Chile: Where the Geography Is a Toothpick, the Desert Is Starlit, and the Earth Never Stops Shaking

Welcome to Chile, a nation so absurdly long and thin that if you stretched it across Europe, it would span from Portugal all the way to Moscow—yet it averages a width of just 110 miles. It’s essentially a 2,700-mile geographical string bean squeezed between the towering Andes mountains and the cold Pacific Ocean.

It’s a country that refuses to pick a single climate zone. Up north, you’ll find the Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar place on Earth, where some spots haven't seen a drop of rain in centuries and the landscapes look so much like Mars that NASA literally tests space rovers there. Because of the bone-dry, high-altitude air, it also boasts the clearest skies on the planet, making it the ultimate spot to stare at the Milky Way while questioning your existence.

Head down to the middle and you hit Santiago, a bustling valley capital surrounded by snow-capped peaks, and Valparaíso, a colorful, steep-hilled port city where funicular elevators carry you past street art and stray dogs. Here, life revolves around sipping crisp Carmenère wine, eating fresh seafood, and attempting to decipher Chilean Spanish—a dialect that leaves even native Spanish speakers deeply confused.

Then you hit Patagonia in the far south. In Torres del Paine, granite spires rise above electric-blue glacial lakes, and the wind is so fiercely powerful it can literally blow you backwards into a grazing llama.

Between dodging occasional minor earthquakes that locals barely interrupt their coffee for, marveling at pristine fjords, and eating giant empanadas packed with beef and olives, Chile is dramatic, wildly diverse, and impossibly scenic. Just pack clothes for both a desert heatwave and an Antarctic blizzard, learn to embrace the wind, and hold on tight!

March, 2010