Just outside Uyuni is a graveyard.
There are no crosses.
No priest came calling for souls of the departed.
The corpses lie, slowly decaying in the desert wind.
The story started one hundred and fifty years ago when the town of Uyuni was a thriving metropolis-in-waiting, refining and exporting the largest quantity of salt in South America at a time when the commodity had not long since ceased to be a King’s Ransom.
To support the trade, a massive railway infrastructure evolved with its epicentre at UIyuni railway station.
The bottom fell out of the salt industry slowly during the early 20th century leaving Uyuni as high and dry as the salt flats that surround it. Left in the wake of the receding tide of wealth was the railway that was no longer needed.
The graveyard is home to the rusting hulks of hundreds of turn-of-the-century locomotives and wagons. Rivet welded steam boilers rest on wheels, axle-deep in the encroaching sands that blow in of the Altiplano.
We wandered amongst the dead and climbed into the cabs, long since stripped of anything useful. The century-old cinders from their last journeys still sit in the fire boxes. The place is full of melancholy for a lost time of prosperity.
And wonder at the industrial power that today’s one horse town could once muster.
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