Salt and The Sound of Music...


So The next little tour of my journey included a trip to the salt flats in the Atacama Desert. And let me just say that when they say salt flat, they mean salt flat. When we stepped out of the van, it was salt as far as the eye can see. It was like standing on the shore to the ocean and seeing nothing but the water until it meets the horizon --but with salt of course. And surprisingly enough, the salt flat is also the national flamingo reserve. So while wandering through the constructed paths, one was able to see wild flamingos just hanging out in the many little ponds that scatter the flats.

The salt flat was amazing in the sense that it was this huge expanse of protected land that is virtually untouched by man. But what I found myself bothered by was the fact that there were constructed paths leading through the flats. Now I understand that one has to be able to walk through the flats somehow, so it's better to have restricted paths that one must walk on, but at the same time, I was bothered by the fact that they broke up the expansive mass of salt. Then again...I found myself fascinated by the juxtoposition of the man-made, smoothed out paths, separated from the natural sea of salt by constructed salt, rock walls.
After the salt flats we headed to two large lagoons. The drive provided some amazing scenery such as this...
From a distance, the yellow grass you see here make the mountains look like they're covered in a yellow sand. I was surprised to find that the color was actually produced by these little tiny yellow clumps of grass. Walking out of the van, I actually felt like I had stepped into a scene from The Sound of Music or something. I actually spun around and started singing at one point.
Once we got to the lagoon, I once again felt as though I were stepping into another time and place. But instead of stepping into a scene from The Sound of Music, I felt as though I had stepped into a photograph from National Geographic. I actually was immediately reminded of a one of the three National Geographic books I own that has a photographic very similar to this one somewhere in its pages. I always thought that the colors had to have been altered to appear so bright, but I now know that waters that blue really do exist...