Will You Pass the Pepper With the Salt House in Uyuni

We made it back to La Paz for the new year. After spending a week trapped there we figured we knew all the ropes to make for a good night out, but due to some bad Cuban food I was sadly in bed at 10:30 pm wondering why it felt like there was a three hundred pound midget sitting on my stomach trying to rip out his circus partner from inside my intestines. Our escape from La Paz was finalized despite the scare of a blockade on the road we were traveling. After the all nigth bus we climbed right onto an SUV and trip through the southern Bolivian salt flats, through the mountains, and finally to grandmother Chile's house.

For the advertised salt flat tour of three days we spent a total of four hours actually on the salt flats. Of these four hours three were spent in the car waiting for the rain to stop. The rest of the trip we spent in the truck doing stupid calculations because honestly there was nothing better to do. According to the guide, the salt flats cover 12000 square km (slightly smaller than Connecticut), and at the deepest points get up to six to seven meters thick (20 ft). That is a lot of salt that is farmed to sell for household use all over South America. How much salt you ask, there is so much salt that they cut it up to use as bricks to make houses, tables, chairs, and gravel sized salt is use floor hotels. It was certainly strange, and the most surreal location we had been since the floating reed islands on Lake Titicaca.

The salt flat is created from two tectonic plates move together, isolating an ocean, elevating and drying it over time. The ocean at the point of being closed off in Bolivia would be roughly the size of all the great lakes put together, or 100 times as big as the Great Salt Lake in Utah assuming they started with the same salinity. It weights roughly 34060 Tg (tetra grams, X 10^12), or enough to give each person on the planet 5500 Kilograms (11000lbs) of salt (almost an H2 Hummer and a half). If you were to farm all the salt for building, it would be possible to build 10,000 Hoover Dams. I realize that salt would not be the best material choice for a dam, but it gives you an idea of the size. Please make all the ¨engi-nerd¨ jokes you want. They are well deserved and very doubtful there would be anything I had not heard before. I really don't know of a better time killer for the rest of the two and a half day trip through the high desert to the border. Honestly I am just relieved we got out of La Paz.