Vision in white

My first glimpse leaves me confused, even though I’ve spent days trying to get here – having taken a detour on a pan-American road trip – and months dreaming of this place. I crest a hill on a potholed road and am suddenly blinded by the white.

My first thought is that I’ve stumbled upon a snowcovered mountain lake. Around me are the dun-coloured mountains of southwestern Bolivia, nearly bare of vegetation, inhospitable with dust and wind. But the white expanse ahead is not snow. It is Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat, 3,656 metres above sea level in the Andes mountains. Salt as far as the eye can see.

Ancient salt that has dried into a perfectly flat pancake 10,582 square kilometres in size, reflecting the sun with such brilliance that the eyes of onlookers burn and stream with tears.

I kick my motorbike back into gear and roar down the hill, into the barren, shimmering white wilderness.

The salar (Spanish for “salt flat”) is all that remains of Lake Minchin, which existed some 30,000 to 42,000 years ago. It sits in the middle of the Bolivian Altiplano, a high plateau formed during the uplift of the Andes. The salt flat is surrounded by mountains with no drainage outlets, forcing mountain run-off into this natural evaporation crucible.

The altitude of the salar varies by only one metre over its entire area, making it flat enough to be used as a target for calibrating and testing remote sensing systems on satellites in orbit. Nevertheless, its surface is not perfectly smooth; it is pebbled with delicate salt bubbles that crackle and collapse under my tyres. There are no roads, no signs, no fences – and no speed limits. Only a few dirty grey tracks show where other vehicles have gone before me. I point my motorcycle into the trackless glare and twist open the throttle.