Our final days in the Atacama, and as far and as high into the mountains and desert here as our bodies would allow, we reached these salt flats. A national park, holding one of the world’s largest and purest active lithium deposits – lithium increasingly in demand, and being extracted, for the batteries required by all our new hybrid/electric vehicles and mobile devices.

Spectral flamingos, like shadows of a place already past, as if their existence here were still possible…

[ images: Mike Brookes ]