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Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile
Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide--not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler discovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica. Eloquent, astute, nimble with history and deftly amusing, Travels in a Thin Country established Sara Wheeler as one of the very best travel writers in the world.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1994
158 people are currently reading
1453 people want to read
About the author
Sara Wheeler
37 books130 followersSara Wheeler was brought up in Bristol and studied Classics and Modern Languages at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. After writing about her travels on the Greek island of Euboea and in Chile, she was accepted by the US National Science Foundation as their first female writer-in-residence at the South Pole, and spent seven months in Antarctica.
In her resultant book Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, she mentioned sleeping in the captain’s bunk in Scott's Hut. Whilst in Antarctica she read The Worst Journey in the World, an account of the Terra Nova Expedition, and she later wrote a biography of its author Apsley Cherry-Garrard.
In 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. From 2005 to 2009 she served as Trustee of the London Library.
She was frequently abroad for two years, travelled to Russia, Alaska, Greenland, Canada and North Norway to write her book The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic. A journalist at the Daily Telegraph in the UK called it a "snowstorm of historical, geographical and anthropological facts".
In a 2012 BBC Radio 4 series: To Strive and Seek, she told the personal stories of five various members of the Terra Nova Expedition.
O My America!: Second Acts in a New World records the lives of women who travelled to America in the first half of the 19th Century: Fanny Trollope, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, Rebecca Burlend, Isabella Bird, and Catherine Hubback, and the author's travels in pursuit of them.
In her resultant book Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, she mentioned sleeping in the captain’s bunk in Scott's Hut. Whilst in Antarctica she read The Worst Journey in the World, an account of the Terra Nova Expedition, and she later wrote a biography of its author Apsley Cherry-Garrard.
In 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. From 2005 to 2009 she served as Trustee of the London Library.
She was frequently abroad for two years, travelled to Russia, Alaska, Greenland, Canada and North Norway to write her book The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic. A journalist at the Daily Telegraph in the UK called it a "snowstorm of historical, geographical and anthropological facts".
In a 2012 BBC Radio 4 series: To Strive and Seek, she told the personal stories of five various members of the Terra Nova Expedition.
O My America!: Second Acts in a New World records the lives of women who travelled to America in the first half of the 19th Century: Fanny Trollope, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, Rebecca Burlend, Isabella Bird, and Catherine Hubback, and the author's travels in pursuit of them.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 150 reviews
June 21, 2025
“This review applies to Travels in a Thin Country, The Broken Road, A Time of Gifts, Roumeli and a few others by the same author. I am very keen on travel writing and on this basis bought the books, supposedly by one of the great travel writers. Overall they present as being written by a self indulgent, smarty pants show-off using many complex and very rare words when simple words would work better ( and I am very interested in words). Avoid.” says an Amazon review from someone in Australia.
Ouch! But I wonder why the reviewer has mixed up his Patrick Leigh Fermor books with the rather less well known Sara Wheeler. To be fair to Sara she is no Patrick Leigh Fermor in the ‘self indulgent, smarty pants show-off using many complex and very rare words’ but if the review thought she was, he read a different version of Chile Travels in a Thin Country than me. Be that as it may I have found this one an entertaining read even if it did have/lack those smarty pant big words and that, for me, Sara was more journo than traveller.
Sara was talked into travel to Chile by an expat Chilean in London. Her intention was to travel the long thin country from north to the Antarctic south in as much time as her visa allowed. Other than a first chapter that explains her tour of a Santiago brothel that happened because some other researcher needed a wing women, her travels are told as near as possible from a north to south perspective.
From the dusty north around Araca and the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Furgo Sara and even to the Antarctica she travelled with both friends found, known and solo to see as much of Chile as she could. What to this reader were very useful descriptions of both the people and the places are presented. The local people she met she was not scared to mix with, be they the ultra-wealthy through to those in abject poverty. She had very useful contacts in this regard.
As to the countryside, she was more than willing to go off the beaten track. The two things that stood out for me were her love of the diversity and beauty of those dusty and dry deserts of the north through to the wondrous lands of the south and their alpine vista’s, glistening lakes and smoking volcanos.
Sara offers her travels in Chile, as she says in the introduction of my revised 2nd edition from 2006, as those of a young woman 30 odd years back. She actually spent her 30th Birthday while in Chile. In the introduction, she tells of how much Chile had changed between her visits. The same would ring true today, one would have thought.
Recommended travel writing.
Ouch! But I wonder why the reviewer has mixed up his Patrick Leigh Fermor books with the rather less well known Sara Wheeler. To be fair to Sara she is no Patrick Leigh Fermor in the ‘self indulgent, smarty pants show-off using many complex and very rare words’ but if the review thought she was, he read a different version of Chile Travels in a Thin Country than me. Be that as it may I have found this one an entertaining read even if it did have/lack those smarty pant big words and that, for me, Sara was more journo than traveller.
Sara was talked into travel to Chile by an expat Chilean in London. Her intention was to travel the long thin country from north to the Antarctic south in as much time as her visa allowed. Other than a first chapter that explains her tour of a Santiago brothel that happened because some other researcher needed a wing women, her travels are told as near as possible from a north to south perspective.
From the dusty north around Araca and the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Furgo Sara and even to the Antarctica she travelled with both friends found, known and solo to see as much of Chile as she could. What to this reader were very useful descriptions of both the people and the places are presented. The local people she met she was not scared to mix with, be they the ultra-wealthy through to those in abject poverty. She had very useful contacts in this regard.
As to the countryside, she was more than willing to go off the beaten track. The two things that stood out for me were her love of the diversity and beauty of those dusty and dry deserts of the north through to the wondrous lands of the south and their alpine vista’s, glistening lakes and smoking volcanos.
Sara offers her travels in Chile, as she says in the introduction of my revised 2nd edition from 2006, as those of a young woman 30 odd years back. She actually spent her 30th Birthday while in Chile. In the introduction, she tells of how much Chile had changed between her visits. The same would ring true today, one would have thought.
Recommended travel writing.
March 22, 2010
I really wanted to like this book. Some of it was a little interesting, but honestly i would have had a more enjoyable time reading the wikipedia article on Chile.
Example of this book:
I went to have dinner with my friends, we ate shellfish, it was ok.
The next moring i got a shower, it was cold.
The roads were muddy, I rode a bus.
Chile is beautiful.
This book has not begining middle or end, its a list, a poorly written list of things she did in Chile. I don't feel like she had an adventure, because nothing interesting ever happened.
Example of this book:
I went to have dinner with my friends, we ate shellfish, it was ok.
The next moring i got a shower, it was cold.
The roads were muddy, I rode a bus.
Chile is beautiful.
This book has not begining middle or end, its a list, a poorly written list of things she did in Chile. I don't feel like she had an adventure, because nothing interesting ever happened.
April 10, 2022
Sara Wheeler says in her introduction:
“What I fear I cannot do is convey to you adequately at the beginning of the book how passionately I felt about the country at the end of the journey.”
And indeed, that rather mirrors my reading experience: this is a book that really grew on me as I journeyed, virtually, with her from the Atacama Desert in the far north to misty Patagonia and even Antarctica. Yet at the start – when she spent some time lolling about with backpackers – I wasn’t at all hopeful about learning anything much about Chile.
Wheeler is a hugely resourceful traveller and quite engaging writer, though not a lyrical one – her prose can be a bit flat, but she does have a nice self-deprecating style. Because she didn’t know much about Chilean history at the time, her travel writing is interspersed with historical commentary, with an anti-colonial slant, that I found very informative.
She is at her best when travelling alone or with various idiosyncratic natives and others that she meets along the way; much more interesting types than the privileged dilettantes and fixers from Chile’s impossibly rich classes that she also hobnobbed with.
I hadn’t really appreciated that there were such extremes of wealth and utter poverty, but Wheeler manages to move between the two worlds fluidly. In doing so, she provides a much more balanced picture of Chile’s reality than if she had been only a minimalist backpacker herself (which I suspect some of her negative reviewers were expecting) or only cruised the country in comfort (which she certainly did, but not exclusively).
Her travels occupied six months from the end of 1991, so many of her observations are undoubtedly thirty years out of date now. However, what she has here is a valuable portrait of Chile during the nervous post-Pinochet years (though he was still head of the army) when the country was still attempting to come to terms with the horrors of the dictatorship – and which was still strongly supported, she discovers, by many of the Chileans, both rich and poor, who she encounters.
Four stars plus!
“What I fear I cannot do is convey to you adequately at the beginning of the book how passionately I felt about the country at the end of the journey.”
And indeed, that rather mirrors my reading experience: this is a book that really grew on me as I journeyed, virtually, with her from the Atacama Desert in the far north to misty Patagonia and even Antarctica. Yet at the start – when she spent some time lolling about with backpackers – I wasn’t at all hopeful about learning anything much about Chile.
Wheeler is a hugely resourceful traveller and quite engaging writer, though not a lyrical one – her prose can be a bit flat, but she does have a nice self-deprecating style. Because she didn’t know much about Chilean history at the time, her travel writing is interspersed with historical commentary, with an anti-colonial slant, that I found very informative.
She is at her best when travelling alone or with various idiosyncratic natives and others that she meets along the way; much more interesting types than the privileged dilettantes and fixers from Chile’s impossibly rich classes that she also hobnobbed with.
I hadn’t really appreciated that there were such extremes of wealth and utter poverty, but Wheeler manages to move between the two worlds fluidly. In doing so, she provides a much more balanced picture of Chile’s reality than if she had been only a minimalist backpacker herself (which I suspect some of her negative reviewers were expecting) or only cruised the country in comfort (which she certainly did, but not exclusively).
Her travels occupied six months from the end of 1991, so many of her observations are undoubtedly thirty years out of date now. However, what she has here is a valuable portrait of Chile during the nervous post-Pinochet years (though he was still head of the army) when the country was still attempting to come to terms with the horrors of the dictatorship – and which was still strongly supported, she discovers, by many of the Chileans, both rich and poor, who she encounters.
Four stars plus!
April 26, 2011
A woman traveling (mostly) solo in South America for 6 months. How could I possibly not love this book? I'm still trying to figure that out, as I've been looking forward to eating it up.
The author's account of traveling from the northern tip of Chile to the southern tip manages to be boring. How can that be? Everything about South America is fascinating to me. I haven't been to Chile, but the other parts of Latin America I have traveled in have been lively, passionate, gorgeous, heart-breaking, extreme, alluring and funny.... it's hard to make it boring!
The writing style felt snootily-British to me. (In a manner I haven't really encountered in contemporary writing.) Seeing Chile through what came across as unengaged, uninterested eyes was bizarre. I couldn't finish it, despite the fact that I assumed the book would get better the longer she traveled. For someone who writes travel books, she doesn't come across as enjoying it all that much.
It's a shame the writing wasn't different, because many of the things she did were brave and inherently interesting, despite not coming across that way in the book. I know this because I've done similar things in South America, or, turned back from similar things because my instinct told me the activities were too reckless, too slap-dash, or just too bizarre for a solo gringa.
I'll have to cleanse my travel writing palette with some Pico Iyer now.
The author's account of traveling from the northern tip of Chile to the southern tip manages to be boring. How can that be? Everything about South America is fascinating to me. I haven't been to Chile, but the other parts of Latin America I have traveled in have been lively, passionate, gorgeous, heart-breaking, extreme, alluring and funny.... it's hard to make it boring!
The writing style felt snootily-British to me. (In a manner I haven't really encountered in contemporary writing.) Seeing Chile through what came across as unengaged, uninterested eyes was bizarre. I couldn't finish it, despite the fact that I assumed the book would get better the longer she traveled. For someone who writes travel books, she doesn't come across as enjoying it all that much.
It's a shame the writing wasn't different, because many of the things she did were brave and inherently interesting, despite not coming across that way in the book. I know this because I've done similar things in South America, or, turned back from similar things because my instinct told me the activities were too reckless, too slap-dash, or just too bizarre for a solo gringa.
I'll have to cleanse my travel writing palette with some Pico Iyer now.
August 13, 2011
This is probably a 4 star but have only rated it 3 because I don't really know how to review it. I enjoyed it totally = Wheeler writes well and has combined a heck of a lot of history with documenting her travels through Chile. For someone about to go to Chile it would be invaluable (if a little dated) - I mean don't rely too much on her transport timetables since that would be changed in the years since she wrote it) although I get the feeling progress is slow due to the nature of the terrain. I would have liked an historical timeline maybe in the index but it wasn't that kind of book. In the context of her travels she quotes a fair number of authors from Chile and/or other books to read regarding historical aspects and for that reason alone it's worthwhile to have on your shelf if you are interested in the country. She mentions Bruce Chatwin's Patagonia as still being relevant to travellers in Chile and I hope to track that down sometime soon. There are so many incidents she recounts that touch the heart in many ways - covering the geography, history, politics and humanity of the country it is impossible to single any one out here. Chile is one of those places that not many people seem to know much about. While reading this the student riots there were happening and so I could relate to what I saw on the news. I was impressed that Wheeler was able to wrangle herself down to the Chilean South Pole base and her commitment to venturing further into the unknown Chile than many tourists do.
$2 today 11/7/11
$2 today 11/7/11
April 1, 2012
The author combines history, political intrigue, stories of people she travels with or meets along the way, verbal snapshots of unbelievable landscape, and box after box of wine (mixed with Coke) into a travel book that has made Chile even more of a mystery to me NOW than when I started reading it.
The country stretches along South America and includes icebergs, rainforests, desert, mountains, island regions, wine country, with a diversity of old European colonials and (mostly extinct) native people groups. She never travels to Easter Island, but it seems like it is more Polynesian than anything else (and I still have a book to read for it by itself). I learned about quite a few more cold weather islands that I didn't know about (hooray) but if traveling there is anything like she describes in 1992, I'm not sure I could do it (boo).
Quotation tidbits I liked:
"'The problem is,' he went on, 'that you don't stop being an exile when you get home. It becomes a state of mind. You can be an exile inside your head. Perpetual travellers are often like that... Mind you, you don't necessarily have to go anywhere to feel that kind of permanent alienation. Perhaps the worst kind of exile is mental.'"
"It was unutterably peaceful. At that moment the past held no regrets and the future no fears; I could have given up everything worldly to live the rest of my life on that island."
Cold weather islands to explore:
Juan Fernandez Islands
Isla Mocha (in a folk song, not on a map, Mapuche lived there, no public transport to it)
Chiloe'
Tierra del Fuego (I knew a piano piece with this title)
Isla Grande
Almirantazgo Sound
Dawson Island
Isla Navarino
Lennox
Picton
Nueva
Hoste Islands
Mornington Island
Food tidbits to look into:
chirimoyas - she describes this fruit as tasting of pears and honey
papaya - "the stalls on the highway out of La Serena were touting papaya honey, syrup, juice, sweets, cakes, bars and peeled papayas suspended in jars of sugar syrup. There was clearly nothing which could not be made out of a papaya." (ooh gotta love a challenge)
The country stretches along South America and includes icebergs, rainforests, desert, mountains, island regions, wine country, with a diversity of old European colonials and (mostly extinct) native people groups. She never travels to Easter Island, but it seems like it is more Polynesian than anything else (and I still have a book to read for it by itself). I learned about quite a few more cold weather islands that I didn't know about (hooray) but if traveling there is anything like she describes in 1992, I'm not sure I could do it (boo).
Quotation tidbits I liked:
"'The problem is,' he went on, 'that you don't stop being an exile when you get home. It becomes a state of mind. You can be an exile inside your head. Perpetual travellers are often like that... Mind you, you don't necessarily have to go anywhere to feel that kind of permanent alienation. Perhaps the worst kind of exile is mental.'"
"It was unutterably peaceful. At that moment the past held no regrets and the future no fears; I could have given up everything worldly to live the rest of my life on that island."
Cold weather islands to explore:
Juan Fernandez Islands
Isla Mocha (in a folk song, not on a map, Mapuche lived there, no public transport to it)
Chiloe'
Tierra del Fuego (I knew a piano piece with this title)
Isla Grande
Almirantazgo Sound
Dawson Island
Isla Navarino
Lennox
Picton
Nueva
Hoste Islands
Mornington Island
Food tidbits to look into:
chirimoyas - she describes this fruit as tasting of pears and honey
papaya - "the stalls on the highway out of La Serena were touting papaya honey, syrup, juice, sweets, cakes, bars and peeled papayas suspended in jars of sugar syrup. There was clearly nothing which could not be made out of a papaya." (ooh gotta love a challenge)
May 13, 2011
I am giving up on this. Other reviews have commented that the author doesn't seem to absorb her surroundings and isn't likable. That's my impression as well. It seems as though she wouldn't be able to get from one place to another without the assistance of locals, expats, and other travelers; she repays them all with mildly patronizing character sketches.
It might be bearable if she stuck to poking fun at the "tack" she sees everywhere (manjar blanco, nescafé, peasant children clumsily named for Lady Di), but once she gets into talking about the Chilean revolution I was even more turned off and had to give up. She isn't snarky about that part (which is good) but it just seems like she reduced stories that were probably intensely personal and emotional to her sources, in a facile and not very thoughtful way.
I'm sure there are better books about Chile out there.
It might be bearable if she stuck to poking fun at the "tack" she sees everywhere (manjar blanco, nescafé, peasant children clumsily named for Lady Di), but once she gets into talking about the Chilean revolution I was even more turned off and had to give up. She isn't snarky about that part (which is good) but it just seems like she reduced stories that were probably intensely personal and emotional to her sources, in a facile and not very thoughtful way.
I'm sure there are better books about Chile out there.
February 21, 2010
I read about a hundred pages of this and decided I wasn't very interested in finishing it. The set-up is enviable: an extensive, top-to-bottom, six-month-long tour of one of the countries I find most interesting. However, Wheeler's prose style isn't particularly alluring, her characterizations aren't very precise or captivating, and none of her adventures (at least in the first several chapters) are very interesting. I lost interest rather quickly.
April 13, 2018
I'd give it 1 1/2 if I could, but will round up to 2 since she did bother to toss in some history, simplistic and anglo-centric as it was.
The marketing pitch: Solo female travel writer tackles traveling the length of Chile, a country she's never been to before. Working her Rolodex and waving her press pass, she contrives to visit parts of the country off-limit (or off good sense) to either the average traveler or most Chileans: a private tour of the Presidential Palace, the Chilean Air Force's Antarctic station, parts of wineries not open to the public, etc.
The reality: Solo female travel writer tackles traveling the length of Chile, a country she's never been to before and seems to care little about except for what travel bragging rights it will give her. Working her contacts and waving her press pass, she manages to get people to either arrange for or act as her host to amazing places, none of which seem impress her in the least except that she can then check them off her list and can bring them up to other travelers over drinks at some point. Interspersed with her monotone and shallow observations and always slightly derisive comments about the people and culture, she includes some bits of history that feel like she pulled them out of a college textbook, one written with a decidedly English slant. (It couldn't be from Wikipedia. The Wiki page on Chile is far more interesting than anything in this book.)
If she's paying, she makes it a point to stay in the worst accommodations (also for bragging rights--she points out hos disappointed she was not to be able to find an F or G-rated flophouse, which is the very worst rating.) If she's not paying, she still finds something condescending and snide to say about her hosts and their accommodations, no matter if it is the humble shack of someone who took pity on the dumb gringa and gave her their bed for the night or the uber-rich winery owner who played host by offering access to his luxurious home and staff. When her guides, usually locals who are excited to be showing a foreigner their country, bring up anything that even remotely touches on British history (Drake, the Faulkland Islands), she contradicts them with the English version of history. She wants to see the homes of Pablo Neruda (got to check those off the list), but she states he "wasn't a very good poet."
So, basically, instead of this being a fascinating look at a complex country and its people, it is perhaps one of the most boring and superficial travelogues ever. It is six months of bitch, moan, grouse, complain, condescend: the food isn't very good; the weather is too wet/dry/windy/unpredictable; the poor people's houses and clothes are dirty; the roads are bad; nothing runs on time; the children are unkempt. (She actually calls a couple of eight year olds "thuggish"); the houses and stores are tacky; the men are sexist. (No shit, Sherlock, So are most of the men in Asia, Africa and a fair number of them in your beloved Europe.); this village in the middle of nowhere isn't very interesting; people won't discuss traumatic and politically sensitive topics with me; I picked up fleas from some child I held; Patgonia is very flat; the south part of the country is windy. Well, gee, thanks for that sparkling commentary and such detailed, insightful observations. All I can figure is she must be a hell of a lot more charming a conversationalist in person than she is in her writing because she comes across as a most misanthropic, ethnocentric, arrogant, and thoroughly unpleasant person. About halfway through the book, I noticed that the only time she seemed interested in anything, there was a drink involved and/or she met up with someone from England. Maybe the first clue was when she was unduly miffed that her traveling companion of the moment "forgot" to get wine for their foray into the desert. (Smart man.) Seriously, if the only things she's interested in is drinking and other Brits, why not keep her butt at home and just go to a pub? I'm sure the Chileans wouldn't have missed her, especially the ones she makes snotty remarks about in the book.
There was one anecdote that amused me. The first is that she manages to get a tour at one of the amazing observatories in the Chilean desert and seems to have these delusions of channeling Carl Sagan or something. These are telescopes that scientists must wait months, if not years, for a chance to spend mere hours using. (I'd give my eyeteeth to tour this place.) The fact that she thought her little press pass was going to get her time on the telescopes was laughable, but that she thought she was going to have bragging rights on these scopes in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY had me in stitches.
I finished the book for (apparently) the same reason she travels, to check it off my to-do list. I certainly don't recommend it or think I got any return on the investment of time or money. The only remarkable things were that someone could make an entire country and trip seems so boring and that she makes a living doing it.
The marketing pitch: Solo female travel writer tackles traveling the length of Chile, a country she's never been to before. Working her Rolodex and waving her press pass, she contrives to visit parts of the country off-limit (or off good sense) to either the average traveler or most Chileans: a private tour of the Presidential Palace, the Chilean Air Force's Antarctic station, parts of wineries not open to the public, etc.
The reality: Solo female travel writer tackles traveling the length of Chile, a country she's never been to before and seems to care little about except for what travel bragging rights it will give her. Working her contacts and waving her press pass, she manages to get people to either arrange for or act as her host to amazing places, none of which seem impress her in the least except that she can then check them off her list and can bring them up to other travelers over drinks at some point. Interspersed with her monotone and shallow observations and always slightly derisive comments about the people and culture, she includes some bits of history that feel like she pulled them out of a college textbook, one written with a decidedly English slant. (It couldn't be from Wikipedia. The Wiki page on Chile is far more interesting than anything in this book.)
If she's paying, she makes it a point to stay in the worst accommodations (also for bragging rights--she points out hos disappointed she was not to be able to find an F or G-rated flophouse, which is the very worst rating.) If she's not paying, she still finds something condescending and snide to say about her hosts and their accommodations, no matter if it is the humble shack of someone who took pity on the dumb gringa and gave her their bed for the night or the uber-rich winery owner who played host by offering access to his luxurious home and staff. When her guides, usually locals who are excited to be showing a foreigner their country, bring up anything that even remotely touches on British history (Drake, the Faulkland Islands), she contradicts them with the English version of history. She wants to see the homes of Pablo Neruda (got to check those off the list), but she states he "wasn't a very good poet."
So, basically, instead of this being a fascinating look at a complex country and its people, it is perhaps one of the most boring and superficial travelogues ever. It is six months of bitch, moan, grouse, complain, condescend: the food isn't very good; the weather is too wet/dry/windy/unpredictable; the poor people's houses and clothes are dirty; the roads are bad; nothing runs on time; the children are unkempt. (She actually calls a couple of eight year olds "thuggish"); the houses and stores are tacky; the men are sexist. (No shit, Sherlock, So are most of the men in Asia, Africa and a fair number of them in your beloved Europe.); this village in the middle of nowhere isn't very interesting; people won't discuss traumatic and politically sensitive topics with me; I picked up fleas from some child I held; Patgonia is very flat; the south part of the country is windy. Well, gee, thanks for that sparkling commentary and such detailed, insightful observations. All I can figure is she must be a hell of a lot more charming a conversationalist in person than she is in her writing because she comes across as a most misanthropic, ethnocentric, arrogant, and thoroughly unpleasant person. About halfway through the book, I noticed that the only time she seemed interested in anything, there was a drink involved and/or she met up with someone from England. Maybe the first clue was when she was unduly miffed that her traveling companion of the moment "forgot" to get wine for their foray into the desert. (Smart man.) Seriously, if the only things she's interested in is drinking and other Brits, why not keep her butt at home and just go to a pub? I'm sure the Chileans wouldn't have missed her, especially the ones she makes snotty remarks about in the book.
There was one anecdote that amused me. The first is that she manages to get a tour at one of the amazing observatories in the Chilean desert and seems to have these delusions of channeling Carl Sagan or something. These are telescopes that scientists must wait months, if not years, for a chance to spend mere hours using. (I'd give my eyeteeth to tour this place.) The fact that she thought her little press pass was going to get her time on the telescopes was laughable, but that she thought she was going to have bragging rights on these scopes in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY had me in stitches.
I finished the book for (apparently) the same reason she travels, to check it off my to-do list. I certainly don't recommend it or think I got any return on the investment of time or money. The only remarkable things were that someone could make an entire country and trip seems so boring and that she makes a living doing it.
January 27, 2016
Another book I read in advance of our upcoming trip to Chile. I loved this travelogue describing the six months the author spent wandering Chile from top to bottom. Her dry British wit had me laughing out loud, and she managed to work in lots of information about Chile's history and culture at the same time. My one disappointment was that she spent so little time in Torres del Paine National Park (only a day!) because that's going to be the focus of our trip, but that's a personal quibble. Overall this was delightful.
February 12, 2018
Subtitled A Journey Through Chile, Travels in a Thin Country is a memoir of Sara Wheeler's exploration of the entire length of this South American Country.
I love travel books, and was eagerly anticipating being immersed in this one, but I found it a bit disappointing. First, where were the locals? It seemed as if Wheeler, despite taking extensive language courses beforehand, never talked to native Chileans. Every single person she came into contact with was an expat. It gave you the impression that either a) Chileans didn't exist or b) Wheeler was a cultural snob who did not wish to fraternize with the locals. Second, if Wheeler's descriptions are any indication, Chile is nothing but mountainous desert and frozen tundra, with a city in the middle. The other day I watched an episode of House Hunters International, where the family decided to relocate to Chile. It was so beautiful! The footage of mountains, lakes and stunning ocean vistas were so gorgeous, I would never have guessed this was Chile if Wheeler's book was all I had to go by.
Before I completely turn you off of this book, I will say that Wheeler presented an interesting history of Chile and some amusing anecdotes. So it wasn't a complete loss. But it could have been so much more.
I love travel books, and was eagerly anticipating being immersed in this one, but I found it a bit disappointing. First, where were the locals? It seemed as if Wheeler, despite taking extensive language courses beforehand, never talked to native Chileans. Every single person she came into contact with was an expat. It gave you the impression that either a) Chileans didn't exist or b) Wheeler was a cultural snob who did not wish to fraternize with the locals. Second, if Wheeler's descriptions are any indication, Chile is nothing but mountainous desert and frozen tundra, with a city in the middle. The other day I watched an episode of House Hunters International, where the family decided to relocate to Chile. It was so beautiful! The footage of mountains, lakes and stunning ocean vistas were so gorgeous, I would never have guessed this was Chile if Wheeler's book was all I had to go by.
Before I completely turn you off of this book, I will say that Wheeler presented an interesting history of Chile and some amusing anecdotes. So it wasn't a complete loss. But it could have been so much more.
June 13, 2013
I was given this book just before my current my trip to Chile. I lived in the Vina Del Mar area for a year and a half during 2009-2010. Travels in a Thin Country captured Chile magnificently.
Written almost twenty years ago, this book manages to paint the nuances of the country so well that the armchair traveler gets a real sense of what it means to be in Chile. Wheeler's descriptions of the regional flavor, the society, the political landscape is spot on to this day.
Some reviewers seemed to resent she came with credentials. Well, she was a sponsored writer. Good for her! Others complain of the posh digs she stayed in. My memory is that though there were a few accommodations I will never see the likes of, most of the time she stayed in pretty humble lodgings. Her bout with scabies is testimony to this.
I loved her writing style, her dry British humor, her wonderful vocabulary, and her spunk. In regard to Pinochet, she writes about the same confusion I have had living and visiting here. I have heard more people than I would ever believe, from the ricas to the fishmongers, say things like "Pinochet saved Chile." This has been the most disturbing part of living in this country, though the economic tragedy of Allende´s tenure created great scars in the country as well, created in a large degree by Nixon and Kissinger´s manipulations in Washington. I have also heard of human rights abuses during this time as well.
In many ways Chile is my second country. By the end of the book, I felt my understanding of Chile had grown, and I felt her sadness when she left reflects my own bittersweet feelings each time I return to the U.S.
Written almost twenty years ago, this book manages to paint the nuances of the country so well that the armchair traveler gets a real sense of what it means to be in Chile. Wheeler's descriptions of the regional flavor, the society, the political landscape is spot on to this day.
Some reviewers seemed to resent she came with credentials. Well, she was a sponsored writer. Good for her! Others complain of the posh digs she stayed in. My memory is that though there were a few accommodations I will never see the likes of, most of the time she stayed in pretty humble lodgings. Her bout with scabies is testimony to this.
I loved her writing style, her dry British humor, her wonderful vocabulary, and her spunk. In regard to Pinochet, she writes about the same confusion I have had living and visiting here. I have heard more people than I would ever believe, from the ricas to the fishmongers, say things like "Pinochet saved Chile." This has been the most disturbing part of living in this country, though the economic tragedy of Allende´s tenure created great scars in the country as well, created in a large degree by Nixon and Kissinger´s manipulations in Washington. I have also heard of human rights abuses during this time as well.
In many ways Chile is my second country. By the end of the book, I felt my understanding of Chile had grown, and I felt her sadness when she left reflects my own bittersweet feelings each time I return to the U.S.
November 10, 2016
In the early 90's, Sara Wheeler leaves Britain for Chile, a country unknown and appealingly rectilinear. Fascinated by the prospect of having to pack for both deserts and glaciers, Wheeler sets out to map the entire territory one region at a time, one national park at a time with the humorous self-confidence only a Briton can have . From north to south and onward to Antartica, Wheeler opens up an entire society for the reader, from Bolivian truckdrivers to the Santiago elite, from llamas to exotic birds with precise English names, "bejewelled Argentinians" and Russian souvenir sellers in Antartica, it's a magical ride through that exclamation mark land that links the bottom of the world and an accidentally romantic reminder of the era of fax-machine, poste restante and cassette tapes.
September 20, 2010
Dry. I would not have finished this book if it weren't for a strong interest in Chile since my son will be living there for two years. This book truely was mainly about her travels - how she traveled and who she traveled with and not enough about the country she traveled thru. I had to look up the areas she visited on the internet in order to get a visual due to a lack of description. Once I saw the beautiful country she was in I wondered why she wrote this book if she wasn't going to give it justice? However, I did learn a few interesting things about Chile, thanks to the interenet as well.
Read
December 29, 2021An account of visiting Chile from Sara Wheeler, a Brit who visited for several months in the early 90s, as an expat writer making a trip in her youth as she travelled top-to-bottom throughout the country. Her point-of-view as a curious and empathetic outsider with at least some awareness of her privilege made this an interesting read - much more so than Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” which I had started to read concurrently but had abandoned partway in. She clearly loved her time in Chile which shows abundantly throughout the book.
“There was nothing I had ever wanted to do less than leave Chile.”
“I was supposed to be leaving the luxuries of the metropolis for the southern half of the country, but there was always a reason to stay another day, and then another. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go–I felt a leap of excitement whenever I thought of the glaciers and the fjords of the far south–but Santiago was a cornucopia, and I was very happy.”
“Chile took in the driest desert in the world, a glaciated archipelago of a thousand islands and most of the things you can imagine in between.”
“I found that I couldn’t buy the fine wines I tasted on my tour in the supermarkets. It was all being sent abroad.”
“My friends left for Santiago. They had found a bottle of pisco that was fifty per cent proof. Their holiday, they felt, had been a learning curve from thirty per cent pisco through to fifty. This was quite an astute observation, as Chileans are very conscious of the strength of a pisco, always seeking out the higher end of the scale and scorning the lower echelons, which they seem to think are produced exclusively for the faint-hearted and foreign, though these two categories are effectively synonymous.”
“As the stars came out an Argentinian bank manager tried to point out formations and constellations. People were always doing that, and I hated it; I didn’t need sordid terrestrial labels bringing the stars under control. Giving them shapes from our world (the Plough; the Hunter) robbed them of their otherness. They belonged to the land of the imagination, the most beguiling country of them all. I had spent many nights alone with the Chilean stars, and I wasn’t going to let a bank manager turn them into agricultural implements.”
“Despite abundant evidence of what economic pundits called, ‘the Chilean tiger’, 95 per cent of wealth remained in the hands of the old central valley elite.”
“The Mapuche were systematically deprived of their lands by theft and discriminatory legislation for generations. Little has changed. The majority of Chileans remain indifferent to the distress of the marginalized, impoverished Mapuche and their culture, and to call someone an ‘indio’ is a great insult. And actually the Mapuche weren’t and aren’t warlike by nature. They just happened not to go for the idea of their own genocide.”
“The future of the Quinquen region Pehuenche and their traditional way of life is still insecure. I could go into these disputes in great detail, but you know the story, and its themes of moral turpitude, greed and a dominant culture. You have heard it told about many countries, in both hemispheres, probably so often that the words no longer register.”
“According to one of the most cautious academic sources, between 3000 and 10,000 Chileans were killed in the immediate aftermath of the coup. The Rettig Commission recorded less than 3000 deaths and disappearances, but a new national reparation and reconciliation corporation has subsequently added many hundreds of cases to that figure. Somewhere between 40,000 and 95,000 people were taken prisoner for some period in the first three years. Hadn’t the Pinochetistas I met (43 per cent voted to keep him in 1988) read all those accounts I had read about torture and depravity and murder? Hadn’t they met the woman whose three sons had been killed, as I had, or the hideously disfigured man who had set fire to himself in the village square to draw attention to the disappearance of his daughter, who at that moment was being raped by the eleventh man that day? Well, hadn’t they?”
“Acute poverty is less visible in urban Chile than in the shanty towns of Brazil and Peru–but it is no less deadly. Chronic unemployment and chronic overcrowding lead to endemic social dysfunction and endemic misery; I didn’t have to look far to see that.”
“Pinned to the seat by their bodies, I tried to work out how I felt about being in the slum. First of all I felt alienated; I believe that emanated from disgust at my rich and privileged life. I also felt despair… Their lives were never going to get any easier, or less anguished, or more comfortable. The power of despair to diminish struck me very hard during that bus journey… I suspect now that hope was my bourgeois luxury.”
“On my last Friday I climbed Santa Lucia hill in the centre of the city in the late afternoon ready for the thirty minutes or so when the sky turned salmon pink. I always made a point of stopping to observe this; half the sky became a slow gradation of colour from dark to light, the glow concentrating behind the black hills. When there were clouds, they formed a ridged panoply of blue and pink.”
“You couldn’t sleep through the colours of an Andean dawn.”
[On Antarctica] “Nobody owned it–that was the thrilling thing. Seven countries might have ‘claimed’ a slice for themselves, and there might be pushing two hundred little ‘research’ camps, but the continent wasn’t really owned by anyone. It was like seeing the earth for the very first time, and I felt less homeless there than I had ever felt anywhere. All the sordid failures and degradations of humanity and the morass of personal anxieties we struggle to live within shrank to insignificant specks as I looked out over the Antarctic snowfields.”
— Chile: Travels In A Thin Country by Sara Wheeler
https://a.co/7CUbfES
“There was nothing I had ever wanted to do less than leave Chile.”
“I was supposed to be leaving the luxuries of the metropolis for the southern half of the country, but there was always a reason to stay another day, and then another. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go–I felt a leap of excitement whenever I thought of the glaciers and the fjords of the far south–but Santiago was a cornucopia, and I was very happy.”
“Chile took in the driest desert in the world, a glaciated archipelago of a thousand islands and most of the things you can imagine in between.”
“I found that I couldn’t buy the fine wines I tasted on my tour in the supermarkets. It was all being sent abroad.”
“My friends left for Santiago. They had found a bottle of pisco that was fifty per cent proof. Their holiday, they felt, had been a learning curve from thirty per cent pisco through to fifty. This was quite an astute observation, as Chileans are very conscious of the strength of a pisco, always seeking out the higher end of the scale and scorning the lower echelons, which they seem to think are produced exclusively for the faint-hearted and foreign, though these two categories are effectively synonymous.”
“As the stars came out an Argentinian bank manager tried to point out formations and constellations. People were always doing that, and I hated it; I didn’t need sordid terrestrial labels bringing the stars under control. Giving them shapes from our world (the Plough; the Hunter) robbed them of their otherness. They belonged to the land of the imagination, the most beguiling country of them all. I had spent many nights alone with the Chilean stars, and I wasn’t going to let a bank manager turn them into agricultural implements.”
“Despite abundant evidence of what economic pundits called, ‘the Chilean tiger’, 95 per cent of wealth remained in the hands of the old central valley elite.”
“The Mapuche were systematically deprived of their lands by theft and discriminatory legislation for generations. Little has changed. The majority of Chileans remain indifferent to the distress of the marginalized, impoverished Mapuche and their culture, and to call someone an ‘indio’ is a great insult. And actually the Mapuche weren’t and aren’t warlike by nature. They just happened not to go for the idea of their own genocide.”
“The future of the Quinquen region Pehuenche and their traditional way of life is still insecure. I could go into these disputes in great detail, but you know the story, and its themes of moral turpitude, greed and a dominant culture. You have heard it told about many countries, in both hemispheres, probably so often that the words no longer register.”
“According to one of the most cautious academic sources, between 3000 and 10,000 Chileans were killed in the immediate aftermath of the coup. The Rettig Commission recorded less than 3000 deaths and disappearances, but a new national reparation and reconciliation corporation has subsequently added many hundreds of cases to that figure. Somewhere between 40,000 and 95,000 people were taken prisoner for some period in the first three years. Hadn’t the Pinochetistas I met (43 per cent voted to keep him in 1988) read all those accounts I had read about torture and depravity and murder? Hadn’t they met the woman whose three sons had been killed, as I had, or the hideously disfigured man who had set fire to himself in the village square to draw attention to the disappearance of his daughter, who at that moment was being raped by the eleventh man that day? Well, hadn’t they?”
“Acute poverty is less visible in urban Chile than in the shanty towns of Brazil and Peru–but it is no less deadly. Chronic unemployment and chronic overcrowding lead to endemic social dysfunction and endemic misery; I didn’t have to look far to see that.”
“Pinned to the seat by their bodies, I tried to work out how I felt about being in the slum. First of all I felt alienated; I believe that emanated from disgust at my rich and privileged life. I also felt despair… Their lives were never going to get any easier, or less anguished, or more comfortable. The power of despair to diminish struck me very hard during that bus journey… I suspect now that hope was my bourgeois luxury.”
“On my last Friday I climbed Santa Lucia hill in the centre of the city in the late afternoon ready for the thirty minutes or so when the sky turned salmon pink. I always made a point of stopping to observe this; half the sky became a slow gradation of colour from dark to light, the glow concentrating behind the black hills. When there were clouds, they formed a ridged panoply of blue and pink.”
“You couldn’t sleep through the colours of an Andean dawn.”
[On Antarctica] “Nobody owned it–that was the thrilling thing. Seven countries might have ‘claimed’ a slice for themselves, and there might be pushing two hundred little ‘research’ camps, but the continent wasn’t really owned by anyone. It was like seeing the earth for the very first time, and I felt less homeless there than I had ever felt anywhere. All the sordid failures and degradations of humanity and the morass of personal anxieties we struggle to live within shrank to insignificant specks as I looked out over the Antarctic snowfields.”
— Chile: Travels In A Thin Country by Sara Wheeler
https://a.co/7CUbfES
January 16, 2021
Fueling my wanderlust
Reading about Chile as I continue to socially isolate during this pandemic. The author manages to paint a picture of Chile through a foreigner’s eye without being annoying and self aggrandizing which I appreciated. Having traveled south to north in Argentina, this book managed to make me feel nostalgic for a place I’d never been.
Reading about Chile as I continue to socially isolate during this pandemic. The author manages to paint a picture of Chile through a foreigner’s eye without being annoying and self aggrandizing which I appreciated. Having traveled south to north in Argentina, this book managed to make me feel nostalgic for a place I’d never been.
January 2, 2020
Sublime, droll, insightful, effortlessly amusing, brilliant travel writing. Wheeler travels the length of Chile post-Pinochet, pre-internet, apps, GPS and smart phones.
September 15, 2023
3.5 stars.
August 5, 2024
Very interesting book. Brought back memories of our own trip through Chile in 1990's, nice to recognise place names and descriptions.
August 9, 2025
Fun little book. A nice retelling of her trip with some arrogance baked in toward some of the local people. She’s not so bad that she doesn’t recognize some of it though.
July 6, 2022
This was good. I enjoyed the leisurely way she wrote about her travels, which perfectly matches Chile.
January 5, 2012
I enjoyed Travels in a Thin Country even though I had my misgivings about the author. She certainly knew how to write well, but I felt she went about her travels the wrong way. She landed in Santiago with a little black book full of names and addresses, but with very little deep understanding of Chile, its culture and literature. She picked up some as the trip moved from the Atacama Desert in the north to the colder south around Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, and even Antarctica (where Chile lays claim to a slice of the subcontinent).
Somehow, I would feel unequipped to write about Chile without understanding more about its world-famous Poets, Neruda and Mistral, as well as a host of historians and writers of prose fiction. Instead, Sara Wheeler gives a voice to various backpackers and others encountered during her long journeys down the Pan-American Highway and the Carretera Austral -- as well as all the detours to the Andes and the Pacific Coast. Fortunately, she didn't just associate with roving Aussies and Austrians, but also made some effort to interview the people of Chile. This is where the book shines. Where it fails is when she is spending too much time dealing with random foreigners she meets up with and travels with.
Having just finished an extensive reading program in preparation for a 3-week trip to Argentina (November-December 2011), I thought that surely there must be more that she could have added by more preparation. Her book has a rather random bibliography and does refer to some classics, such as Chatwin's In Patagonia and Lucas Bridges's The Uttermost Part of the Earth. But I was put off by her dismissal of Neruda's poetry and her failure to discuss Gabriela Mistral except in passing.
I rather suspect that, writing about Chile, was General Pinochet was still in power (no longer as President, but as Commander in Chief of the Army), Wheeler was a bit overly sympathetic with the former dictator -- especially as so many of her Chilean contacts were big landowners and latifundistas.
However leery I am of Miss Wheeler herself, I admit that she writes well. But when compared to Bruce Chatwin and Lucas Bridges, she is far from the highest levels of travel literature.
Somehow, I would feel unequipped to write about Chile without understanding more about its world-famous Poets, Neruda and Mistral, as well as a host of historians and writers of prose fiction. Instead, Sara Wheeler gives a voice to various backpackers and others encountered during her long journeys down the Pan-American Highway and the Carretera Austral -- as well as all the detours to the Andes and the Pacific Coast. Fortunately, she didn't just associate with roving Aussies and Austrians, but also made some effort to interview the people of Chile. This is where the book shines. Where it fails is when she is spending too much time dealing with random foreigners she meets up with and travels with.
Having just finished an extensive reading program in preparation for a 3-week trip to Argentina (November-December 2011), I thought that surely there must be more that she could have added by more preparation. Her book has a rather random bibliography and does refer to some classics, such as Chatwin's In Patagonia and Lucas Bridges's The Uttermost Part of the Earth. But I was put off by her dismissal of Neruda's poetry and her failure to discuss Gabriela Mistral except in passing.
I rather suspect that, writing about Chile, was General Pinochet was still in power (no longer as President, but as Commander in Chief of the Army), Wheeler was a bit overly sympathetic with the former dictator -- especially as so many of her Chilean contacts were big landowners and latifundistas.
However leery I am of Miss Wheeler herself, I admit that she writes well. But when compared to Bruce Chatwin and Lucas Bridges, she is far from the highest levels of travel literature.
February 26, 2008
I bought this book a few months before I moved to Chile. Sara tours Chile from north to south and shares her experiences that she has with residents of various towns along the way. I found the book useful for learning a little about the geography, history, and spots of interest in Chile, but the author's style turned me off a lot. I almost felt like she felt her way of traveling was superior to other backpackers because she had a more authentic experience and did things off the beaten path. I also lost interest during some of her anecdotes when she rambled a little too much. I wish I could have gotten all of the information but in a different style.
October 12, 2018
Lovely description on page 281:
and the next morning I disappeared for good, on a bus to Balmaceda, whence a plane took me to Puerto Montt. It flew low, and the late afternoon sun turned the multitudinous rivers into gold ribbons between brown crepey mountains. The glaciers rippled, like folds of glossy cloth, and out to the west the archipelago throbbed, suffused in an amber glow.
and the next morning I disappeared for good, on a bus to Balmaceda, whence a plane took me to Puerto Montt. It flew low, and the late afternoon sun turned the multitudinous rivers into gold ribbons between brown crepey mountains. The glaciers rippled, like folds of glossy cloth, and out to the west the archipelago throbbed, suffused in an amber glow.
December 28, 2023
I'd forgotten how enjoyable travel writing can be. I knew practically nothing about Chile before reading this, and since a family member will be moving there and I plan to visit, this was a wonderful introduction to the country.
The author planned to travel from the top of Chile and move down the country on the Panamerican Highway, mostly via Jeeps, buses,and hitchhiking until two thirds of the way down, when the Highway ends and she jumped around a bit. Chile is divided into 13 zones, top to bottom, and it is fascinating to read about how different they all are - it is a VERY long thin country. She decides to skip Easter Island, as she feels it's more Polynesian than Chilean, but she does fly to the Chilean part of Antarctica.
What amazed, and puzzled me, was her total confidence in traveling solo - a 30 year old woman with very few contacts in the country. Her time in Chile was 6 months. The book was written in 1994, but I'm not sure it was any safer for a single woman to travel then than it is now. I also wondered about how many changes have happened over the last 30 years - the book may be incredibly dated, but the basic geography, the history, and the topography is still valid and a wonderful introduction to Chile.
Chile: Geography (starts in desert, Andes all the way to Antartica, 2000 volcanoes, only one of three places in world where 3 plates come together....etc), history (sections about America trying to influence developing countries politics, etc), weather, food, people, etc etc. So many interesting things to learn about the country. This was my introduction, and I plan to soon follow up with other books such as My Invented Country by Isabelle Allende, travel guides such as Eyewitness...
(I'm happy to rate this a 5, since that might bring up recommendations of similar travel books that I really like. Is it on a par with my other 5 stars? Hard to compare, different genre.)
+++++++++++++
Random notes (always rough form!):
-Chapter 1 - she flies into Santiago and spends a few days there before heading north to the border with Peru and the start of her planned journey in the Atacama desert.
-15 the border town of Arica was overlooked by a cliff, where Chilean troops defeated the Peruvians in the war of the Pacific in 1880. They were fighting basically over the nitrates and guano-rich territories to the south, which at that time belonged to Peru and Bolivia, both of which share a border with Chile. During a particularly tense period In the triangular relationship, Peru had entered into a secret alliance with Bolivia, effectively ganging up on Chile, and then, when it was exposed, Chile declared war on both of them. In the treaties and agreements which followed, Chilean territory was enlarged by 1/3. The nitrates of the Atacama desert were to shape the country's Socio-economic development, realign the class structure, etc. and create an export dependent economy. Bolivia and Peru sorely resented their loss, and still do. More on this on page 24. Traffic over the Andes was Bolivian, as virtually all Road traffic over that section of the Andes carries freight from landlocked Bolivia
-23 there are 2000 volcanos, about 50 active ones
-41 the road through Colchane, Bolivia to Chile, is called the cocaine route
-44 nitrate industry in the north; govt depended on its revenue, collapsed when Germans succeeded in making synthetic nitrates during First World War
- 47 Iquique in Aymara means rest and tranquility - good name for house
-52 fruit cherimoya a warty, olive green rind, a pulpy white flesh, and glossy black pips, it is a member of the custard, apple family, and I believe is properly called a Jamaica apple in English, tastes like pears and honey - she really likes it
-55 history of beginning of Chile and Santiago - Spanish, 1540s
-58 large copper mine CHUQURICAMATA, large scale exploitation began in the 19 century, mainly funded by foreign capital, and although it was temporarily overshadowed by nitrates, later it regained its preeminence as the countries main export. Up until the mid-1970s it accounted for between 70 to 80% of the value of Chilean exports and by 1991 had settled to about 40%. Dependence on the international copper price has been an almost permanent cause of national pain. More importantly, years of US ownership, through subsidiaries of too powerful companies has meant this fastest national resource has been subordinated to the interests of another country. Finally, it was nationalized by Allende after 1964. But Pinochet did not privatize the industry, but stipulated 10% of all copper sales were to be handed over to the military to finance the procurement of weapons.
-63 Pisco is a town, a bird, a drink
-67 visits Vedric commune
-71 observatory Tololo, biggest telescope in southern hemisphere
-76 papaya everywhere
-80 listening to him speak of the pain caused by a disappearance, perhaps the acutest pain of all, was like flossing with barbed wire - what a good image
-82 not eating the raw clams was too much for her constitutionally, low reserves of restraint
-82 listening to Pepe discusse the colorless numerical toponyms invented by bureaucrats when Chile was divided into 14 regions in 1977
-90 her opinion of Isabel Allende, overblown writing
-91 famous poet Pablo Neruda
-90. chap 5, good overview of politics of 20th century, Allende’s elected, too socialistic for some, US (Nixon, Kissinger) worries about Cold War, we want democracy there, not socialism, US undermines Allende, uprising, 1973 Allende dies in office (how?) Pinochet starts rule of extremist conservatism
-Monada is Presidential residence where he died etc
-111 ch 6 - Juan Fernandez islands - Robinson Crusoe, Defoe based it on this island and its history
-111 ch 6 - Juan Fernandez islands - he was Spanish priest and navigator who arrived between 1563 and 1574, tho Spain didn’t take possession for almost 200 years - Robinson Crusoe, Defoe based it on this island and its history Alexander Selkirk, Scot who was rowed ashore in 1704 lived there alone for 4 years
-fur seals (over hunted)
-121 langosta fishing (also called spiny lobster, rock lobster, marine crayfish)
-136 Sir Francis Drake, considered in Britain as a hero, whereas in reality his conduct up and down the Chilean and Peruvian coasts was so Barbaric that his name entered the language as a synonym for terror and destruction
-136 Valparaiso - Chile's second city, a port two hours from Santiago
-138 houses jammed together in aleatory confusion
-139 Chileans think that Argentina stole most of Patagonia, in reality, a treaty was signed in 1878
-ch 7 political Vivaria de la Solidaidaf to help the persecuted. Big issue today (when book written 30 years ago) - forgive the violence and perpetrators in Pinochet’s regime?! Tear country apart
-145 visits wealthy homes of colonial overseers
-ch 8 p 151
-157 going to Concepcion, city that’s the start of south proper - on BioBio river, symbolic river, boundary of Spanish territory for generations, southern Indians the Mapuche fought back, later mistreated
-159 independence from Spain. Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1807 and his usurpation of the Spanish throne precipitated a heavy rush towards independence in the south American colonies. The first junta was formed in Santiago in 1810 - but rivalries kept much from happening for seven years. The real liberator of Chile, warmly supported by O’Higgins (the first riuler of independent Chile), was the Argentinian general, Jose de San Martin, who won 1817 led his famous army of the Andes over the mountain passes to defeat the royalist army, at Chacabuco and subsequently in April 1818 to set the seal on Chilean independence at Maipu.
--Independence didn’t make much difference to most Chileans, or to the country at large, except for the opening of the ports. The social structure remained unchanged, as did the Hacienda system. O'Higgins (first ruler of independent Chile) sought to institute reforms, but with no great success. The instigators of freedom were irreconcilable and the chaotic period of government changes, and even Civil War ensued
-162 Arturo Prat part of War of the Pacific, naval officer, didn’t do much of significance killed at port Tal ahuana, but glorified into becoming a hero
-163 coal coast. South of BioBio
-164 coal towns grimmer than copper communities further north. 162 Arturo Prat part of War of the Pacific, naval officer, didn’t do much of significance killed at port Tal ahuana, but glorified into becoming a hero
-183 the Lake District is the most popular holiday destination in the country, and Chileans speak of it as their most beautiful asset. It was certainly beautiful, replete with volcanoes, Greenfield and the amaranthine loveliness of the evergreen forest. There were some resorts.
-191 island of chiloe the large island of Chiloe to the south of Puerto Montt occupies a special place in the Chilean imagination, one of the few locations in the country, familiar to Northerners and Southerners alike. Unlike Easter island, and Juan Fernandez, Sheila was near the mainland and cheap to visit, and it is also in possession of a colorful, and idiosyncratic mythology and vestiges of a rich traditional culture.
-195 Puerto Montt pan-American ceases to apply to the highway. Pinochet‘s dream Road the Carretera Astral, took up the baton at Puerto Montt and went South. The roads were symbols of a more general transformation. From the northern borders of Chile almost 2000 miles away or you can travel easily right now down to Puerto Montt You could drive the whole way if he wanted in a straight line. But at Puerto Montt. The plug comes out until the south of the country hardens into a continental ice cap and crumbles into an archipelago. Few people live down there and fewer visit.
-206 the base was just outside Punta Arenas so I took a commercial flight down there from Puerto Montt. It meant I was spoiling my plan of a nice logical journey from top to bottom as I was now going straight to the southernmost point of the mainland jumping a third of the country. People from Magellanes, the 12th and southernmost region of Chile, promote the theory that the country was first discovered by Europeans in the south, when Magellan appeared in 1520.
-206 Punta Arenas, last century, many Europeans, fancy homes streetlights etc
-208 in 1914. The panama canal opened and ships didn’t have to sail all the way around the continent anymore and the docks at faded glory, old mansions Punta arenas went quiet. People didn’t know what to do about it. Between the wars, a large number of British families left. But the Croats proliferated.
-210 by the 1970s, factions within church and within the state were great. Fear of communism and Marxism
-flew on Air Force Plane to largest z Chilean base in Antarctic Teniente Rodolfo Marsh (I think)
--220 the children’s behaved very confidently down there. Usually they were shy in international situations. But they were near Home than anyone else on King George, but are equipped, and they were more of them, so it was natural that they should feel confident. They were very conscious to that what they were doing was important for Chile
-223 in 1918, Chile made formal declarations to the international community in 1940 in order to assert its territorial rights in Antarctica, and it was one of the original signature signatories of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, ratified by 12 nations in 1961. The treaty, which recognizes that Antarctica shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes, remains the core of international antarctic politics. Besides legislating for environmental protection, and the exchange of scientific data between contracting parties, it’s stipulated that nominal territorial claims may be asserted, or existing claims enlarged.
-when visiting Antarctica, she is driven to several other countries bases, most very small. The seventh continent.
-228 when God created the world, he had a handful of everything left - mountains, deserts, legs, glaciers – and he put it in his pocket. But there was a hole in his pocket, you see, and as God walked across heaven it all trickled out, and the long trail it made on earth was Chile . Quoted from drunk to author, Isla Navarino, 1992
-228 Chapter 12, all about the southern islands . I wish there had been a map included that showed this area in more detail, or that was easier to read than the map that is in the book. I downloaded one and was fascinated by all the different islands and how their ownership was, randomly, some Chilean and some Argentinian. Fort William, situated on Navartan Island (directly under Argentina), just to keep an eye on Argentina.
-History of Magellan and later Darwin (Darwin's condescending view of natives there, 234).
-231 Dawson Island, where the surviving ministers of Allende government were dumped after the revolution in 1973.
-239 good book by Lucas Bridges about South America, The Uttermost Part of the Earth
-245 talking with German seaman, thank you didn't Chile help Britain at your bases? re: Falklands War of 1982 (still not discussed, officially Chile was neutral
-went on boat carrying passenger ship corpse to Cape Horn so it could be sailed home, rough waters
-245 Two more islands appeared out of the mist, the last visible remnants of the longest mountain range on earth - 4300 miles from the Caribbean down to the Horn, and it doesn't stop there, it just goes underwater !!
--251 she spent six months in Chile
-252 Torres del Paine, huge park of parks, guanacos, rheas and the huge Torres
--248 Chap 13 sailing north backtracking down
-266 the 11th region is a mass of violently disparate climates, reflecting a violently disparate geography. It was very disorienting
-267 her 31st birthday
-269 Chapter 14
-272 our road, the only one going north, was devoid of cars and of any sign of human life; it was a concept, that career terror, Austra, not a road. It was a dream made real, linking 2/3 of a tamed country with its lost town, and bringing communication to an unimaginably beautiful hinterland. It was a part of Chile that touched my soul. As I sat in the back of the pick up, I grappled with a notion that Pinochet was responsible for opening it up. He was still so present until. I had come expecting a black and white country. For anyone exposed to the western media, Pinochet was a symbol of evil, and opposition to his regime had become identified with the noble battle of right and wrong, oppressed against oppressor. But from my first week in the country, I had met all kinds of Chileans, not only rich ones, who regretted Pinochet's demise, and had no trouble at all, and consigning the unsafe facts to oblivion, and telling me that he had been good for the country, and for them.
--274 even when the nation voted against him in the plebiscite of October 1988, and found he had insured that the new president wouldn’t be elected for 14 months and wouldn’t take office for three more after that. He had set things up so that whatever happened he would retain at least some power.
-278 Cuba libre
-279 one of only three places in the world where three plates meet
-284 train
-289 ch 15 back to Santiago
-298 air pollution bad - congestion and pollution stand at record levels
-301 earthquakes
The author planned to travel from the top of Chile and move down the country on the Panamerican Highway, mostly via Jeeps, buses,and hitchhiking until two thirds of the way down, when the Highway ends and she jumped around a bit. Chile is divided into 13 zones, top to bottom, and it is fascinating to read about how different they all are - it is a VERY long thin country. She decides to skip Easter Island, as she feels it's more Polynesian than Chilean, but she does fly to the Chilean part of Antarctica.
What amazed, and puzzled me, was her total confidence in traveling solo - a 30 year old woman with very few contacts in the country. Her time in Chile was 6 months. The book was written in 1994, but I'm not sure it was any safer for a single woman to travel then than it is now. I also wondered about how many changes have happened over the last 30 years - the book may be incredibly dated, but the basic geography, the history, and the topography is still valid and a wonderful introduction to Chile.
Chile: Geography (starts in desert, Andes all the way to Antartica, 2000 volcanoes, only one of three places in world where 3 plates come together....etc), history (sections about America trying to influence developing countries politics, etc), weather, food, people, etc etc. So many interesting things to learn about the country. This was my introduction, and I plan to soon follow up with other books such as My Invented Country by Isabelle Allende, travel guides such as Eyewitness...
(I'm happy to rate this a 5, since that might bring up recommendations of similar travel books that I really like. Is it on a par with my other 5 stars? Hard to compare, different genre.)
+++++++++++++
Random notes (always rough form!):
-Chapter 1 - she flies into Santiago and spends a few days there before heading north to the border with Peru and the start of her planned journey in the Atacama desert.
-15 the border town of Arica was overlooked by a cliff, where Chilean troops defeated the Peruvians in the war of the Pacific in 1880. They were fighting basically over the nitrates and guano-rich territories to the south, which at that time belonged to Peru and Bolivia, both of which share a border with Chile. During a particularly tense period In the triangular relationship, Peru had entered into a secret alliance with Bolivia, effectively ganging up on Chile, and then, when it was exposed, Chile declared war on both of them. In the treaties and agreements which followed, Chilean territory was enlarged by 1/3. The nitrates of the Atacama desert were to shape the country's Socio-economic development, realign the class structure, etc. and create an export dependent economy. Bolivia and Peru sorely resented their loss, and still do. More on this on page 24. Traffic over the Andes was Bolivian, as virtually all Road traffic over that section of the Andes carries freight from landlocked Bolivia
-23 there are 2000 volcanos, about 50 active ones
-41 the road through Colchane, Bolivia to Chile, is called the cocaine route
-44 nitrate industry in the north; govt depended on its revenue, collapsed when Germans succeeded in making synthetic nitrates during First World War
- 47 Iquique in Aymara means rest and tranquility - good name for house
-52 fruit cherimoya a warty, olive green rind, a pulpy white flesh, and glossy black pips, it is a member of the custard, apple family, and I believe is properly called a Jamaica apple in English, tastes like pears and honey - she really likes it
-55 history of beginning of Chile and Santiago - Spanish, 1540s
-58 large copper mine CHUQURICAMATA, large scale exploitation began in the 19 century, mainly funded by foreign capital, and although it was temporarily overshadowed by nitrates, later it regained its preeminence as the countries main export. Up until the mid-1970s it accounted for between 70 to 80% of the value of Chilean exports and by 1991 had settled to about 40%. Dependence on the international copper price has been an almost permanent cause of national pain. More importantly, years of US ownership, through subsidiaries of too powerful companies has meant this fastest national resource has been subordinated to the interests of another country. Finally, it was nationalized by Allende after 1964. But Pinochet did not privatize the industry, but stipulated 10% of all copper sales were to be handed over to the military to finance the procurement of weapons.
-63 Pisco is a town, a bird, a drink
-67 visits Vedric commune
-71 observatory Tololo, biggest telescope in southern hemisphere
-76 papaya everywhere
-80 listening to him speak of the pain caused by a disappearance, perhaps the acutest pain of all, was like flossing with barbed wire - what a good image
-82 not eating the raw clams was too much for her constitutionally, low reserves of restraint
-82 listening to Pepe discusse the colorless numerical toponyms invented by bureaucrats when Chile was divided into 14 regions in 1977
-90 her opinion of Isabel Allende, overblown writing
-91 famous poet Pablo Neruda
-90. chap 5, good overview of politics of 20th century, Allende’s elected, too socialistic for some, US (Nixon, Kissinger) worries about Cold War, we want democracy there, not socialism, US undermines Allende, uprising, 1973 Allende dies in office (how?) Pinochet starts rule of extremist conservatism
-Monada is Presidential residence where he died etc
-111 ch 6 - Juan Fernandez islands - Robinson Crusoe, Defoe based it on this island and its history
-111 ch 6 - Juan Fernandez islands - he was Spanish priest and navigator who arrived between 1563 and 1574, tho Spain didn’t take possession for almost 200 years - Robinson Crusoe, Defoe based it on this island and its history Alexander Selkirk, Scot who was rowed ashore in 1704 lived there alone for 4 years
-fur seals (over hunted)
-121 langosta fishing (also called spiny lobster, rock lobster, marine crayfish)
-136 Sir Francis Drake, considered in Britain as a hero, whereas in reality his conduct up and down the Chilean and Peruvian coasts was so Barbaric that his name entered the language as a synonym for terror and destruction
-136 Valparaiso - Chile's second city, a port two hours from Santiago
-138 houses jammed together in aleatory confusion
-139 Chileans think that Argentina stole most of Patagonia, in reality, a treaty was signed in 1878
-ch 7 political Vivaria de la Solidaidaf to help the persecuted. Big issue today (when book written 30 years ago) - forgive the violence and perpetrators in Pinochet’s regime?! Tear country apart
-145 visits wealthy homes of colonial overseers
-ch 8 p 151
-157 going to Concepcion, city that’s the start of south proper - on BioBio river, symbolic river, boundary of Spanish territory for generations, southern Indians the Mapuche fought back, later mistreated
-159 independence from Spain. Napoleon's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1807 and his usurpation of the Spanish throne precipitated a heavy rush towards independence in the south American colonies. The first junta was formed in Santiago in 1810 - but rivalries kept much from happening for seven years. The real liberator of Chile, warmly supported by O’Higgins (the first riuler of independent Chile), was the Argentinian general, Jose de San Martin, who won 1817 led his famous army of the Andes over the mountain passes to defeat the royalist army, at Chacabuco and subsequently in April 1818 to set the seal on Chilean independence at Maipu.
--Independence didn’t make much difference to most Chileans, or to the country at large, except for the opening of the ports. The social structure remained unchanged, as did the Hacienda system. O'Higgins (first ruler of independent Chile) sought to institute reforms, but with no great success. The instigators of freedom were irreconcilable and the chaotic period of government changes, and even Civil War ensued
-162 Arturo Prat part of War of the Pacific, naval officer, didn’t do much of significance killed at port Tal ahuana, but glorified into becoming a hero
-163 coal coast. South of BioBio
-164 coal towns grimmer than copper communities further north. 162 Arturo Prat part of War of the Pacific, naval officer, didn’t do much of significance killed at port Tal ahuana, but glorified into becoming a hero
-183 the Lake District is the most popular holiday destination in the country, and Chileans speak of it as their most beautiful asset. It was certainly beautiful, replete with volcanoes, Greenfield and the amaranthine loveliness of the evergreen forest. There were some resorts.
-191 island of chiloe the large island of Chiloe to the south of Puerto Montt occupies a special place in the Chilean imagination, one of the few locations in the country, familiar to Northerners and Southerners alike. Unlike Easter island, and Juan Fernandez, Sheila was near the mainland and cheap to visit, and it is also in possession of a colorful, and idiosyncratic mythology and vestiges of a rich traditional culture.
-195 Puerto Montt pan-American ceases to apply to the highway. Pinochet‘s dream Road the Carretera Astral, took up the baton at Puerto Montt and went South. The roads were symbols of a more general transformation. From the northern borders of Chile almost 2000 miles away or you can travel easily right now down to Puerto Montt You could drive the whole way if he wanted in a straight line. But at Puerto Montt. The plug comes out until the south of the country hardens into a continental ice cap and crumbles into an archipelago. Few people live down there and fewer visit.
-206 the base was just outside Punta Arenas so I took a commercial flight down there from Puerto Montt. It meant I was spoiling my plan of a nice logical journey from top to bottom as I was now going straight to the southernmost point of the mainland jumping a third of the country. People from Magellanes, the 12th and southernmost region of Chile, promote the theory that the country was first discovered by Europeans in the south, when Magellan appeared in 1520.
-206 Punta Arenas, last century, many Europeans, fancy homes streetlights etc
-208 in 1914. The panama canal opened and ships didn’t have to sail all the way around the continent anymore and the docks at faded glory, old mansions Punta arenas went quiet. People didn’t know what to do about it. Between the wars, a large number of British families left. But the Croats proliferated.
-210 by the 1970s, factions within church and within the state were great. Fear of communism and Marxism
-flew on Air Force Plane to largest z Chilean base in Antarctic Teniente Rodolfo Marsh (I think)
--220 the children’s behaved very confidently down there. Usually they were shy in international situations. But they were near Home than anyone else on King George, but are equipped, and they were more of them, so it was natural that they should feel confident. They were very conscious to that what they were doing was important for Chile
-223 in 1918, Chile made formal declarations to the international community in 1940 in order to assert its territorial rights in Antarctica, and it was one of the original signature signatories of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, ratified by 12 nations in 1961. The treaty, which recognizes that Antarctica shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes, remains the core of international antarctic politics. Besides legislating for environmental protection, and the exchange of scientific data between contracting parties, it’s stipulated that nominal territorial claims may be asserted, or existing claims enlarged.
-when visiting Antarctica, she is driven to several other countries bases, most very small. The seventh continent.
-228 when God created the world, he had a handful of everything left - mountains, deserts, legs, glaciers – and he put it in his pocket. But there was a hole in his pocket, you see, and as God walked across heaven it all trickled out, and the long trail it made on earth was Chile . Quoted from drunk to author, Isla Navarino, 1992
-228 Chapter 12, all about the southern islands . I wish there had been a map included that showed this area in more detail, or that was easier to read than the map that is in the book. I downloaded one and was fascinated by all the different islands and how their ownership was, randomly, some Chilean and some Argentinian. Fort William, situated on Navartan Island (directly under Argentina), just to keep an eye on Argentina.
-History of Magellan and later Darwin (Darwin's condescending view of natives there, 234).
-231 Dawson Island, where the surviving ministers of Allende government were dumped after the revolution in 1973.
-239 good book by Lucas Bridges about South America, The Uttermost Part of the Earth
-245 talking with German seaman, thank you didn't Chile help Britain at your bases? re: Falklands War of 1982 (still not discussed, officially Chile was neutral
-went on boat carrying passenger ship corpse to Cape Horn so it could be sailed home, rough waters
-245 Two more islands appeared out of the mist, the last visible remnants of the longest mountain range on earth - 4300 miles from the Caribbean down to the Horn, and it doesn't stop there, it just goes underwater !!
--251 she spent six months in Chile
-252 Torres del Paine, huge park of parks, guanacos, rheas and the huge Torres
--248 Chap 13 sailing north backtracking down
-266 the 11th region is a mass of violently disparate climates, reflecting a violently disparate geography. It was very disorienting
-267 her 31st birthday
-269 Chapter 14
-272 our road, the only one going north, was devoid of cars and of any sign of human life; it was a concept, that career terror, Austra, not a road. It was a dream made real, linking 2/3 of a tamed country with its lost town, and bringing communication to an unimaginably beautiful hinterland. It was a part of Chile that touched my soul. As I sat in the back of the pick up, I grappled with a notion that Pinochet was responsible for opening it up. He was still so present until. I had come expecting a black and white country. For anyone exposed to the western media, Pinochet was a symbol of evil, and opposition to his regime had become identified with the noble battle of right and wrong, oppressed against oppressor. But from my first week in the country, I had met all kinds of Chileans, not only rich ones, who regretted Pinochet's demise, and had no trouble at all, and consigning the unsafe facts to oblivion, and telling me that he had been good for the country, and for them.
--274 even when the nation voted against him in the plebiscite of October 1988, and found he had insured that the new president wouldn’t be elected for 14 months and wouldn’t take office for three more after that. He had set things up so that whatever happened he would retain at least some power.
-278 Cuba libre
-279 one of only three places in the world where three plates meet
-284 train
-289 ch 15 back to Santiago
-298 air pollution bad - congestion and pollution stand at record levels
-301 earthquakes
January 5, 2010
This book is a 1st-person account of a British woman traveling through Chile. I got through about two chapters before having to return it to the library. The author is not a very likable person and I don't think it was interesting enough for me to finish. I liked the title, though.
Read
December 22, 2016This book just didn't captivate me enough to finish. I did learn some interesting things about Chile's history and my memory was refreshed about Pinochet and Chile's diverse geography but her travel stories were not enough to hold my interest.
April 23, 2010
Very uneven writing style. I persited because i am interested in Chile.
June 19, 2021
The country of Chile is fascinating for a number of reasons: for one thing, it's one of the thinnest countries on Earth, as well as one of the longest, and for another thing it endured almost twenty years of a brutal military dictatorship (a fate shared, sadly, by many Latin and South American countries). But the country is more than its geographical quirks and tragic history, as Sara Wheeler discovered when she took a journey down the length of the country in 1992.
"Travels In a Thin Country" might be one of the best travel books I've ever read, and it's up there as perhaps the most entertaining. Here lately, over the last couple of years, I've read more travel books than I'd previously done consciously in my many years on this planet (both before and during the pandemic, it may have entered my mind that I'd like to see more of the world than I have, but don't have the financial means to do so, so let's travel vicariously). Wheeler, who undertook her journey in the fall of 1991 and continued through the spring of 1992 (well, in the Southern Hemisphere it was summer when she was in Chile), has an open mind, a warm spirit, and a bullshit detector to help her navigate the lesser-loved bureaucratic nature of Chile in order to get into the good stuff; the stunning geographical diversity, the multifaceted people of this singular nation, and the experience of seeing a country that is thin but steeped in history.
Wheeler is a fantastic traveling companion, blessed with a sharp wit and a willingness to take off from the safety of the country's few modern highways to explore the fringes of a country bordered on one side by the Pacific and (not very far in the other direction) the Andes. Look at Chile on a map and you'll note how skinny it is, buttressed up against its much loathed neighbors (especially Argentina; there are some great lines in here that reflect the divide between the two countries). Hugging the coast of South America, Chile is abundant in seafood but also able to contain a desert at the very top of the country and fjords and even a slice of Antarctica at the end of it, with a whole lot of stuff in between. Wheeler manages to see most of the country during her many months in Chile, and she provides a glimpse of a world that seems both familiar and uncertain, stuck between its past and uncertain future much as it is stuck between an ocean and a mountain range.
"Travels In a Thin Country" might be one of the best travel books I've ever read, and it's up there as perhaps the most entertaining. Here lately, over the last couple of years, I've read more travel books than I'd previously done consciously in my many years on this planet (both before and during the pandemic, it may have entered my mind that I'd like to see more of the world than I have, but don't have the financial means to do so, so let's travel vicariously). Wheeler, who undertook her journey in the fall of 1991 and continued through the spring of 1992 (well, in the Southern Hemisphere it was summer when she was in Chile), has an open mind, a warm spirit, and a bullshit detector to help her navigate the lesser-loved bureaucratic nature of Chile in order to get into the good stuff; the stunning geographical diversity, the multifaceted people of this singular nation, and the experience of seeing a country that is thin but steeped in history.
Wheeler is a fantastic traveling companion, blessed with a sharp wit and a willingness to take off from the safety of the country's few modern highways to explore the fringes of a country bordered on one side by the Pacific and (not very far in the other direction) the Andes. Look at Chile on a map and you'll note how skinny it is, buttressed up against its much loathed neighbors (especially Argentina; there are some great lines in here that reflect the divide between the two countries). Hugging the coast of South America, Chile is abundant in seafood but also able to contain a desert at the very top of the country and fjords and even a slice of Antarctica at the end of it, with a whole lot of stuff in between. Wheeler manages to see most of the country during her many months in Chile, and she provides a glimpse of a world that seems both familiar and uncertain, stuck between its past and uncertain future much as it is stuck between an ocean and a mountain range.
December 18, 2023
I am scrambling to finish the 666 Reading Challenge this year, so when I saw a friend had this book I asked her to save it for me. South America has proven to be the most difficult continent. I didn't realize until I opened it to start reading that the author also wrote Terra Incognita, which I read in the spring. I enjoyed her writing style and was pleased to already know that I would enjoy this book.
What I would not enjoy is traveling the way the author does -- too many bugs, too much dirt, meals that were too unpalatable way too often, too few opportunities for showers. Chile sounds like a fascinating and beautiful country that would be nice to visit, but not for very long. I think I will be content to have read this book because she obviously loved almost every second of her trip. She loved the physical beauty of the landscape and the hardy spirit of the people. She made friends easily and thought nothing of driving off into the wilderness for a week of camping with a total stranger. And my gosh did she drink. (I grew up in a culture where alcohol is forbidden, but I am frequently around people who drink and my mother's family are heavy drinkers, so I don't think it's my background that made me think her imbibing a tad excessive.) I am ASTONISHED that she never seems to have encountered strange men who harassed or tried to assault her. I think she probably just did not include those events. She was quite honest about the poverty she encountered, about the incredible remove at which wealthy people operate, and the fraught political history and its ongoing ramifications.
In sum, Chile is a beautiful place as seen through the author's eyes. Even when she has scabies and a hangover and nothing appetizing to eat. I think for me the best way to experience Chile is through this book.
What I would not enjoy is traveling the way the author does -- too many bugs, too much dirt, meals that were too unpalatable way too often, too few opportunities for showers. Chile sounds like a fascinating and beautiful country that would be nice to visit, but not for very long. I think I will be content to have read this book because she obviously loved almost every second of her trip. She loved the physical beauty of the landscape and the hardy spirit of the people. She made friends easily and thought nothing of driving off into the wilderness for a week of camping with a total stranger. And my gosh did she drink. (I grew up in a culture where alcohol is forbidden, but I am frequently around people who drink and my mother's family are heavy drinkers, so I don't think it's my background that made me think her imbibing a tad excessive.) I am ASTONISHED that she never seems to have encountered strange men who harassed or tried to assault her. I think she probably just did not include those events. She was quite honest about the poverty she encountered, about the incredible remove at which wealthy people operate, and the fraught political history and its ongoing ramifications.
In sum, Chile is a beautiful place as seen through the author's eyes. Even when she has scabies and a hangover and nothing appetizing to eat. I think for me the best way to experience Chile is through this book.
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