The Flattest Place on Earth

Crossing Bolivia’s salt flats

Every good bit of science needs a datum, a place to start measuring from. Whizzing around above your head right now is the NASA ICESat, a satellite responsible for measuring how badly, and at what rate, we are making sea levels rise by doing things like riding motorcycles. But because the sea moves around quite a lot it’s actually quite a difficult system to calibrate. In order to do so they need a very big, perfectly flat, non-moving surface in a place with no cloud cover. Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is that place; it is the flattest place on Earth. This bright white spot on South America’s maps was part of the draw for this entire motorcycle trip, and our entry into Bolivia involved crossing all 160km of it.

We crossed from Chile into Bolivia in the evening, about a week after we had planned to, after a day of climbing up the Andes once again. The Uyuni salt flat has a little brother, Salar Coipasa, to the North. The two salt flats make up the only reasonable way to get from the border to the tourist town of Uyuni, to the East of the large flat. We followed the GPS co-ordinates given to us by our Chilean motocross friend to get us to the tiny town of Coipasa for the night, and got a taste of what was to come as we crossed ever deepening sections of soft sand. As the sun set, we got our first chance to ride on some salt. What should have been us rushing to get to the town before sunset turned into the first of many salt photoshoots.