Atacama Montage

Is it sand? No it is salt! These are the salt plains in Bolivia where the salt is harvested from the flats. In fact it is possible that some of the salt from here has ended up on your dinner table.
During the dry season each year locals come out onto the plains to harvest the salt, they pile it into the pyramids that you can see to allow it to dry and then it is taken to the local town where it is dried and cleaned before being sold.
During the wet season the entire plain is knee deep in water which as it dries draws more salt from the earth providing the locals with more salt to collect.
The Atacama Desert is a virtually rainless plateau in South America and has been inexistance for C. 20 million years. It covers a 600 mile strip of land on the Pacific coast of South America, west of the Andes mountains. According to NASA, National Geographic and many other publications, this is the driest desert in the world.
The rain shadow on the leeward side of the Chilean Coast Range and the Andes, as well as a coastal inversion layer created by the cold offshore Humboldt Current keeps the desert 50 times drier than California's Death Valley.