. This is something which can either deeply relax me, or cause me to feel panicky. Unfortunately the latter is what happened in this situation. My heart was thumping hard in my chest in a completely different way than I have experienced at sea level. There, it feels healthy and normal after exertion. Here, it felt shallow, high in my chest and desperate. My lungs were demanding more air that I could not give them. Then, between us and the car, was an enormous plume of gas, thickly issuing from the ground and spreading out into a large volume, that we must pass through. Before we get there I am already gasping to George that I can't breathe. But we must hold what breath we have as we cover these ten or so steps to pass through the gas. Ten steps is much further than it sounds. George ends up having to support my weight and pull me across to the other side, where I scrabble into the back seat, close my eyes and breathe as hard as I can. George then abandons all chivalry and leaves me there, with the French guys looking at me with mild alarm, to take more photos before we leave. Physically unpleasant, but well worth it for a sight I will never forget. 

Altitude: 4300m

Current song: Wisemen - James Blunt

George

Our guide has an unnatural obsession with James Blunt. I quite like James Blunt, I think Wisemen is a decent song, but it NEEDS TO STOP.

And stop it finally does as the engine splutters to a standstill and we park up at our final true stop on the tour, a hot spring nearby our second overnight accommodation. The temperature is already dropping with the sun and as we carry out bags to the overnight dorm I can already feel the chill seeping through my shirt, fleece, jumper and gloves. The concept of going outside in just swim shorts, and then having to make the 5 minute hike to the hot springs in just swim shorts and the pitch black is not immediately enticing no matter how hot the springs may be at the end of it. And that's to say nothing about the hike back in the same conditions but wet. The accommodation has no heating and no electricity. The temperature outside is -2.

I don't blame the couple who stay behind in the room. Both are suffering from severe altitude sickness with repeated trips to the bathroom, but for the rest of us, pounding headaches ignored as far as possible, there are only so many chances you get to sit in a volcanic spring in pitch darkness looking up at a clear night sky from 4000m above sea level. 

Our head-torches give a pathetic amount of illumination as we stumble our way down the gravel road. We would have been better off bringing candles, at least they would have supplied a fraction of warmth, but before we know it the springs are there, we dump our shoes in the small concrete changing hut nearby and step gratefully into naturally heated - 32 degree hot water. Wonderful, beautifully warm water. The pool is about the size of - well it's difficult to quantify because it was dark and we didn't have a tape measure but say half a tennis court, plus a bit, in a circular shape. Just enough space in any case for everyone from four land cruisers, minus one unwell couple, to fit comfortably without anyone having to float on anyone else's patch. And while floating, for the first time we get to take our time and look upwards at the Southern Hemisphere sky. A sky full of light. Our guides, naturally in the pool with us, pull out a green laser pen and start using it to trace constellations for us. The most interesting of these is a constellation that isn't actually there, because it is a shape made from the negative space in the Milky Way. A snake of darkness from within the densest patches of stars. This is a type of constellation that simply isn't possible to have in the northern hemisphere, we are looking the wrong way. I feel a stab of jealousy for all those who live in the Southern Hemisphere and get to look towards the centre of our galaxy. Maybe it's just because I grew up with it, but the pole star just doesn't seem as exciting. 

As we watch, several shooting stars pass in the near distance. Brief trails across a twinkling canvas. Ellen makes a wish. I make a wish. I wish that my headache would go away and that I hadn't left my glasses in the dorm room. I'm not sure there's much in this wishing lark. 

Altitude: 4000m

Current Song: Sometimes James Blunt. Sometimes not.

George

The route down winds through all the varied landscapes of the high plateau, from red rock Martian wilderness, past white lagoons, through desolate plains and windswept deserts. Now on the final day of the tour we shoot through them without stopping, they are vistas through a tinted window.

The road we take feels much more direct than the winding barely present path we had been following. The road, while not Tarmac by any stretch of the imagination, is much more definitely a road than it has been, and populated by lorises and construction workers. But then I speak too soon and, as soon as we leave the national park, it disintegrates to just rocky desert with a path cleared through the larger boulders. We are, for a few minutes, placed on the most hilarious diversion I think I have ever been on. A man wrapped in a balaclava against  the dust, waves a sign at us and we veer off our desert track onto desert that feels no different. We drive right alongside the road, just a few yards away, and I notice no difference in surface quality.

Some of the trucks that barrel past us are laden with the white borax from the lagoons. Ivan explains that there is a large mining operation in this part of Bolivia and that borax, a key ingredient in many detergents, is one of Bolivia's major exports. I ask who it is doing the mining and it turns out it's the Belgians. So the largest mining operation in Bolivia is run by Belgium for the production of cleaning products. This doesn't get into many brochures.

8 hours and 1 flat tyre later we roll back into Uyuni where we started our tour. As "Wisemen" starts up on the radio (no word of a lie) Ellen and I climb out of the land cruiser for the final time and walk away to find another 8 hours of transport in the form of a night bus to take us back to la Paz. 

Here is a short video of our tour.

Love to all.