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Mar. 30, 2007 Everyone thinks of South America as the land of jungles, rivers and mountains, and that it is indeed, for I've seen them myself. I sailed the Amazon 800 miles through the Brazilian jungle and overflew another 1500 miles of almost uninhabited jungle there. I ferried across El Río de la Plata twice and across the Straits of Magellan twice. I crossed the Paraguay, Iguazú and Paraná Rivers and saw Iguazú Falls at their confluence. I've been high in the Andes in Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, Argentina and Chile. This is all stupendous and magnificent, and everyone knows all about these wonders, so great is their fame. But most people do not realize that South America also has terrifying deserts. There are the Sechura Desert of Perú and the Atacama Desert of Chile. I passed through 600 miles of the Sechura Desert in 2004, and found that it literally beggars all description. I'm not exactly a novice at viewing deserts. I lived in the Mojave Desert in California, Arizona and New Mexico for years and years. I've passed also through the Mexican Mojave, south of the border, several times. I've been on the fringes of the Sahara Desert in Egypt, where the toweing dunes come rolling right into the pyramids in al-Gizah (other spellings are also in vogue). I've gone back and forth across the Gobi Desert in Mongolia and the Taklamakan Desert of China and Central Asia. The Sechura Desert of northern Perú is just as barren and frightening as any of them. I entered on an Ormeño bus in April of 2004 at Tumbes, Perú, a city right on the border between Ecuador and Perú, around 600 miles north of Lima, the Peruvian capital. It took 18 to 20 hours to cross that stretch of the desert and reach the capital. For the first 200 miles or so, the desert resembled the Mojave in Arizona, with cactus, sagebrush, tumbleweed, here and there some scrub trees, with a few adobe houses now and then. We even passed through a place that is regarded as an oasis. Trujillo, Perú's third city, greens there. But 300 to 400 miles out of Lima, the dunes began to roll. I simply couldn't believe it. Staggering dunes, 200 to 300 feet tall, as tall as high-rise buildings, flanked the black two-lane highway in endless succession, mile after mile, hour after hour. There was absolutely no sign of plant or animal life anywhere, except for one or two miserable towns we passed. We left Tumbes at around 3 PM, so we rolled through the desert all night. With dawn, the fog, utterly dismal and drab, swaddled the dunes without a trace of blue, so that the entire panorama was gray above and tan below, except for the narrow pencil of asphalt that lay before us straight as an arrow. We were in Lima late in the forenoon. When I leave Santiago, I will be going through the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, the driest place on Earth. In one spot, it is believed that there was no rain whatsoever between 1570 and 1971. I may stop a day or two at Antofagasta, in the heart of the Atacama. So far, I don't know what lies between the Sechura and the Atacama, that is, in the southern half of Perú. I'm supposing that there will be more arid or semi-arid land. If all goes well, I'll find out in the next couple of months, as the next leg of my journey will be Santiago-Lima. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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