The first day of a three-day tour taking me through southwestern Bolivia started with seven of us travellers cramming into a 4x4 and visiting an unusual graveyard on the outskirts of Uyuni. It's for trains (pic). They just get dumped here. Clearly Bolivia has a long way to go as regards recycling.
Then it was the main event of the day, and the trip: visiting the vast salt flats of the Salar de Uyuni. They are 100km across, and as the name suggests, they're made of salt, and flat. The empty white landscape plays tricks with your eyes: we could see clearly a volcano we thought was about 5km away. It was actually 80km, taking over an hour to drive there (pic).
At one point we saw someone cycling across the salt flats (pic) with their dog and some shopping. Britain used to have a road safety campaign for cyclists called 'Wear Something White at Night'. That wouldn't help you here.
Eventually we got to the volcano (pic) and had lunch at a place on its slopes. The volcano is dormant so it wasn't smoking, unlike most of our tour group.
After that we drove back across the salt flats to visit an island full of giant cactuses. Well, not really an island, because it's not surrounded by water, but by salt (pic). But it felt like an island.
The salt flats (pic) are very hard and smooth, which makes them easier to drive over than most Bolivian roads. I'm smiling because I know our next stop is dinner...
...which we had in our home for the night, a 'salt hotel' on the edge of the flats. The building is made of salt bricks, and the floor is salt (pic). Dinner was chicken, as most meals are in Bolivia. Oddly enough, given that the entire building was made of the stuff, there was no salt with it.
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