As you have probably gathered, Im currently riding through one of the harshest deserts in the world... Its quite narrow but its thousands of Km long, streaching from the coast of Peru just South of Ecuador to about a third of the way down the very long coast of Chile.
And the land is so dry that there are vast planes with not a scrap of vegetation on them because it pretty much never rains here.
In fact, I rode through the driest recorded place in the world just yesterday.
But the land is not totally useless to humans... Just ask any mineral extraction company!
It seems that the conditions here over the centuries, and the environment in eons past left a layer of Nitrate a couple of metres below the surface of the desert here...
And Nitrate is VERY usefull if you want to grow crops (one of the main ingredients in fertilizers along with phosphates and potasium salts).
And these vast areas of natural nitrate deposits were discovered before we humans got so good at synthesizing things out of petrochemicals and such.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, these nitrate deposites were "extracted" during the 40s and 50s in the manner of the day... Which means they raped the land brutally and just took the top of the desert off, removed the layer of nitrate and then piled the useless "overburden" back in the hole. They went to within a metre or so of some very significant preColombian Geoglyphs too... (cant waste those resources now!)
It means that what was a smooth flat plane is now a vast plain of piles of desert dirt... And Im not kidding when I say its VAST.
But, as with all human "resource extraction" endeavours, its never sustainable (and despite what the forestry industry likes to tell us, Ive never seen a sustainable forestry operation either!), and the nitrate mining ended in 1960.
And as is the manner of Corporations and big companies, when they go into "harvest mode" they get every cent out of their investment they can. So, everything is sold off and the company ceases to exist. And in this case, when I say everything, I mean it... The only thing left of the dozens of nitrate plants that used to be here are the wastelands of upheaved earth and a few foundations of mud and concrete... There is not a scrap of metal or wood anywhere (which is actually a pretty effective clean-up operation... except for the environmental aspect!)
But, thats not quite true...
There were many thousands of workers engaged in these operations, and it seems that many of them litteraly sold their lives to the nitrate companies. Along with each of the old concrete foundations, there is associated a grave yard. Its usually a Km or two from the old processing plant, and its on some land where there was little or no nitrate (cant have the dead getting in the way of profitable minerals now can we!)
So, scattered all over the place down here (say every 30Km or so) are very forlorne little grave yards of decrepit rusted ironwork fences, wooden crosses, and wooden headboards... from which the wind blown sands have erased all names, dates, and epitaphs.
They are left out here in the desert; Reminders of people that were... But there is barely a trace of the companies that they died for.
Its as if the people gave there all and the companies just took it and moved on when there was no more money to be had...
"How Convenient"!
