From Caldera, the next jump is up to San Pedro de Atacama, deep inland not far from the Chile-Argentina-Bolivia border. The struggle to get two tickets to get us there shows just how popular our next destination is. A tiny oasis town in the middle of the Atacama Desert, San Pedro is a minute, almost insignificant blip on the landscape. But oh, what a landscape! And this is why visitors to Chile flock to San Pedro de Atacama in their thousands. It's hot, it's dry, it's high up - the 2,400 metre altitude doesn't agree with everyone - but this little town of barely 5,000 inhabitants is surrounded by some of the most astonishing scenery in Chile. Again, here, the pictures will do most of the talking. We spent a delightful four days here, visiting the ... read more

The "end of summer" sensation didn't last long. After a surprisingly sound night's sleep on the bus from Pucón, we step out into a very sunny Santiago. A taxi ride from the terminal to our hostel - the dubiously named but in fact utterly brilliant Happy House Hostel - is a bit of a jarring shock. Wide avenues, cars, cars, cars, people, people, people. Santiago is a big city - nearly a third of Chile's entire population lives in the city and its suburbs. We spend only a couple of days in the capital. It's not a particularly engaging place - certainly less so than Buenos Aires - and it's very, very hot. Wedged right up against the Andes in a geographic bowl, Santiago suffers from terrible air pollution. From a high viewpoint in a pretty ... read more

Our fantastic trekking guide to Patagonia includes a hike we've had our eye on for months, in Parque Nacional Puyehue, a few hours north of Puerto Varas and straddling the border between Region XIV Los Ríos and Region X Los Lagos. There's only one problem: the trail passes almost under the nose of the volcanic eruption which has been spewing ash over Argentina's Lake District and causing global havoc - the eruption disrupted air traffic in Australia for several days, so we're not talking about an insignificant planet-fart here - since June 2011. We've seen for ourselves the state of Villa La Angostura, the small Argentine town which bore the brunt of the ash - can there be any hope for a hiking trail a few kilometres away from the source of said ash? After a ... read more

January and February are high summer in Chile, when Chileans escape in droves from their cities - smoggy, sweltering Santiago in particular - to enjoy their country's extraordinary natural wealth: its lakes, its rivers, its mountains, its beaches.We'd never have guessed as much over the past 6 weeks, however:so out of the way is the Carretera Austral that only a relatively small handful of people make it there. Chiloé, with its (not altogether unearned) reputation as a place of endless rain, also escapes the summer hordes despite its accessibility. And so we have been lulled into a dangerously false sense of security. Our plan for after Chiloé is to visit regions X and IX - Los Lagos and Araucanía respectively - just when tens of thousands of Chileans are doing so as well. There really isn't ... read more

As far as the inhabitants of Chile's Aysén Province are concerned, they don't really live in Chile at all. "Acá no es Chile. Es Patagonia.", they say. How very true that statement would turn out to be. Over four thousand kilometres long, with its capital city more or less slap bang in the middle, with its southern tip within striking distance of Antarctica and its northern one in the rainless desert of the altiplano, nudging Peru, it's no wonder that Chile's more peripheral regions feel, well, rather far-flung. As a result of Chile's utterly bizarre geography, a crazy beanpole of a country if ever there was one, its provinces are numbered as well as named - from number I in the north to number XII in the case of Magallanes, far in the south. Aysén is ... read more