Photo Post: The Uyuni Salt Flats of Bolivia

Welcome to Mother Nature’s Cormac McCarthy novel!

Bolivia’s Uyuni Salt Flats are a beautiful, moonscape wasteland where temperatures can swing 40 degrees in a day. You can fry, but then you’ll freeze. I was fortunate to spend a few days there back in October.

Salt is everywhere. It’s on your lips, under your fingernails, partying in your jacket pocket and nestling in corners of your eyes while you sleep. Like tiny, crystalline, water-sucking ticks, you find pieces of this insane place months later, still clinging to your boots in an obstinate, white layer.

That’s what happened to me just now.

I was minding my own business, eating dumplings in a Hong Kong shopping mall and looked down to realize I still had some Uyuni on my shoe.

It’s still in my soul, as well. Bolivia was my 40th country. I adored it, and I’ll be back. Especially to La Paz, which serves the gluttonous with gleeful abandon from street cuisine to fine dining … all beneath a backdrop of 400 year old churches clinging to crumbling, Andean hillsides. More on that in a coming post … but first, here’s my visual recap of three days spent in total peace and quiet in one of the most remote landscapes on Earth. We camped out in airstream trailers with Cox & Kings – a fantastic global travel company that specializes in getting you to those less traveled places in style.

The Salt Flats are four times the size of Hong Kong. They exist at an altitude of 12,500 feet and were created when a prehistoric lake dried up. Bring an oxygen tank and an open heart.

I wasn’t prepared for the beauty of the sheer silence. Of the deep emotions sweeping over me at sunset. Of feeling tiny … insignificant … and at the same time like I could stroke the clouds. I wasn’t prepared for this endless plain of nothing being so much damn fun. It held the best sunset of my life.

This year, Cox & Kings is adding a third airstream to their existing two, meaning you can bring up to six people on the adventure. Book it here.

And definitely book it.

I soaked my Bucket List in single malt Scotch and threw it in the campfire that night.

Nothing tops this. No way, no how.