The Atacama — 181,000 square kilometres of ancient laval flows, sand and salt pans — spanning northern Chile, southwestern Bolivia and southern Peru, is a place so hot and so very dry that if the visitor were to spot a half-dozen blades of grass it would be a prairie. Most parts have never seen rainfall in living memory. It is fifty times more arid than the USA’s Death Valley, drier even than the Sahara. Uplifted from an ancient seabed, the Atacama has been a dersert in the making for 200 million years and river beds appear to have been waterless for tens of millennia. Together with Altiplano (Andean High Plain) it is such a bleak yet strange world, with a beauty derived from beyond the threshhold of normal experience, and yet — and yet empty might the desert seem it is not lacking interest. For a start it is one of geography’s great ironies that the Atacama is so dry it can scarcely support a living thing, but was once the world’s most abundant source of natural fertilizer.
The thirsty traveller has no right to be here where the desert only makes dry throats drier, when merely observing makes the observer feel parched, vulnerable. It is the ‘Silent Land of Death‘ according to the former Chilean politician Vicuña Mackenna and ‘…a wearier looking desert a man never saw.’ (Robert Louis Stevenson). In this delightful landscape format book the author has provided some of his most stunning photography which, combined with a historical narrative, paints a pretty fair picture of this unique region of the Andes.
The most noticable feature abaout the Atacama, apart from the obvious, is the ever-changing texture and, above all else, the subtleties of colour. The sun plays an important role in both, and if the heat doesn’t addle the brain it is possible to appreciate the desiccated, almost psychedelic beauty in wind-crafted dunes, steam loc graveyards, petroglyphs, mining ghost towns, volcanoes, hot springs, cacti, toxic lagoons, salt lakes and vibrant desert towns.
Available here http://www.howardmbeck.co.uk/
