Salt, snow and sulphur…

 

 

 

First things first, a belated Happy New Year to you all.  This blog entry marks 5 months away from the fair land of England, as we now find ourselves in Bolivia and hopefully the above pictures can convey to you the utterly spectacular landscape and adventure that was our tour of  Salar De Uyuni. We were fortunate enough to be accompanied by two lovely Glaswegians, who like us, found the scenery and the altitude, utterly breath-taking.

The first two pictures are actually the start of day two, where we hauled our bleary-eyed backsides out of bed at 4am, still struggling with the severe altitude (4200m).  The next picture shows Emma braving both the cold (it was snowing) and the extremely dangerous geysers which jettisoned steam of 220 degrees centigrade – I have no idea why she is smiling, the sulphuric stench was quite overpowering!

Our jeep (Lexus 450 – these beasts are a marvel of engineering: tough, teak, like a lighthouse) then negotiated treacherous plains as we found warmer climes, and the familiar hot waters of aguas calientes, heated by the adjacent volcano…

The star of this tour however is the ethereal Salar, This alien terra sprawls some 4000 sq km and is the world’s largest salt flat, which also boasts the largest supply of lithium on the planet.  Arriving just before sunset, we intrepidly ventured out to the flats which were immersed in 10cm of water due to it being the rainy season.  The result is heaven’s mirror.  The clear air and still waters project a natural looking glass which gives the effect of literally walking on water; we found ourselves gliding wordlessly across this saline sheet, trying to take in the majesty of it all.  On the last day we again found ourselves on the salt flats only this time in the dry pockets.  The clear air and light affords some fantastic opportunities for perspective photography, as the pringles/frying pan pics show!

So, an incredible adventure and an unforgettable way to start 2012 and so we sincerely wish all of you the very best of health, wealth, peace and happiness.

All our love

Jack & Ems xx