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into the desolate high plains. Uyuni appeared like a mirage, a defiant outpost against cold and wind. Founded in 1889, it once served as a mining hub and remains a strategic military base. For us, it was the gateway to two extraordinary places: the Cementerio de Trenes and the Salar de Uyuni.
At the train cemetery, dozens of 19th-century locomotives lie rusting in the desert, remnants of Bolivia’ s industrial ambitions. President Aniceto Arce had championed the railway as a symbol of progress, but the Aymara people saw it as an intrusion and sabotaged the tracks. When mining collapsed in the 1940s, the trains were abandoned, monuments to dreams gone still. Sand now buries the rails; iron flakes into rust. Standing among them, the silence was eerie. Nature, patient as ever, was reclaiming what man had left behind.
The Salar de Uyuni, the world’ s largest salt flat, awaited us. During the Dakar Rally years, from 2009 to 2019, its dazzling expanse hosted the world’ s toughest riders. One of the rally’ s most iconic monuments stands here, a sculpture made entirely of salt, carved with the Tuareg emblem.
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