That's when things started heading South

The last stop on my Bolivian adventure was the world largest and highest salt flats in Uyuni. The landscape is other worldly, like a sea of white stretching in every direction. Without sun glasses a person could go blind in a matter of no time. Also a person's skin could fall off at the elevation that the salt flats are at. Once a massive interior sea in the highs of the Andes, now Uyuni is an other worldly site to see.

The salt flats are a world heritage site and the Bolivian government has recognized their extreme importance to the tourism and development of this out of reach area of Southwestern Bolivia. While that may seem amazing, there is always something there to ruin it. The worlds largest untapped lithium reserves lie under the salt flats. With the growing demand for heavy metals to charge the batteries we all seem to need, lithium prices have flown through the roof. It is now only a matter of time until the salt flats are torn up to mine the valuable lithium below.

There is more to the Southwest circuit then just the salt flats. The area contains volcanoes, rock formations, sand dunes, lagoons full of flamingos, wildlife, and geysers. In order to see all of these areas one must go on one of the many tours that do this circuit. A lot of the trip is spent doing normal road trip things in the end.

Of course there is the wildlife as well. Vacuñas, Flamingos, and Foxes.

The landscape of the Southwest is amazing. The high elevation desert creates a type of landscape I would imagine dinosaurs wandering around. Its amazing to see rocks that have been carved out only by the wind and sand through millions of years.

Going Up!

La Paz is the capital. When you arrive in Sucre, they will remind you that they are (kind of) and used to be the exclusive capital of Bolivia. They very much are not. They maybe the home of the judicial branch but their days of being the center of Bolivia active is over. Santa Cruz has taken over the business center and La Paz is the center of the Bolivian government. Sucre looks like the capital. The buildings are all white-washed giving it a Spanish colonial feel.

My time in Sucre was short. I was massively running out of time and the rich city center of Sucre had little to offer my imagination. I took a little private car winding steeply up to the highest city on earth, Potosi.

Potosi is famous as the place where all of the Spanish empire's silver came from. At one time, the mines of Potosi paid off the Spanish debt and the streets were literally paved in silver. The famous book "Open Veins of Latin America" by Eduardo Galeano tells the story of the uses of Potosi, which quickly became the most important city for the Spanish in South America. This is not a happy story though. Hundreds of thousands of indigenous and African slaves died in the mountain. The hell that Potosi represents is a dark mark in the past and one of the most telling parts of Latin American history. Now-a-days Potosi is still a working town where people wonder into the hells of the mines to see what little amounts of silver they can scrap from the mountain.