Nearby, a vast man-made lagoon foams water – and what else?
Manod had vast man-made chambers 30m high linked by tunnels and drainage shafts.
A two-hour bus ride from Tacuarembó, this tiny, isolated town sits on the border of a vast, man-made lake.
Redford has himself navigated the Colorado river and keeps a boat on Lake Powell, a vast man-made reservoir – now at perilously low levels – at the eastern end of the Grand Canyon.
The setting was a real hotel under a railroad viaduct that crossed a vast man-made lake, and the shooting was complicated by the fact that the lake was about to be drained by civil engineers.
Rugged desert spread out below me, then a mountain ridge loomed and then, suddenly, a sweeping view of the Colorado River tumbling into the vast man-made basin of Lake Mead behind the mighty Hoover Dam.
As one lawyer, Khaled al-Alansi, put it to me, "If you can't fight sheik Mansour, how can you possibly fight Al Qaeda?" Two thousand years ago, the area east of Sana held one of the earth's most prosperous kingdoms, a lush agricultural region of spices and fruits, fed by irrigation canals from a vast man-made dam.
The upstream countries quickly got together and in May came up with a formula that would free them to build their own irrigation projects and dams, reducing the flow to Lake Nasser, the vast man-made reservoir that straddles Egypt and Sudan.
Vast men's and women's locker rooms facilitate daytime rides, including a low-key lunch race.
And then there is the vast no man's land in front of the town: a former tailings pond that is considered poisoned ground, protected by a fence topped with barbed wire.
And yet, there is a reticence - out of sympathy, out of embarrassment, perhaps out of the haunting incongruity between the memory of this vast, hulking man who radiated power, and the endless helplessness of his situation now.
