High on the altiplano between Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, the sky is an impossibly deep blue. The car pulling up was my driver, who played a prank and drove off when I was talking too many photos. It gave the scene a sense of scale, which was perfect. I ended up asking him to do this a few times over the 4 day trip, much to his bemusement.
High up in the altiplano plateau, within the Salar de Uyuni, there is a train graveyard. Rather than methodically removing locomotives and wagons, the local rail service instead runs them off the end of the line and leave them to rot in the salty desert.
The first time I visited this place, there was a simple yet eerie sense of otherworldliness. However, upon my return, all the trains had been graffitied and the whole area had become a huge rubbish dump, which was a real shame.
Strange shapes in the desert. Whilst crossing the Atacama desert in Bolivia, I passed through the Salar de Uyuni salt flats. In the vastness of the white desert, strange shapes were cut into the floor. Blocks of salt were extracted and left in the sun to dry before being removed and sold. The remaining angular shapes were gradually filled with the water that lingered beneath the surface.
In the wet season, the floor of the salt flats becomes flooded and the looks like an impossibly huge mirror, making it hard to know which is heaven and earth.
At the edge of the world is a place called the Salar de Uyuni, in the altiplano in Bolivia. It feels alien, set at over 4000m high in the Andes, close to the gods. With the exception of the cactus, it is bereft of life. This hostile, baron environment is one of my favourite places on earth. There is a brutal simplicity to existence here.
Moon Valley in Chile, close to San Pedro de Atacama, very much lives up to its name. Trekking in the heat of the day at 4000m altitude, in the altiplano, literally took one’s breath away.
I took this shot in the mid afternoon, as the shadows of the canyon cast increasingly longer trails across the exposed spikes of the rock outcrops, akin to the vertebrae of the valley jutting out of the ground.
Back in 2011, I was on assignment for Lonely Planet in South America, gathering some new shots for their online library. This was taken in the middle of nowhere in southern Bolivia, less than 100 miles form the Chilean and Argentinian borders, close to the Salar de Uyuni. It was late afternoon and the heat of the day in the altiplano desert was rapidly evapourating as the steely grip of night gathered traction.
Temperatures regularly drop to -20 degrees Celsius. That night was no exception.
All Terrain Photography 