Bolivia, with five neighbour countries and no coastline well hidden somewhere deep in South America. Like many other places on this trip we where really looking forward to visit this country. This because of the world famous huge salt flats. These salt flats cover an area of 10,582 km2, the largest salt flats in the world. This all at an altitude of 3660 meters on the Bolivia Highlands, in the Andes near the town of Uyuni.
Wikipedia learned us;
About 40,000 years ago, this plains was part of a huge prehistoric lake. When the lake dried up, two lakes remained (Poopo Lake and Uru Lake), and two large salt flats (Salar de Uyuni and Salar de Coipasa). It is estimated that it contains more than 10 billion tonnes of salt, of which around 25,000 tonnes are removed annually.
The flats are covered by a few meters of salt crust, which has an extraordinary flatness with the average elevation variations within one meter over the entire area of the Salar. The crust serves as a source of salt and covers a pool of brine, which is exceptionally rich in lithium. It contains 50% to 70% of the world's known lithium reserves. The large area, clear skies, and exceptional flatness of the surface make the Salar ideal for calibrating the altimeters of Earth observation satellites. Following rain, a thin layer of dead calm water transforms the flat into the world's largest mirror, 129 kilometres across.
From the border from Peru we will head for La Paz, one of the highest cities in the world from were we will go south to Oruro, on to route 12 to Sabaya. At this small town close to the Chile border we gonna hit Salar de Coipasa first, meet the flamingos and move on to Salar de Uyuni.
After Uyuni will cycle south to the border with Argentina. On this part we expected a boring route but cycled an unexpected beautiful part of Bolivia, a bit similar to the National Parks in the United States but without the thousands of tourists.

Our first campspot in Bolivia. Also in this country, wildcamp doesn't look like a problem. The highway is just 100m away but no one can see us in the lower riverbed. We enjoy the nice sunset.

Camping at the salt. Cars and trucks pass by sometimes. Our biggest scar at night for us; They don't see our tent on time and drive over us.

Endless... Priceless... The whole route over both of the saltlakes was around 300km. Due the wet and muddy first lake it took us nearly 5 days to finish both of the lakes.

Welcome at Isla Incahuasi. This island is in the middle of Salar de Uyuni. We camped here for the night.

Strange but true. We found water underneath the salt. This did give us the strange feeling like cycling on ice instead of salt.

Close to the end of the Salar the Uyuni there is this Dakar Rally monument. Here we met @fedeflores94 from Argentina

Cleaning bikes and stuffing ourselves up with loads of calories again. Preparing and planning for the last leg of our trip through Argentina, Chili and Patagonia.

August 4, nearly 6000km to go. (Google did a little miscalculation of 1000km) At the time of posting this Bolivia blog we are in San Martin de los Andes already.

Filling our campstove up with gasolina again at the last gasstation for the coming days. Kim is making friends in the meantime with these twins.

"Kim how do you transport 20 eggs on a bicycle?" --- "Just on the back with some soft mattresses underneath! :-)"
Beppie en Rieks
Wat een zoutvoorraad, graag een kilo voor ons meenemen! die fietsen kun je straks ook beter achterlaten tenzij jullie een abstract kunstwerk willen meenemen.
Alle achting wat een fantastische tocht ook nu weer na al die verroeste treinen.
Van het ene in het andere uiterste.
We begrijpen nu beter waarom deze fantastische reis ?????
Nog heeeel veeel plezier.
John Mercer
Enjoy the last days of your journey! Believe it or not, work, bills, and a regular life awaits. But there will be more adventures. One of the things we learned by doing our bike trip was it completely changes what travel and a vacation is. On a bike, it’s all about the journey between A and B. Most travelers are all about A or B and the journey between is something to forget. They might not even move from A to B? It’s a huge difference and we still carry it with us everyday, kind of a guiding light for us. Life is a journey, best enjoyed on a bicycle.