We fly into the Chilean summer, touching down at Santiago on a dry and dusty Sunday morning. The rolling hills look parched and we learn later that a drought is affecting much of the centre of the country. Apart from municipal watering all is crispy brown.
Santiago, where nearly a half of Chile's 17 million population live, doesn't feel like a capital. The main square ("Plaza de Armas", the same name throughout the country) is lined with classical 18th century administration buildings, and the cathedral. But on two sides they are overshadowed by ugly 1970s towers. And just a block away you can quickly find yourself in no man's land where renovated and decaying are cheek by jowl; beautiful, decrepit palacios carved up by dual carriage ways.
The square hosts a couple of cafés. We sit and watch a busking fiddler, complete with accompanying puppet "pianist" (using a backing track, you understand) playing Eine Klein Nachtmusik ad nauseum. Nearby, a noisy drum-and-dance act earns enthusiastic applause from onlookers - but ends up driving us onwards. In another corner of the square couples are tangoing on a pavilion stage. Sunday strollers in day-glo colours eat ice creams; kids splash in the fountains; hawkers dodge the police, hastily rolling up their scarves and nicknacks as the carabineros walk by.
Later in the afternoon the streets fill with girls in shiny pink and purple princess dresses, dressed up for the procession of giant inflatable cartoon characters, now in its fifth year. A young country forming its own traditions. A team of tightly bunned policewomen hand out ID bracelets to children as a security measure in the event of them losing its parents.
8 December
From bone-dry Santiago we hop on a plane to Punta Arenas, a 3000 km ride and almost as far south as you can go in mainland South America. The views are exhilarating and we have our noses pressed to the window for the entire flight, an exhilarating geography lesson: snow-capped volcanoes "floating" above the clouds; mountain ranges extending to infinity; desolate, dry wilderness with no sign of life apart from occasional dirt tracks for who knows what purpose; vast lakes; and finally grey, flat, soggy, windswept Patagonia.
For reasons good and bad we didn't plan this holiday in detail. Having established the main areas we wanted to visit - Torres del Paine National Park, the Lakes region and the Atacama desert - we handed over to SNP, the Dutch company we've used for numerous self-guided walking holidays in the past. Through not making the reservations ourselves, we somehow "forgot" that we were booked on a trip to see the Seno Otway penguin colony, an hour northwest of Punta Arenas. So it is a surprise to be whisked by taxi to the coast, on arrival. And then see an exquisitely comic display as small groups of birds, returning from their daily fishing outing, waddle from the beach to their burrows. We miss prime time, early and late in the day - when thousands of penguins launch and return from their daily fishing trip. But, from our short boardwalk itinerary, we can enjoy close-up views virtually on our own. A total thrill.
The geography of the area is incredibly complex - a mass of islands and inlets. I am never sure if I am looking at open sea or a sound, or lake. Punta Arenas was originally named "Sandy Point" by an English sailor, in service to the Chileans, when the settlement was created in 1848. It faces Tierra del Fuego, across the Magellan Strait pioneered by Ferdinand Magellan in the sixteenth century. He sailed west from Portugal in September 1519 with a fleet of five ships and a mission to find a route through the coast of South America. It took him until October 1520 to find the elusive passage. The 36-day journey was not something anyone wanted to repeat (the ocean they found as they exited the Strait named "Pacific" because of the contrast with the stormy waters just passed). So, rather than return to Europe that way, they pressed on west. Three years after setting out from Portugal just one of the five ships made it back - without Magellan, who'd been killed by natives on Mactan Island.
Although not Portuguese or a native Spanish speaker, I find this story of exploration and subsequent colonization resonates strongly with me. The story of Punta Arenas is so recent, just a few generations. And the town still has the atmosphere of a frontier town: single-storey wood and tin-roofed houses; wide, American-style roads; a handful of bourgeois mansions; a wild and windy place at the bottom of a continent.
We visit the cemetery and see the blend of nationalities who have contributed to the development of the city - a thriving commercial centre until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1924 negated the role of the Magellan Strait as a trade route. And now riding an oil-boom wave, with low employment and only a vague threat from Puerto Natales if and when the plan to build an airport there comes to fruition, and tourists bypass the city.
In Santiago I had felt a bit of a freak in my baggy walking trousers when all around were clad in jeggings and skimpy summer clothes. In Punta Arenas we are in good company, dressed identically to the dozens of trekkers heading for Torres del Paine, and even more remote destinations, for which the town is a launch pad.
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