The Andean flamingo is pink because of the brine shrimp. The shrimp are pink because of carotenoids in the algae. The algae are among the few things that live in this water, which is saturated with salt and lithium and arsenic and has a pH near that of seawater but is in no other way like seawater — it does not come from the ocean. It is old snowmelt. It is an inland sea that has been evaporating for 40,000 years.
After rain, the flat holds a few centimeters of fresh water that does not mix well with the brine below. In this layer, sky and earth become indistinguishable. Photographs taken here have been described as dreamlike, surreal, impossible. This is inaccurate. The physics are exact. The reflection is exact. The impossibility is ours — we expect ground to look like ground.
The flamingos know. They tilt forward, submerge their heads, run their beaks backward and upside-down through the water. Lamellae inside filter out what they can’t use. What they can use turns them the color of the rising light, the color of heated copper, the color of the inside of a closed eye.
They come here in winter. Eleven thousand of them, sometimes more. The temperature at night falls far below freezing. Their legs — thin as a child’s wrist, the same pale pink as the white of a hard-boiled egg — do not freeze. This has been studied. The blood vessels in their legs run counter-current: arterial blood warms venous blood, so the feet maintain just barely above freezing while the core stays warm. They are the solution to their own problem.
Under the salt is the largest lithium reserve on Earth. It is not yet mined in significant quantities, though Bolivia has plans and foreign interests have tried for years to establish access. The brine shrimp have lived in this water for longer than the lithium was known to be valuable. The flamingos have migrated here for longer than that. There is a kind of argument in this, but the argument belongs to humans. The flamingos are not making the argument. They are standing in a sky, eating the sky’s small creatures, being made pink by what they eat.
Hexagonal salt formations tile the flat’s surface where there is no water — from the edge you can see the crust buckling along each seam, a few centimeters of ridge between each plate. Millions of hexagons. This is how salt crystallizes under the pressure of the water above and the heat below. It is not unusual. Every crystal lattice prefers certain angles. The honeycomb happens because bees evolved to minimize wax. The salt flat happened because sodium chloride maximizes density. Everything is trying to do something. This is not mystery. It is still astonishing.
The volcanoes at the edge are dormant and snowcapped. Tunupa, which looms over the northern shore, last erupted approximately three million years ago. In local Quechua tradition, Tunupa is a deity — there are stories about Tunupa weeping, Tunupa wandering, Tunupa creating. A woman-mountain, crying into the basin. The tears making salt. The myth and the geology agree that something enormous made this place. They differ on what kind of enormous.
You can rent a jeep and drive onto the flat. In the wet season you will drive on water, on sky. You can stand at the center where no edge is visible and feel the absence of edge in your body — a faint vertigo, a widening. Some people cry. Some people feel afraid. Some people take photographs with the forced perspective trick, where one person appears to be held in another’s palm. This is fine. It is a way of meeting something too large.
Eleven thousand flamingos filtering brine shrimp with their upside-down beaks, pink because of what they eat, standing in mirrored sky, legs solved against the cold, not waiting — simply being what they are in this specific light, this specific thin air at 3,656 meters where the Altiplano holds its breath and the salt crust holds the water and the water holds the light and nothing, for miles, interrupts.