Chile: Atacama, Patagonia and Easter Island

Some countries you walk across. Chile you fall down. It's the longest country on Earth, a thread of land pinned between the Andes and the Pacific, more than 4,000 kilometres top to bottom and so narrow you could drive across it in an afternoon. I came for the two ends of that thread — the driest desert on the planet and the granite towers of the deep south — and then, almost out of greed, I added a third point so far off the map it barely belongs to anything: Rapa Nui, Easter Island, alone in the Pacific with its stone giants.

Three destinations, three different planets, one flag. You don't tour Chile so much as you survive its distances and let them do the storytelling. So this is a carnet of extremes — sand, ice and ocean — and what it taught me about being reachable in a country that mostly isn't.

Atacama: standing under the cleanest sky on Earth

San Pedro de Atacama is a dusty adobe village that runs entirely on awe. I rolled into the Valle de la Luna at sunset, where the rock turns the colour of an old coin and the silence has weight, then dragged myself out before dawn to the El Tatio geysers at over 4,000 metres, shivering in the dark while columns of steam tore out of the ground as the sun came up. There are high-altitude lagoons too, impossibly blue, with flamingos pretending the cold doesn't bother them. But the headline act is the night. Almost no humidity, almost no light pollution — this is why the world's biggest telescopes set up shop here — and the Milky Way arrives like a physical thing you could lean against. A word of warning the brochures only whisper: the altitude is real, so take the first day slow, drink more water than feels sensible, and pack layers that would embarrass a mountaineer, because the desert roasts you by day and turns genuinely cold the second the sun drops.

« Chile doesn't ask you to choose between extremes. It dares you to chase all of them. »

Here's the honest part about staying connected, because it's the whole tension of a trip like this. In Santiago, the capital sitting right at the foot of the Andes, the signal is genuinely good — proper 4G, the full modern-city experience — and the same goes for Valparaíso down the coast, that tumble of painted houses and clattering funicular lifts. But the desert is another story. You'll usually catch something in San Pedro itself; out on the salt tracks and in the geyser fields, expect long stretches of nothing at all. So I used my data the way I use a head torch — not for the wilderness itself, but for the edges of it: booking the El Tatio tour the night before, sending one ridiculous photo of the Milky Way before the village wifi died.

Patagonia: where the wind has opinions

A long flight south to Punta Arenas, the road up to Puerto Natales, and Chile becomes a completely different film: glaciers, turquoise lakes, guanacos grazing in herds, and that famous Patagonian wind that doesn't blow so much as argue with you. Torres del Paine is the reason you came — three granite towers clawing straight up out of the steppe. Whether you do the multi-day W trek or just hike to the base of the towers and back, you'll spend the whole time feeling delightfully, gloriously small. Down here the weather changes its mind every twenty minutes; four seasons before lunch is a local sport. Puerto Natales has a signal, but once you're deep in the park, coverage goes patchy to absent, and that's the deal. Wild places are supposed to swallow you for a while.

Rapa Nui: the loneliest island and its stone watchers

Then the strangest leg of all: a flight far out into the Pacific to Easter Island — Rapa Nui — one of the most remote inhabited places on the planet, a speck of volcanic green thousands of kilometres from anywhere. The moai stand with their backs to the sea, hundreds of carved giants the Rapanui people raised centuries ago, and standing in front of them you feel time stretch. These are sacred sites of a living culture: you stay on the marked paths, you never climb on the platforms, and you never, ever touch the moai. The connection out here is the most fragile of the whole trip, as you'd expect from an island this isolated — so I closed the laptop, learned to wait for the village wifi, and gave the place the attention it was clearly asking for.

What I take away

Chile taught me to stop fighting distance and start using it. A desert, a glacier and an island in the middle of the ocean have nothing in common except the peso and the flag — and it's the long empty hops between them that make the contrast land. Three skies, one absurdly long country, and a phone that knew when to be useful and when to leave me alone: online for the bookings, properly off the grid under four thousand stars, beside the towers, and in front of the silent moai.

— Thomas, from the desert to the glaciers to the edge of the Pacific.