October 9, 2018 – October 12, 2018

One of Bolivia’s most famous attractions is the expansive salt flats outside of Uyuni.   The Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat, at 10,582 square kilometres (4,086 square miles), and is at an elevation of 3,656 metres (11,995 feet).  It formed when a prehistoric lake went dry, leaving behind a few metres of hard packed, glaring white salt, and a few remnant islands.

 

As we neared to where we would drive onto the flats and we could see that there was a bit of water along the “shore”. We were both immediately apprehensive about driving onto the flats, and then laughed when we realized that we were treating the white expanse as if it were ice…you would never drive onto a frozen lake with open water around the edge.

In fact, we kept having to remind ourselves over and over that this was salt not ice. The Salar is completely flat, allowing us to drive faster than we had in months, and I kept having to shake the feeling that our speed was WAY to fast for an icy surface…but it’s not ice, it is salt, and it provides remarkably good traction.

Another interesting aspect of the landscape was the lack of perspective, with the ground being so flat and so white.  It reminded us both of downhill skiing in a white out.  If you have never experienced that, what can happen is that you very easily loose track of what is up and what is down.  You may feel dizzy.  You may stop skiing, but then be unsure of whether you are still moving or not. The Salar, even with its blue skies, gave a similar sense. Derek would turn the wheel to change course slightly, but there would be almost no visual clues that you had changed direction, yet you would feel the inertia effect on your body.  Very strange indeed.

We tried a zero-to-sixty mph speed test on the flats…25 seconds. Keep in mind that we are a big heavy truck with a camper on…I can think of a few people that we know that have some spiffy sports cars that would probably love to give the Salar speed test a go! This was the approx. 100ftlb/ton camper class.  This photo was at only 2600 rpm and there was still lots of upside but  Derek would have felt pretty stupid if we had to fly home because he was driving our camper at over 100mph in Bolivia.

Derek was having a lot of fun driving on the Salar.

There are islands scattered throughout the Salar, and so, in order to have a destination, we drove to one, then another and then another island. It was like boating on a lake.  We ended our day parking up on the sandy beach of one of the smaller islands for the night. The sunset was amazing, the night turned very cold, and later we saw a spectacularly clear, star filled sky, perhaps more stars than I have ever seen before.

We ended up only spending one night on the Salar.  Although we really enjoyed visiting the area, one island looked much like another, and the salt looked the same everywhere, so we decided to head on.  We drove through Potosi, wild camped just off of the highway in a small canyon, and made our way on to the capital of Boliva, Sucre.