March 8 - Our first stop on Day 1 of our tour was at the village of Colchani, which sits virtually alone atop billions of tons of easily accessible salt deposits. We stopped to watch a short demonstration of how the local people processed the salt. With the thickness of the salt layers up to six meters deep there is plenty of raw material for commercial purposes. This little settlement extracts and processes nearly 20,000 tons of salt each year, most of which is marketed for human consumption. Despite the vast salt resources, the operations in Colchani are essentially primitive. Workers chop and shovel and the salt by hand from the flats onto lumbering old dumptrucks which haul it to the processing plants in town. The sifting, drying and bagging is done by the local village residents in a small three-room 'factory', working in small teams. Larger block quantities are cut and processed at a facility several miles away. Iodine is added according to WHO specifications and then shipped to refiners and sold abroad.