Salar de Uyuni

In the very South of Bolivia lies the Salar de Uyuni; the largest salt desert on earth. I was beginning to doubt the superlatives as everything I have seen in Bolivia is the highest, or the greatest, the grandest or the largest. It however turns out to be true the Salar is the biggest salt desert this planet possesses and what is more it is a place that deserves every superlative cast upon it from the mouths of those who stand upon its edge.

The impoverished towns that appear on the track leading to the salt deserve nothing but diminutives. They are end of the line places. Destinations on a train line that a train no longer runs to.

Colchani and Uyuni have no streets, let alone street lights. Adobe clad houses with windows often secured behind grills stand along side the dusty streets, frequently rutted from a deluge of rain. If it is some sort of cosmic diversion to juxtapose this;

with this:

there is no humour in it. Beauty and poverty in alignment do not make easy viewing.

There had been incessant rain throughout the night prior to my arrival in the Salar. The white hard salt normally lying in dry honeycombs was converted in to a sea across which four by four

vehicles were obliged to crawl, carrying an army of adventurers onwards towards the higher parts of the desert and an under construction salt hotel.

One hour of journey to arrive in a place that resembled an art house remake of Mad Max.

Surreality at every aspect. A lost sky. Lost ground. No division of elements here, all swirling in a celestial mix that was confounding.

The most intense confusion for the brain occurring at the part of the desert known as the Mirror of Reflections. A part of the desert in which the vibrancy of salt crystallising under a thin sheet of water converts a base element in to glass.

The sky and the earth perfectly reflected one within the other. A symmetry of land and cloud.

The sky held in salt and those who stand against it levitated, to hover suspended in another sphere.

The irony of this disorientating place which takes the mind and throws it upside down, until it is frankly impossible to tell where air begins and land ends, is that it holds the key to an environmentally sustainable future for mankind. Vast reserves of lithium lie beneath the salt.

Auto industry giants want to buy the Salar to divide it up and begin lithium mining. Evo Morales will not let them. If however the world's demand for eco- vehicles, principally hybrid and electric cars, continues to rise, the world's existing supply of lithium  will be outstripped by 2015; imagine the pressure then upon Evo Morales and his government to rip apart the crust of the Salar.

You could not write a better plot. One of the most impoverished countries on earth in possession of 50% of the planet's lithium reserves. What does Evo Morales need for Bolivia, what will he ultimately sell? With his firmly anti - capitalist rhetoric I would not presume to hazard a guess. I can only be grateful that my life allowed a journey to the centre of this heaven on earth well before global power play between grand and lesser nations caused the Mirror of Reflections to break.