Chile: the new Alaska

Chile
© Dan Cooper

Visitors will find a craggy coast with breathtaking glaciers and wildlife. But where are the crowds?

By Craig Neff

The end of the world is a jagged rock 1,391 feet high. The desolate headland has been famous—or infamous—for 400 years, yet surprisingly few people have seen it. This is one of the Earth's most inhospitable spots.

Welcome aboard. We're at Cape Horn.

Six hundred miles from Antarctica, at the point where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans collide, the Horn is the dot on the exclamation point of land known as Chile. Our ship, the 940-passenger Crystal Symphony, has reached Cape Horn under the rarest of conditions. It is twilight on a summer evening in February, temperature close to 50 degrees, waters calm, a half-moon dangling in the mostly clear sky. Crowded onto the top deck with fellow passengers who have rushed out from dinner, Pamelia and I can see the rock perfectly.

The quietly thriving country of Chile is touted as the "new Alaska" for its rugged beauty and dramatic, mountain-flanked inside passage. The natural splendor of southern Chile unfolds in many forms: pristine fjords, electric-blue icebergs, dolphins and seals frolicking at sunset beneath an ignited sky. In the thousand-mile archipelago north of Cape Horn, solitude reigns.

We began our cruise in Buenos Aires and sailed down Argentina's coast, with stops in Uruguay and the Falkland Islands. On the seventh day we rounded the Horn, and now, on day eight, a shore excursion to the island group of Tierra del Fuego reminds us how far south we have come. The dusty dirt road we're on is the southern end of the 16,000-mile Pan-American Highway, which originates near the Arctic Circle and crosses 13 national borders.

After cruising through the Beagle Channel and the Strait of Magellan—two of sailing's most storied, and at times ferocious, waterways—we step ashore at Punta Arenas, Chile, a city with winds so fierce that guide ropes are sometimes strung along sidewalks to steady pedestrians. Because those winds pinned our ship to the dock for several hours in Tierra del Fuego, we arrive too late to take our planned day trip to Torres del Paine, the jewel of Chile's national park system with its massive glaciers, turquoise lakes and 8,000-foot granite spires.

Instead, we try a bus trip to the Otway Sound penguin colony. As Pamelia and I commiserate over missing Torres del Paine and its wildlife—the 100 species of birds, the pumas, the dog-size pudu deer—a voice cries out: "There's a condor!"

"He must have come down from the mountains," says our Chilean guide, Paula, as we watch the majestic bird soar across the grass-and-scrub flatland. "He's a young one; maybe he's having his flying lessons."

As if on cue, the wildlife has come to us, here in sheep country, under an endless sky. Ostrich-like rheas graze on the pampa while a gray fox prowls for their eggs. Upland geese and flightless steamer ducks bob in a water hole, and crested caracaras-raptors that in this region prey on lambs—shadow a flock left unattended by its shepherd.

We are in a landscape typical of Patagonia, the semiarid scrub plateau that covers much of southern Chile and Argentina. No other humans are in sight. In Chile's south, the emptiness of the land makes the people especially friendly. "If you have to travel for hours to find someone," Paula says, "you want to talk to him, show him pictures of your family, everything!"

Soon we are off the bus, watching the march of the Magellanic penguins. These two-foot-tall birds are one of four penguin species commonly found in Chile, and thousands of them nest here. Seeing them waddle through the grass is both thrilling and comical. This group will swim some 2,000 miles to winter in the warm climes of Uruguay.

On the ride back to Punta Arenas, Paula tells us where to lunch on some of her nation's renowned seafood and buy jewelry of lapis lazuli, the blue stone mined primarily in Chile and Afghanistan. Her nearly flawless English offers a hint of her country's future. Spanish is its official language, but Chile launched a program in 2003 to make its population fluent in English within a generation. The goal is to boost tourism and business, in a nation that already has the most stable economy in South America. Scars—both emotional and literal—remain from the 17-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which ended in 1990, but free-market reforms introduced during his reign eventually helped Chile cut its poverty rate in half.

What makes the country most remarkable, however, is its geography. Chile is nearly 2,700 miles long, yet has an average width of 110 miles. Lay it atop North America and it would stretch from Los Angeles to New York. Chile's far north contains the driest desert on earth, the Atacama, home to bizarrely patterned salt fields and the world's most prolific copper mine—and, in parts, virtually no forms of life. In contrast, the valley just outside the capital, Santiago, is a fertile expanse of vineyards and orchards that makes Chile a major exporter of wine and fruit.

Farther south, where we find ourselves on Day 10, is the heart of the inside passage, a maze of complex waterways and dead ends. As albatross and giant petrels glide alongside, we pass rocky hillocks, thick forest and the occasional snowcapped mountain. On Day 11 we anchor in front of Pio XI, perhaps the only glacier in the world named after a pope. A boat motors out from the Crystal Symphony to retrieve some ice for drinks.

On Day 13 we reach the postcard-pretty Lake District, called "Little Switzerland" for its alpine landscape, European architecture and flower gardens. The mighty Andes mountains form an imposing wall along Chile's eastern border, but it is possible to climb up and over them by a series of bus and boat rides connecting a staircase of lakes. Pamelia and I take an excursion to one of those lakes, Todos los Santos, famed for its emerald waters. Towering above it is the stunning Osorno volcano. Chile has a history of tremors, tsunamis and lava flows. In 1960 the strongest earthquake ever recorded, a 9.5, devastated nearby Puerto Montt.

That unsettling thought is best washed down with a pisco sour, Chile's margarita-like national drink. Our tour group goes through several pitchers over lunch at a lakeside restaurant. We dine on local farm-raised salmon and sopapillas. No one wants to leave, but our fabulous 4,526-mile cruise is nearing an end. Pamelia and I, however, have one adventure left: a tour of the Santiago area with a distant relative of ours.

He greets us on the dock in Valparaíso, a hillside city with wonderful old funiculars. Joachim von Fritschen comes from one of the nation's German immigrant families. He fills our four days in the Santiago area with an itinerary that is extensive yet relaxed. We tour the home of Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda, set on terrain that looks like the rocky Maine coast. We walk for hours through sunny Santiago, enjoying the 19th-century European architecture and the majesty of the two mountain ranges, the Andes and Coastal, which rise on either side of the city. We buy plastic cups of the ubiquitous Chilean treat, mote con huesillo—cold peach nectar poured over dried barley and a peach half. Outside the city, we drive the Colchagua Valley wine trail, stopping to see the rows of blue-purple Carmenere grapes at the Viu Manent vineyard.

Too soon, time runs out. We must fly home. Somehow, 11 days after rounding Cape Horn, we have made it only halfway up the coast of this constantly surprising land.

Amid farewell hugs and smiles, here at the end of the world, we bask in Chile's warmth.

Craig Neff is an assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated.