April’s book review- Travels in a Thin Country by Sara Wheeler
This book was read by a good friend of mine who has not traveled to Chile, and he told me about the story a bit before I had taken off from Reno, Nevada to go live in Chile for work. The book covers the Chile experience as it was for a traveling female backpacker adventurer in >1986 <1994 who spent six months zigzagging her way through the highlights. My wife and I have always said that Chile is a great place to visit, an altogether different place when one lives there.
For example, it took us over six months to secure our resident visa and open an in-country bank account; this with the support of Ernst and Young and company backing. The trials of travel are trivial compared to the frustration of bureaucracies. Sara Wheeler’s tales of Chile may be captivating for those who have not seen the country. For me they were about a bottom dweller’s or low budget wandering. I had gone through many of the same cities for work, and in exploration we get farther off the traveled routes ,seeing places not in the travel guides. So many of her descriptions fell flat though reasonably accuracy. I general I did not have the time in her writing for details about what music was being played on the car stereo cassettes, or the personality and character descriptions of the random expats and Chileans she met up with. Thus reading accounts of many places I had different experiences with turned the book into an inescapable comparison of notes. This is why “Travels in a Thin Country” is better for the reader who has not been to Chile.
The book begins with very little time spent in Chile and hosted by expats living there, it does add an odd day description of a sex hotel, and then dives into a 30 hour bus ride up to northernmost Chile to the town of Arica. After having driven the PanAmerican highway several times, nothing sounds more tortuous than putting oneself in a bus to make the journey. In fact, today most people hope affordable Chilean airlines between the major towns. This option was likely not available at the time this book was written. When I remember Arica, it comes with the smell of urine, bad food, and Peruvian style traffic. Wheeler briefly covers a trip up the Azapa Valley, mentions the museum and old culture there, but fails to name the “Chinchorro” culture properly, and did not mention that the mummies are the oldest ones known in the world. Instead, we get a tenuous description of visiting the mother of a Chilean she barely knew from a chance encounter in England.
I give Sara Wheeler points for making the side trip to the very small coastal town of Pisagua, but she hardly described the place, so much more could have been said.
The descriptions of high country Andes, and the occasional sighting of alpacas are given as the Andean experience, but every time I have gone through northern Chile they have this “cultural” view is just a mere latent ghost of what it is like in Bolivia and Peru. Side trips to talk with some hut dweller in the desert or mountains took inordinate amount of description time in the book while leaving out a needed visual on the character of the landscapes in northern Chile. In part this is because it was probably easier to relate the color of the dishware or contents of a small room than having the terminology to describe the varicolored exposed geological formations. The small village has human relate-able scale meanwhile the expansive barren tan to pinkish plateaus and deep canyons are difficult to frame with words. My impressions of the Atacama is always one of it being like Mars, it is about how spares or non-extant the vegetation is. I did not get this feeling reading “Travels in a Thin Country.”
She visits the hot spring area called Chusmiza, a place that I had visited in 2012 while doing research for our book “Hot Springs of the Andes.” The place was even more run down than when Wheeler visited it. She stayed the night there, one would not do so now. At the village of Isluga more description is dedicated to the town than to the national park. More time is spent analyzing or disparaging her travel companion.
The descriptions suggests the only forefingers in the country are religion missionaries, however, I know several people who were expats working in Chile throughout the eighties and nineties doing exploration work for copper mining. Many of them were based out of Antofagasta, but would have set remote exploration camps in many of the small villages. Their stories about the country make a different impression than the vision painted by a backpacker. At the time when Sara Wheeler was wandering the remote back-country, many other geologists were active out there, unseen, but thoroughly scouring every ridge and ravine looking for the red metal. There is always more going on around a place than the casual visitor understands.
Wheeler visits the ruins of the Humberstone nitrite facility, and discusses the nitrite industry, and likewise covers in part the War of the Pacific that took away larger pieces of territory from Peru and Bolivia to become what is modern northern Chile. She does mention that the motive in fighting over the territory was the wealth in the nitrite mines, she skips that the war started with the instigation of the British and that the Brits soon managed and traded the nitrite fertilizers from Chile.
The description of the city of Iquique was completely lacking the jest. I had spent many hours walking the city streets taking photographs of historic doors. The place always amazed me for how much imported wood was required to make the building in a desert without a single tree. And that these historic buildings have managed to escape the typical calamity of major fires that destroyed so many wooden mining towns in North America.
The bus travel to the mining town of Calama seemed to be filler, uninteresting. She pins San Pedro de Atacama accurately as having poor food that is very expensive. This much has not changed in Chile. The place is more than ever a hippie backpacker destination, something that one does not sense in her writing, suggesting the increase of tourism has imported more dreadlocks and tattoos than ever before. Her brief mention of Valle de Luna park she visited missed the important occurrence of the salt cave. She took the obligatory trip to the Tatio geyser field, which today remains a must do visit. Again more description is given to surround unimportant settlements than the main destination of Tatio. She mentions taking a dip at the Puritama hot spring stream, well, it is warm spring, but the book description lacks the mention of the steep descent in the canyon and tall strand of plants growing in a strip along the stream, or the stair-cased nature of the bathing pools.
Her subsequent trip back to Calama has a visit to the world famous Chuquicamata copper mine- it is among the ten largest copper deposit in the world. A non-specialist description places it in the field of pollution, desperation. Her summary of the copper industry of Chile is a miserable failure and inaccurate. A key indicator is the fact that she did not use the name “Codelco.”
So she travels on to the beach town of La Serena, missing Antofagasta altogether. In her exploration of the Valle de Elqui, the canyon above La Serena, she botches the description of Chilean pisco sour as being mixed with egg white, this is something done in Peru, NOT IN CHILE. More dull location interactions are related without purpose. Wheeler’s description of the upper Elqui valley as a spiritual mecca for hippies and extraterrestrial followers varies from today where the major Pascua Llama gold mining project has significantly changed the economic fortunes of La Serena and had the ensuing legal and protest difficulties. The project still has not reached production, and perhaps never will with the current punitive environmental fines levied by the current Chilean government bureaucrats. On the other hand, the operator Barrick is a loose cannon and likely deserved what they have made- but this are events after Wheeler’s visit. Times to change. I know a geologist who has a small ranch in Valle de Elqui and a beach apartment in La Serena- he has many tales of the region, that paint a very different picture than related in the book. It seems two differently realities about the Valle de Elqui. I have driven up it several times, none of the books descriptions really struck a cord of remembrance. At this point while reading the book I realized not once has Wheeler mentioned a name of a single Chilean national beer or the tap drawn house beer called a “schopp.”
She drives through the rough mining town of Copiapo, and does not do it justice. There is nothing much for the tourist there, we ran and exploration out of there, getting to know most of the restaurants there were worth knowing, including one of the better ones that was at the gas station along the highway. There is a lot to write about Copiapo, more interesting local characters than many she takes the time to write about. Such are mining towns. Just mind where you step when in Copiapo. Her description of the small fishing port of Caldera as being “ugly” is the opposite where as a photographer I find it picturesque with the typical colorful Chilean fishing boats.
In Santiago she goes through the exercise of Pablo Neruda, something that one is suppose to do as a tourist. We never did while living in Santiago. Poems just are not that important. So fast forward a few pages here in the book. Her descriptions of Santiago did not click with what I deeply know of the place, and here we get more expat meetings that are fillers. Nothing as interesting as going to the Santiago Beer Night for the mining and exploration crowd. The descriptions of politics and the 1970s Chile again a fast-forward, I have read about it elsewhere. The description of going to Chilean wine country south of Santiago read with no sense of place- I could not picture where she was talking about and I have traveled through these areas. She visits a women’s prison (this is a vacation?), the tale related seems awkward and forced.
Her side trip to Juan Fernandez islands, the place of Robinson Crusoe tale, is something we missed the chance to do. She tells some history, sees some animals, and meets more expats. Wheeler gives more religion history, and then goes fishing. Nothing in Chapter Six paints a picture of the islands, so I still must go there someday.
At least when she visited Valparaiso she takes a bit of time to mention the inclined rail cars called funiculars- and then gives another history lesson. Then further south, on to Concepcion, Temuco, and the Lakes region, the tale is colorless, laden with Mapuche indigenous history, more encounter descriptions, a relation extending down to Puerto Montt port city that did not coincide with anything we saw traveling the area. I think the travel descriptions are too broken apart with the insertion of history lessons take make for a continuous read.
Wheeler goes onto the Island of Chiloe, and the port city of Ancud, a fishing village. This is the place of our 2012 Christmas Day car accident, the reason my wife called her book about time in the country “Upside down in Chile”. We had ample time in Chiloe stripped of transportation and filling out police reports and court documents to see the place in detail. She mentions briefly the local folk story about the Trauco (terming the creature an elf, which is far from it), but does not capture the dozen other similar strange beliefs that in part have a German descent adapted to the wet islands fishing community.
Her travel winds down or culminates in a flight for Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas, and then another flight on to Antarctica to see the Chilean owned portion of the continent. First more religion history is related, yawn, and then description of Punta Arenas, which is an interesting city but not conveyed that way in the book. The flight the Antarctica comes with another dose of history, then she returns to Punta Arenas, makes for Cape Horn (Hornos), returns to Punta Arenas, then goes to Puerto Natales (we liked this place), hits the Milodon cave (as we did also), and then tags the Torres de Paine national park all too quickly without making an interesting read about it. Then more travel along the Carretera Austral to Coyhaique and Cochrane.
“Travels in a Thin Country” covers the country, covering some history, some culture explanation of Chileans, but it seems to stray into details of tourist mindset and paints an incomplete picture. It misses the arrow straight dessert roads masked in shimmering heat waves and the road fatigue one feels while driving hours on these routes. Not once is the truly deplorable nature of Chilean food in general considered, nor recognizes the rather degraded slang infusion reality of Chilean Spanish. It does not mention the Chilean “nana” culture, poor service, the aversion to work, the lawyers society, or even the pervasive “cafe cortados.” As another example of the shortcomings, she refers to the “police” instead of using the Chilean word “carabineros.” Not a single “po” in the book, and that speaks volumes! On the other hand, I found myself fast forwarding through her descriptions of interpersonal relationships between travel companions and chance meetings. Finally, she mentions drinking pisco numerous times, and not once gives that brand of pisco that she had (not that any of the Chilean piscos are decent, the main one, Capel, is rubbish).
The time of this travel description predates the modern pervasive internet, cell phone, and improved infrastructure, and more importantly, it was during the end of the Pinochet regime. Twenty years later we found that Chileans still rather closed off in discussing the events during Pinochet, and I doubt back then they were any more open to a British tourist. Chilean culture is incredibly tight and closed, one does not get that impression at all from Wheeler’s book. For me reading the book was just as much about what was not said versus descriptions provided. Wheeler was too busy being English to see Chile. We do not recommend this book as catchall summary of the Chilean reality or travel experience.
James M. Wise- April, 2019
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