Salar de Uyuni

It's great to then combine that with Bolivia.

There's the Uyuni salt flats.

La Paz itself is amazing because it's probably one of the steepest cities I've ever been in.

Great for the glutes and the calf muscles because everything's on a 90 degree angle.

We've been to the one in Rio, which was very different.

We wanted to see the Sala de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world.

I wanted to see where one of my uncles was born in the jungle in Bolivia.

We did that.

Conditions vary from basin to basin.

Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni, for example, has brines with substantial magnesium, which complicates separation.

Its cooler, wetter conditions also make evaporation slower than in some neighboring operations.

A large resource is therefore not automatically a large supply.

Lithium? Lifeline? Or the same mistake? If you've heard one hopeful thing about Bolivia's economy, it's probably lithium.

The country sits under the Sala de Uyuni, the largest salt flat on Earth.

It's so flat and so bright that scientists use it to calibrate satellite instruments.

Under its crust lies brine rich in lithium, the metal at the heart of the batteries in your phone and in electric cars.

If you count only the industrial plant and leave out the older pilot facility, the figure is under 10%.

Part of the problem is chemistry.

Uyuni's brine is rich in magnesium, which is hard to separate from lithium.

The salt flat floods in the rainy season and its high altitude slows evaporation.

For the ultra-wealthy, the options are really endless.

"As long as it's legal," said one representative of a referral-only travel service, "they'll do anything for a client." Bespoke traveling for the billionaire class is booming, and as long as the traveler gets a good story out of the experience or the ability to brag about visiting the Salar de Uyuni desert in Bolivia or the most rural reaches of Sudan before any of their friends, they'll keep paying well into the hundreds of thousands for it.

But of course, the true top of the market is what we don't know about yet.

Increasingly, wealthy people are traveling to be seen, either in person or on social media.

No idea.

Finn, for the planet Crait in The Last Jedi, filming was done at Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat.

This real-life place is found in what South American nation?

Pass.

What, Lake Titicaca?

No. It's called Salar de Uyuni.

Oh, okay.

I'm probably murdering that.

Uyuni.

So Salar de Uyuni, which is currently a major, um, tourism zone in the country-

Yeah

... it's also a, a major reservoir, let's say, for, for lithium resources to the, the government.

Um, I don't think, and-

Wow

... and maybe I should have known by now, but I don't think there is a settled, complete theory of the Salar de Uyuni as described in the Salar-

Yeah