Bolivian salt flats: Alien landscape on Earth
When people fill up their bucket lists, there are the obvious choices - northern lights, African safaris, Alaskan cruises - then there are more unexpected choices, which despite their relatively lower profile, leave travelers in absolute awe. The Bolivian salt flats are one of these choices, a completely otherworldly landscape that will leave you wanting to sprinkle a little salt on that list of fantasy vacations.
By CBS News Staff Writer Christina Capatides
Bolivian salt flats
At 4,086 square miles, Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world.
Bolivian salt flats
The Salar de Uyuni is home to several different types of flamingos, which give the landscape a dreamlike quality, further emphasizing that, in a place like this, humans feel like the visitors.
Bolivian salt flats
The Bolivian salt flats are known for their extraordinary flatness. Over the entirety of its 4,086 square miles, the landscape only changes in height about three feet.
Bolivian salt flats
The Uyuni salt flats are estimated to contain 10 billion tons of salt - from which 25,000 tons are extracted every year - as well as 100 million tons of lithium, making it one of the largest global reserves of this mineral, according to state officials from the Bolivian Mining Corporation.
Bolivian salt flats
The region's constant bright sunshine and flat landscape combine to create panoramic reflections that are almost startling in their beauty.
Bolivian salt flats
Formed by the transformation of several prehistoric lakes, the Salar de Uyuni is located in the Daniel Campos Province of southwest Bolivia, near the crest of the Andes. It sits about 12,000 feet above sea level.
Bolivian salt flats
The salt flats are a major tourist attraction in Bolivia, with around 60,000 tourists visiting them every year to witness the landscape's giant cacti, geysers, hot springs, volcanoes and colorful ponds in person.
Bolivian salt flats
The reflections of sky on land in the Salar de Uyuni are all-encompassing, creating a landscape which both plays with perspective and light.
Bolivian salt flats
Local legend has it that the mountains, which surround the Salar, were once giant people. Two of these mountains, Tunupa and Kusku, were happily married until Kusku ran away, leaving his wife to raise their son alone.
The story then goes that Tunupa, in all of her grieving, cried heartily while breastfeeding her son. Those tears mixed with her milk, and that's what formed the Salar.
Tunupa is still an important deity in the region to this day.
Bolivian salt flats
The Uyuni salt flats are also one of the host locations of the annual Dakar Rally, an extreme off-road endurance race that takes place in South America every January.
As part of this "rally raid," professional and amateur racers drive off-road vehicles across challenging terrain, which includes dunes, mud, camel grass, rocks and erg, sometimes traversing more than 500 miles in a single day.
Bolivian salt flats
The sun sets on the Salt Hotel in the middle of the Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia. Due to a lack of conventional construction materials, this hotel, as well as most of the others erected on the flats, are built almost entirely with salt blocks cut from the Salar. That goes for the walls, the roof and the furniture.
Bolivian salt flats
At the Uyuni salt flats, just under 10 feet of salt crust covers a pool of brine, which holds around half of the world's lithium reserves.
Here, a worker of the pilot plant for the industrialization of evaporitic resources builds a barrier with stones and rocks at one of these brine pools, July 14, 2011. Lithium is a vital component in most electronic batteries and, as such, holds great economic influence in the region.
Bolivian salt flats
Satellites are often calibrated on the Bolivian salt flats because they are large, stable surfaces with strong reflective properties similar to those of ice sheets and the surface of the ocean.
Bolivian salt flats
The flats are all the more ideal for satellite calibration due to the absence of industry in the region and its high elevation, which renders the air above Salar de Uyuni unusually clear and dry (at least in the low-rain period from April to November).
Bolivian salt flats
In the winter months, heavy rains flood the salt flats, which only make for more awe-inspiring reflections. This seasonal flooding is also functional in that it serves to smooth the flats and make them more stable.
Bolivian salt flats
Companies from all over the world - Bollore (France), Sumitomo (Japan) and Korea Resource (Korea) - are clamoring to exploit the flats' lithium reserves.
Bolivian salt flats
A bicycle rider waves to friends at the Uyuni salt flats in Uyuni, Bolivia.
Bolivian salt flats
The sky is reflected on the Uyuni salt flats as a car drives by in Uyuni, Bolivia.
Bolivian salt flats
Baby Chilean flamingos wander through the middle of the Uyuni salt desert in southern Bolivia.
In the winter of 2010, a late nesting triggered by extreme cold weather and severe drought caused migratory flamingos to abandon their young and begin bizarrely popping up in cities surrounding the Uyuni salt flats. Many of these baby flamingos, too weak and disoriented to fend for themselves in the desert-like terrain, died prematurely as a result.
Bolivian salt flats
This photo, taken from a plane, shows a panoramic view of the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat, in southern Bolivia.