Atacama Desert Atacama Desert The Atacama Desert () is a desert plateau in South America covering a 1000-km (600-mi) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes mountains. The Atacama desert is one of the driest places in the world (the driest being the McMurdo Dry Valleys ) , as well as the only true desert to receive less precipitation than the polar deserts. According to estimates, the Atacama Desert occupies , or if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are included. Most of the desert is composed of stony terrain, salt lakes ("salares"), sand, and felsic lava
Lost in the Desert and the Afrikaans version rather shorter. Most of the scenes are exactly the same in both versions, but both contain a few scenes which are not included in the other. For example, the Afrikaans version starts with a scene showing Dirkie's father Anton Hayes, who is a concert pianist, playing Frédéric Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp minor, Op. 66 (posth.) before an audience. Instead of this, the English version substitutes some panoramic scenes from the Kalahari Desert (the setting for most of the story), with an announcer narrating a brief history of the desert. One possible reason for this difference might