Torres de Paine National Park — © Davthy | Dreamstime.com
Has this week’s incredible rescue of the 33 Chilean miners got you curious about Chile? Me too!
© Skvoor | Dreamstime.com
If you’re a Star Trek fan like I am, you know that one of the ST movies had as a subtitle the words, “the undiscovered country.”
For a lot of us, watching the rescue operation bringing those miners safely up from more than 2,000 feet in the Earth after…sixty…nine…days, that’s an apt description of Chile.
Before tonight, if Americans were aware of Chile at all, it was only in the vaguest sense. That really long, really skinny country that seems to run the entire left side of the map of South America. Had some dictator named Pinochet.
Now, after watching the start of this remarkable operation, a lot of us around may be thinking: “Chile? We need a closer look.”
So let’s take one.
CHILE AT A GLANCE
OFFICIAL NAME: Republica de Chile
POPULATION: 17 million
AREA: 2,700 miles long, 109 miles wide
WEATHER: World’s driest desert in the north (where the San Jose mine is), rainy and mild in the south, Mediterranean climate in between.You could envision Chile as one long bone of a place, backed up against the Andes mountains to the east and front by the Pacific Ocean for its entire 2,700-mile length. That combination gives it some things that should automatically interest a lot of travelers:
- Some of the most spectacular mountain scenery on the planet
- Beaches that go on for days
- Some of the best skiing outside of the Alps
- A wine country that produces some of the best wines in the world
Culturally, it’s a very conservative, very Catholic country. Many Chileans celebrate their saint’s day as much as they do their own birthday. Divorce was illegal until 2004, and abortion still is. And yet this same button-down Catholic culture also invented this thing called “cafe con piernas” — coffee with legs. Go figure.
ZZTop would go nuts down here.
It’s a place where families are both extended and close-knit. They get together for celebrations. They run businesses together.
It’s said to be a very class-conscious place. Money talks, and people will size you up based on how well you dress and other superficialities. But unlike a lot of other class-conscious places in the world, the class structure here is not rigid, fixed. You can work your way up that ladder, if you so desire.
Perhaps in part because of that upward mobility, the Chilean workday is a long one, typically starting around 9 in the morning and finishing up around 8 at night, with a long lunch break in the middle.
Four meals a day are common, starting with a very light breakfast and ending with a dinner that may come as late as midnight. The main meal of the day is usually lunch.
And as you’d expect from a nation with a coastline 2,700 miles long, they’re really big on seafood (okay, that’s it — I’m there!).
Chilean folk music, which became a form of political activism in the Pinochet years, has gained an international following.
Easter Island — © Steve Allen | Dreamstime.com
And we haven’t even gotten to Easter Island yet. Think Stonehenge, but with faces.
All in all, Chile is largely a mystery to us northerners. But perhaps it shouldn’t be.
The first hint we had this year that this place has its act together came in February, when its central region was rocked by an earthquake with a magnitude of…8.8. Fatalities: about 600.
Terrible, yes, but nowhere near what it could’ve been. The quake that killed somewhere between 90,000 and 230,000 people in Haiti a month earlier was a magnitude 7.
We Californians know our quakes, and a magnitude 7 shaker is no joke, but 8.8? That’s Biblical, end-of-days type stuff, the kind that wipes out entire towns in places like Turkey and Iran. To get out of an earthquake that destructive with losses that low, you have to be doing a lot of things right.
And now, we see this amazing mine rescue in northern Chile, in which it looks as if the Chileans, from the most ordinary mine worker to President Sebastián Piñera, are doing everything right.
Politically, they’ve put the dictatorship era far behind. The country has elected governments now, and its press freedom is some of the strongest in Latin America. Indeed, one of the things that jumps out at you as you watch the mine rescue is how open the government is being with the whole process.
Beautiful scenery. One of the world’s longest coastlines. Great food and drink. Proud, hard-working, family-oriented people. A government that handles its business in an honest, democratic way. Maybe it’s time for us to discover this “undiscovered country.”
IF YOU GO
US citizens need only a passport for stays in Chile up to 90 days. That’s the good news. The bad news: a $131 “reciprocity fee.” This is retaliation for the visa fees we now charge Chileans. A lot of countries are doing this as payback for the visa fees we started imposing on them after 9/11.The principal aerial point of entry is the capital, Santiago. In addition in the national airline, LAN, the national Chilean air carrier, 16 international airlines fly into Chile.
Chile also is well established as a cruise ship destination.
Chile’s highways are modern, smooth and safe, which makes bus touring a good option for many. For backpackers in particular, there’s the Pachamama hop-on, hop-off bus. It works just like the hop-on, hop-off city tour buses in places like New York, London and Paris, except this one runs almost the length of Chile and makes its stops once a week.