Things to do
6-
Colchani
Salt from the flat is dried, iodised and bagged in this village on its eastern edge, where stalls sell carved salt blocks and llama wool beside a small salt museum. Tours pause for twenty minutes on the way out. The piles of drying salt beside the track are the working part, and the walls of the buildings are salt brick.
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Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve
Geysers, hot springs, coloured lagoons and the Dalí desert fill the volcanic corner of Bolivia against the Chilean border, held between about 4,000 and 6,000 metres. Vicuñas and viscachas are common sightings. Jeep tours from Uyuni take two nights to cross it, in unheated hostels with no reliable power, and the Sol de Mañana geysers are visited before dawn.
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Isla Incahuasi
Giant cacti, some of them centuries old, cover a rocky outcrop in the middle of the salt flat, the fossil coral of an ancient lake bed showing in the rock. A short loop climbs to the top for the view across the white. Jeeps arrive together in the late morning, and entry is ticketed.
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Lake
Laguna Colorada
Algae and sediment turn this shallow lake red against white borax islands, at about 4,300 metres in the Eduardo Avaroa reserve. Three flamingo species feed here, including the rare James's flamingo. Jeep circuits reach it on the second day; wind gets up by afternoon and nights at the nearby refuges drop well below freezing.
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Other
Salar de Uyuni
Some ten thousand square kilometres of salt crust lie where a prehistoric lake dried out, flat to within a metre and used to calibrate satellites. Jeeps cross to Incahuasi and the salt hotels in a day. A thin film of water after rain turns the surface to a mirror, though deep flooding closes sections to vehicles.
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Train Cemetery
Rusting locomotives and carriages stand on the plain outside town, left when the mining rail link to the Pacific declined in the last century and stripped of anything worth taking since. Most tours stop here first, for half an hour of climbing on the wrecks. The metal is sharp and the wind carries salt dust.
