So many times in the long course of my travels I have been asked the questions: What is your favorite sacred place, or where is the most beautiful place you have ever been? Nearly always I respond that I have ten or twenty favorites, and that it is impossible to say what is the most lovely place I have seen. Beauty is found in many forms when one travels the earth widely. There are soaring mountains colored crimson by the setting sun. There are graceful sand dunes following one another as far as the eye can see. There are lakes set in surroundings so sublime, so majestic that heavenly is the only word to describe them. How could you possibly choose from amongst this palette of perfection?

And yet, if I were to select a place with a beauty beyond compare, I might well choose the great salt lake of southern Bolivia. Modern-day maps mostly name the lake Salar de Uyuni, for near its south-eastern shore is the small town of that name. But question the local indigenous folk whose ancestors have lived around the lake for thousands of years. They will tell you its name is linked not to Uyuni but to the sacred mountain of Tunupa, that rises like a floating mirage from its northern shores.

Sacred Mt. Tunupa and Salar de Uyuni (Tunupa), Bolivia

The salar is only an actual lake, with water, for a few weeks or months each year (but sometimes there is no water for a period of many years). For it is not water that makes it a lake but a sea of salt. Slightly over twelve thousand square kilometers in size and perched high in the altiplano at 3720 meters, Salar de Tunupa is a vast expanse of the whitest white I have seen anywhere on the earth. Whiter even then the extraordinary gypsum sand dunes of southern New Mexico, a favorite play ground of my early youth.

There are no roads across the salt flats, only seasonal tracks left by a few jeeps that take travelers to view the other worldly place. The silence is complete; no sound will you here except the crush of salt crystals beneath your feet. Shimmering mirages ring the horizon in every direction and purple mountains loom out of the misty distance. In the middle, piercing the bold white, is the small island of Isla Inkahuasi; its sharp crags of volcanic rock as black as the darkest ink. The only evidence of island life are a profusion of tall and furry green cacti and a few dozen shy rabbits with long, cartoon-like ears. I have spent three days upon this island and its surrounding sea of pristine salt, and it has been for me an experience of spiritual ecstasy. The combination of land blinding white, skies cobalt blue, and the grand and golden sun touches me in a way no other place ever has. Simply by being in this place one finds a state of inner peace. No effort must be made to reach this state, for the land gives it to you. Travelers I met who had been here remarked that even after weeks away they still felt the power of its presence.  

Dusty Magic Bus, Laguna Verde (above 11,000 feet), Bolivia