Gringo Tur: Kickin' it Stateside: Salar de Uyuni: Altiplano

San Pedro is at a respectable 8000 feet, enough that we were getting our salads a little tossed biking around. East of San Pedro the earth glides skyward as the Andes pin Chile to its strip of land by the coast. Without any metric to judge distance or height, it's hard to tell how much the earth is rising. But even the lowest part of this part of the Andes is at 14,000 feet, out of which loom various volcanoes, which brush 20,000 feet.

The lowest part of the horizon is Cajon Hito, the pass to Bolivia. It's at 14,000 feet.

From san pedro, uyuni

We got into a van and zoomed across the flat plain of the Atacama, until almost imperceptibly the engine started to labor and we have started to climb. The gradient increases and looking over my shoulder I can already see San Pedro has shrunken to look like a lego-town. Remarkably, the higher we get, the greener it becomes. A few intrepid patches of grass are beginning to grow at the bottom of the canyon next to us. These are soon joined by scraggly bushes that don't look like much, but are still a surprise after how barren San Pedro was.

After another 15 minutes steady ascent, our driver announces that we are 14,000 feet, and things are looking nearly lush. Licancabur's south flanks are coated in snow and the driver tells us that it snowed down to where we are sitting just a week ago.

From san pedro, uyuni

This snow feeds the lakes, which would be unthinkable 6000 feet below us in the Atacama desert. However, the combination of volcanic rock and the topography means that many of the lakes are sumps for whatever minerals the volcanic rock leech. We visit lakes of calcium carbonate and sulphur, which are full of algae and flamingos, as well as lakes of copper and arsenic, which are dead green pools.

Flamingo