Salt Pans

The next stop on the Sacred Valley Tour with Victor Hugo was the Salt Pans.

Now, you may wonder if Salt Pans really demand a high priority in such a loftily named place as the "Sacred Valley". For you, I would recommend the book Salt by Mark Kurlansky to show just what an important part of world history salt demands.

This was our first view of the salt pans:

It was an amazing site.

Looking closer:

And closer:

You can see the workers and the brine as it is evaporating out the salt.

You would think that such an environment would be free of flowers, but that is not so.

Here is a nice Hibiscus we saw on the way down:

And down we went.

as did many other tourists. As with most attractions here, there was not much safety consciousness. People were free to walk hither and yon all over the salt pans. I would imagine that more than a few of them slip into the brine. I don't think any of it is deep enough to drown you, though.

Here is the first crystals of the salt appear on some of the young brine. Those of you who know salt, will know this as the "Fleur de Sel" or Flower of the Salt. Here, it is called Flor de Sal.

It is usually used as finishing salt. As our souvenir of Peru, we bought a kilo of this salt.

 You can see the tourists making their way gingerly around the pans:

 Some of the pans had rocks placed between them, probably to keep tourists off. It did a good job.

Since I was zooming in on many of the above photos, I had a hard time taking a self portrait while there.

Here is my first attempt:

and here is my second:

But it worked out in the end:

I love this sort of stuff:

Here are the conventional crystals

and here is the Flor de Sal:

Great things to see:

 The scale was just amazing

And people were really working there

This was a good stop.

On our way up the mountain (and these were very narrow, barely two lane dirt roads up these mountains) a minivan drove into the ditch (on the mountain side, not the cliff side) and stopped all traffic for about 10 minutes as everyone got out to push. I tell you what, that is some scary stuff with two big tour buses passing each other on these mountain roads.