Chile travel tips

In the remote chance you are planning a trip to Chile, here are a few travel tips:

1. Do not visit Chile during February. This is far and away my most important suggestion. Most of the problems we ran into were directly or indirectly related to the decision to visit at a time when the tourist areas are very crowded. I’d suggest December or March.

2. Visiting Chile is much more difficult than visiting New Zealand, and requires more careful planning. Of Chile’s 4 most important scenic areas, we only saw one (Torres del Paine.) And that’s despite renting a car and driving more than 3500 kilometers. And in that one notable area we did visit, we never saw the most famous towers:

The other three are the Atacama Desert, Easter Island and the Carretera Austral highway. Chile is a very big country, and you can’t just rent a car and hit the highlights as easily as in New Zealand. If I were younger and more adventurous, the 1200km Carretera Austral highway would be my number one goal—it’s regarded as perhaps the most beautiful drive in the world. But I don’t like long gravel roads. If they paved it, Chile could turn itself into a must see tourist destination. As it is, New Zealand is the superior option, especially if you don’t speak Spanish.

2. Anticipate problems. Previously, I mentioned the border closure with Argentina, but there were other problems as well. A national park might be closed on the day you arrive. Gas stations can be difficult to find (even with GPS.) Refill at half a tank. You might be bumped from a tour you already booked and paid for. GPS is useful, but less reliable than in America. Many of our problems were linked to the fact that we traveled in the peak tourist season. Crime is not a big problem in the south, but be careful in Valparaiso.

3. We spent 6 days in the central area (Valparaiso and Santiago), but in retrospect the time would have been better spent in the far north or Easter Island. (I actually might prefer Juan Fernandez Island, which is the one that Robinson Crusoe is based on.) If you insist on going to the wine country, pick Casablanca Valley, not the Maipo Valley. If you insist on the Maipo Valley, go to the Santa Rita Winery, which has a great museum (by the far the best I saw in all of Chile. Unlike with most European countries, in urban Chile you want to focus on the modern areas. (Las Condes in Santiago.) We had an excellent lunch at the Mandarin Oriental in Santiago. Oddly, food in Chilean hotels is often better than in ordinary restaurants. But again, I’d skip the cities entirely.

4. We spent most of our time in the Lake District, which is a good area for old people. The scenery is picturesque, not the sublime of the Torres del Paine (and Atacama?) Lake Llanquihue is huge, and the view of Osorno Volcano is impressive. There are German style towns along its shoreline. Here’s a view from our hotel room in Puerto Varas:

Further north, I enjoyed the Huilo Huilo resort, which should appeal to fans of Lord of the Rings.

5. My favorite part of Chiloe Island was visiting the smaller island called Quinchao. There’s a nice drive of about 20 miles along the spine of this island, and you can see the snow-capped Andes about 60 miles away across a large bay.

6. I’m not a foodie, but the seafood seemed fine and reasonably priced. If you want something specifically Chilean, try the fixed price menu at Peumayen Ancestral Food in Santiago. There is no western style fast food in the south. This struck me as really odd, given that the Chilean economy is very “globalized.”

If you want a North American analogy for our trip, consider Chile to be like the Pacific Coast from Cabo to Anchorage. Using that analogy, it’s as if we flew to Alaska and spent 6 days there. Then flew to Seattle and rented a car. We worked our way through Washington and Oregon (and failed to dip into Canada due to border issues.) We ended up visiting San Francisco (Valparaiso), Napa (Casablanca) and Sacramento (Santiago). A total of 26 days, which is a few too many given the relatively modest portion of Chile that we were able to see.

While there were some frustrations, it remains true that challenging travel is the most effective form of life extension. Four weeks of travel in Chile felt like 3 or 4 months of life in Orange County. Time passes far more slowly. By the end of the trip, it seemed like the first few days happened many months earlier. Sort of like when you were young, and summer vacation seemed to stretch on forever. And for sufferers of SAD, the bright summer sunshine feels very nice in the middle of February.

PS. Patagonia has inspired some outstanding literature. Earlier I mention Chatwin’s In Patagonia and Bridges’s Uttermost Part of the Earth. Add W.H. Hudson’s Idle Days in Patagonia. The Bridges book is the least distinguished from a literary perspective, but the best overall due to its amazing content.

PPS. The Santa Rita Winery had this map of Juan Fernandez Island in its museum:

It looked familiar, and when I got home I found that I own the same map:

I love the hand drawn (and colored) mountains in those old maps. On some of them, the island volcanos are issuing smoke.

Tags:

This entry was posted on March 12th, 2023 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.