SALT AND SKY: The remote Salar de Uyuni salt desert in Bolivia is a land of extremes

Salar de Uyuni is a salt desert that stretches across 4,085 square miles of South....

  Salar de Uyuni is a salt desert that stretches across 4,085 square miles of South America. It's twice the size of Delaware, but as flat as the plains of Kansas, nestled in southwestern Bolivia.Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world, roughly 25 times the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. Some 40,000 years ago, it was part of Lake Minchin, a prehistoric salt lake. Today it is a popular tourist attraction for its natural wonder, salt islands and a now-closed hotel made almost entirely of salt.My journey started in mid-September in San Pedro de Atacama, a small town in northwestern Chile, which sits in the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world. I joined a Brazilian couple and a Dutch couple on a tour headed northeast into Bolivia.We traveled for three days through a land of bizarre rock formations, geysers with boiling volcanic mud and multicolored lagoons.We arrived at Salar de Uyuni in the chilly, pre-dawn hours. September is wintertime and there's an extreme temperature variation -- from the 70s in the afternoon to below zero at night. Travelers can sleep on the outskirts of the desert in small refuges that have no heat or running water, but are simply a place with a cot to lay one's head. The desert tour with one guide for six people costs $75 per person for three days and two nights, including the rough accommodations and basic meals.As the sun began to illuminate this vast space, white salt and blue sky reached as far as the eye could see in every direction. We put on our sunglasses to protect our eyes from the blinding whiteness. The salty ground looked like the brittle surface of the moon." It's amazing, all white," said Bertine Fleerkotte, a traveler from the Netherlands. We got out of our 4-wheel drive vehicle and stepped onto the salt to a sound like a thousand crunching potato chips breaking the silence. We walked with that ever-present crunching noise while our guide explained the desert's history.We later stopped at the Salt Hotel, on the edge of Salar de Uyuni. Most of the furniture is constructed from blocks of salt, including the chairs, tables and beds, with more salt sprinkled over the floor.The hotel once had 12 guest rooms, but it has been closed for several years. Visitors still can buy postcards and souvenirs as well as textiles made by the locals at a small gift shop there. Driving across the salt -- we saw no roads -- we headed for Isle de Pescado, Fish Island. It's not your typical island because there's no water around it. It's one of the desert's few landmasses with rocks, cacti and shrubs in the middle of the salt flat.After our 12-hour trip, we headed to Uyuni, the dusty town closest to the desert, leaving behind the tranquility of spectacular nothingness." Mountains far away, high cactus," said Fleerkotte."It's really, if you like, the end of the world," she said and paused. "Beautiful."