The main reason for making the 5 hour bus trip from Potosi to Uyuni was to see the Salar – a huge field of salt. 12,000 square km of salt, salt and more salt. And it really is salt – we licked it to verify.

As we started on our tour (two of us, an Austrian backpacker and the driver, who was also the cook), we went parallel to the salar for a while watching the islands in the salar floating in the air. Since dry salar salt is white (or brownish), the blueness in which the islands reflect isn’t the salt but appears to be fake water caused by some kind of a mirage. Later in the salar we saw a the same double horizon, but the effect was less pronounced.

Click on the first picture in the set above to see vicuñas that our driver pointed out to us at one point. The vicuña is one of South America’s two wild camelids. They are supposed to produce the finest wool in the world, which is hard to get since they produce very little of it and cannot be domesticated. At the moment, sheering the vicuñas is prohibited and there is a 8 year prison term for killing one in Bolivia. Vicuñas are fairly rare, and this was the only time we saw them during our trip.

We eventually got to Colchani – a small (and seemingly very poor) village that makes its living by packaging the salt of the salar. The locals also make all sorts of souvenirs from salt and sell them to tourists. We then stopped at one of the two hotels constructed of salt.

The salar itself was big and white. Really big and really white. We were glad we brought sunglasses, and despite that the sun was sufficiently bright that we seemed to have gotten half of our photos tilted. We stopped at an island in the middle of the salar which was full of huge cacti, some of them with flowers.