Salar de Uyuni Tour: Day 4, The Salt Flat Itself

Another early rise! But this was the important day, the one we had all been waiting for! At half past four the keen few of us had jumped out of bed to see if we were lucky enough not to have rain, and we found that the torrent making the racket throughout the night had turned into a heavy drizzle. About twenty minutes later, the rain had pretty much stopped and the skies were making their best attempt to clear. We were all very tired due to laughing through the night as we heard the loudest cat meow every so often in between the dogs’ constant barks! It sounded like the cat was putting up a very good fight! Not helping with a restful night either was the slight wind that caused our ceiling to creak. Could it have actually fallen down on our heads? Well after checking, all was revealed that it was only made out of polystyrene; hardly worthy of concern after all.
Our twenty-five kilometre drive towards the salt flats seemed very sketchy since the roads were really only one-and-a-half cars wide and had become one stretch of slippery muddy putty due to the night’s precipitous mass. We found our hairs raised as oncoming traffic, such as giant buses and large lorries, came head on competing for the road. Despite all the signs indicating that our jeep was going to skid or roll over, we made it to the salt flats and it was better than what we’d hoped for.
The lake was like a massive mirror of the most powerful reflection. As the clouds began to disperse we were glad of our sunglasses as the sun’s rays were like laser beams that no human eye could tolerate without them. The distant mountains resembled dark diamonds that appeared to be magically floating in the sky, as were some of the piles of salt that we saw every so often.
The hammering rain had turned out to be a bit of a blessing as the Salar de Uyuni only reflects so well when it has been surfaced with rain. Without rain, it would be like going to a never ending beach with brilliant white, but coarse sand. The salt crystals were indeed quite large and some of our friends who removed their shoes to walk on the world’s largest salt flat were in quite a bit of pain due to the coarseness.
One particular mountain with a snowy cap and a mixture of a brown, rocky and green, vegetated body reflected itself beautifully and the clouds in the sky created an amazingly fairytale atmosphere.