Pictures - the western coastal desert

Many of the pictures on our web site come from one photographer: Erich Henry Kuball. He did a bike tour of the Americas back in 2001. (There are a lot of people who tour the world on bikes!) You can see a bike in his picture of the sunset over the Pacific coast. He has a great eye and has taken some of the best pictures I've seen of the Coastal Desert--the western border of Peru, between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains.

The west coast of Peru is predominantly desert. The Andes mountains act like a wall for the weather, so that the western side is all desert and the eastern side gets all the rain. When I look at pictures of the western coast, I imagine that this is what it would look like if the ocean ran up against the shore of the moon. Ironically, this is the side of the mountains we will be living on. Lima, Peru is situated in this coastal desert region. The picture below is of one of the highways that runs through this desert to Lima.

All three of these photos have a foggy quality. That's what happens when the cold waters of antarctica meet the hot sands of the desert. Fog is a big part of life on the coast, but there are a few clear days--as can be seen in the picture of the rocky coast of southern Peru, below.










These pictures come from www.VirtualPeru.net.