There's a moment, about forty minutes into driving onto the Salar de Uyuni, when your brain gives up trying to parse depth. The salt flat runs white to every horizon, ten thousand square kilometers of it, cracked into a hexagonal pattern so uniform it looks manufactured. After a light rain, a thin sheet of water settles over the crust and the whole place becomes a mirror — sky above, sky below, the jeep seeming to drive through cloud.

Our driver, Freddy, has crossed the Salar more times than he can count and still slows down for the same jokes: parking the jeep at just the right distance from a lone rock formation so a photo makes it look like you're holding it in your palm. It's a tourist cliché executed with total sincerity, and somehow that makes it work.

We slept the first night at a hotel built almost entirely from salt blocks — walls, floor, even the bed frames — on the edge of the flat near Colchani, and woke before dawn to drive out to Isla Incahuasi, an outcrop covered in centuries-old cactus that rises out of the white like a shipwreck. From its summit, the sunrise turned the Salar the color of a struck match before fading back to blinding white by seven.

The route south from the flat climbs into a surreal high-altitude desert — the Siloli, at over 4,500 meters, dotted with wind-carved rock formations and lakes stained red, green, and a deep mineral copper by algae and mineral deposits invisible anywhere else. Laguna Colorada, its shoreline crusted with borax, held hundreds of James's flamingos wading through water the color of tomato soup, entirely unbothered by the cold.

By the third night, at a refuge near the Chilean border, the altitude and the silence had done something to my sense of scale. Stepping outside to a temperature well below freezing, the sky held more stars than I've ever counted, no light pollution for hundreds of kilometers in any direction, the Milky Way rendered as a physical band rather than a metaphor.

Getting there: Most tours depart from Uyuni town, reachable by bus or a short flight from La Paz; book a three-day jeep tour that ends near San Pedro de Atacama in Chile if you want to continue south rather than backtrack.

Best months: January to April for the mirror effect after rain; May to November for perfectly dry, cracked salt and clearer roads.