This is, quite literally, another world.. The ground is made of SALT. I arrived by train..
Just kidding! This train is sitting there maybe before I was born eh eh. As usual, I got there on a bus, to the edge of the desert. You can then take a jeep tour with some locals, a very decent bargain for 3 days of surreal landscape. So what is this? As in other salt flats, there was once a lake here. I don't know the geological details, but the lake evaporated leaving the salt behind. It does rain here - and so every year this becomes a very salty, shallow lake for a short season. Interesting enough, they do have some houses made of salt. I passed in the dry period, when is possible to drive around. The salt area is some 12,000km2, the largest in the World.
First we came to the "island" above: inhabited by these intrepid cactuses, alone in the middle of the salt..
The scenery is certainly impressive. This time I wished my modest camera was better, so I could do justice what I saw. This is volcano land here. To give you some context, we are above 4000m already! Thus the snow on that hill top. And yes it gets very cold in the night!
The flamingos make a good living here, too. No predators, stable weather. An interesting animal, they feed by filtering the water in these smaller lakes, which contains small organisms, apparently enough for the flamingo. Some other living things, I could not yet quite figure out if those "balls" were a cactus or a lichen or..
Also very alive, the "boiling" mud holes, I guess the waiting lobby for Hell could look like that :-) It smelled really foul, there's some gas released from the entrails of Earth (thus the bubbles)
And that's me holding on to the Dali rock! Yes, he apparently was here and these kind of rocks inspired him to some of his famous paintings.
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