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Chile: Travels in a Thin Country
Squeezed in between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide - not a country which lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler found out when she travelled alone with two carpetbags from the top to the bottom, form the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica.
This is Sara Wheeler's account of a six-month odyssey which included Christmas Day at 13,000 feet with a llama sandwich, a sex hotel in Santiago and a trip round Cape Horn delivering a coffin. Eloquent, astute and amusing, CHILE: TRAVELS IN A THIN COUNTRY confirms Sara Wheeler's place in the front rank of today's travel writers.
338 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 4, 2019
About the author
Sara Wheeler
37 books145 followersSara Wheeler was brought up in Bristol and studied Classics and Modern Languages at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. After writing about her travels on the Greek island of Euboea and in Chile, she was accepted by the US National Science Foundation as their first female writer-in-residence at the South Pole, and spent seven months in Antarctica.
In her resultant book Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, she mentioned sleeping in the captain’s bunk in Scott's Hut. Whilst in Antarctica she read The Worst Journey in the World, an account of the Terra Nova Expedition, and she later wrote a biography of its author Apsley Cherry-Garrard.
In 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. From 2005 to 2009 she served as Trustee of the London Library.
She was frequently abroad for two years, travelled to Russia, Alaska, Greenland, Canada and North Norway to write her book The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic. A journalist at the Daily Telegraph in the UK called it a "snowstorm of historical, geographical and anthropological facts".
In a 2012 BBC Radio 4 series: To Strive and Seek, she told the personal stories of five various members of the Terra Nova Expedition.
O My America!: Second Acts in a New World records the lives of women who travelled to America in the first half of the 19th Century: Fanny Trollope, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, Rebecca Burlend, Isabella Bird, and Catherine Hubback, and the author's travels in pursuit of them.
In her resultant book Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, she mentioned sleeping in the captain’s bunk in Scott's Hut. Whilst in Antarctica she read The Worst Journey in the World, an account of the Terra Nova Expedition, and she later wrote a biography of its author Apsley Cherry-Garrard.
In 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. From 2005 to 2009 she served as Trustee of the London Library.
She was frequently abroad for two years, travelled to Russia, Alaska, Greenland, Canada and North Norway to write her book The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic. A journalist at the Daily Telegraph in the UK called it a "snowstorm of historical, geographical and anthropological facts".
In a 2012 BBC Radio 4 series: To Strive and Seek, she told the personal stories of five various members of the Terra Nova Expedition.
O My America!: Second Acts in a New World records the lives of women who travelled to America in the first half of the 19th Century: Fanny Trollope, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, Rebecca Burlend, Isabella Bird, and Catherine Hubback, and the author's travels in pursuit of them.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 162 reviews
July 20, 2023
“This review applies to Travels in a Thin Country, The Broken Road, A Time of Gifts, Roumeli and a few others by the same author. I am very keen on travel writing and on this basis bought the books, supposedly by one of the great travel writers. Overall they present as being written by a self indulgent, smarty pants show-off using many complex and very rare words when simple words would work better ( and I am very interested in words). Avoid.” says an Amazon review from someone in Australia.
Ouch! But I wonder why the reviewer has mixed up his Patrick Leigh Fermor books with the rather less well known Sara Wheeler. To be fair to Sara she is no Patrick Leigh Fermor in the ‘self indulgent, smarty pants show-off using many complex and very rare words’ but if the review thought she was, he read a different version of Chile Travels in a Thin Country than me. Be that as it may I have found this one an entertaining read even if it did have/lack those smarty pant big words and that, for me, Sara was more journo than traveller.
Sara was talked into travel to Chile by an expat Chilean in London. Her intention was to travel the long thin country from north to the Antarctic south in as much time as her visa allowed. Other than a first chapter that explains her tour of a Santiago brothel that happened because some other researcher needed a wing women, her travels are told as near as possible from a north to south perspective.
From the dusty north around Araca and the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Furgo Sara and even to the Antarctica she travelled with both friends found, known and solo to see as much of Chile as she could. What to this reader were very useful descriptions of both the people and the places are presented. The local people she met she was not scared to mix with, be they the ultra-wealthy through to those in abject poverty. She had very useful contacts in this regard.
As to the countryside, she was more than willing to go off the beaten track. The two things that stood out for me were her love of the diversity and beauty of those dusty and dry deserts of the north through to the wondrous lands of the south and their alpine vista’s, glistening lakes and smoking volcanos.
Sara offers her travels in Chile, as she says in the introduction of my revised 2nd edition from 2006, as those of a young woman 30 odd years back. She actually spent her 30th Birthday while in Chile. In the introduction, she tells of how much Chile had changed between her visits. The same would ring true today, one would have thought.
Recommended travel writing.
Ouch! But I wonder why the reviewer has mixed up his Patrick Leigh Fermor books with the rather less well known Sara Wheeler. To be fair to Sara she is no Patrick Leigh Fermor in the ‘self indulgent, smarty pants show-off using many complex and very rare words’ but if the review thought she was, he read a different version of Chile Travels in a Thin Country than me. Be that as it may I have found this one an entertaining read even if it did have/lack those smarty pant big words and that, for me, Sara was more journo than traveller.
Sara was talked into travel to Chile by an expat Chilean in London. Her intention was to travel the long thin country from north to the Antarctic south in as much time as her visa allowed. Other than a first chapter that explains her tour of a Santiago brothel that happened because some other researcher needed a wing women, her travels are told as near as possible from a north to south perspective.
From the dusty north around Araca and the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Furgo Sara and even to the Antarctica she travelled with both friends found, known and solo to see as much of Chile as she could. What to this reader were very useful descriptions of both the people and the places are presented. The local people she met she was not scared to mix with, be they the ultra-wealthy through to those in abject poverty. She had very useful contacts in this regard.
As to the countryside, she was more than willing to go off the beaten track. The two things that stood out for me were her love of the diversity and beauty of those dusty and dry deserts of the north through to the wondrous lands of the south and their alpine vista’s, glistening lakes and smoking volcanos.
Sara offers her travels in Chile, as she says in the introduction of my revised 2nd edition from 2006, as those of a young woman 30 odd years back. She actually spent her 30th Birthday while in Chile. In the introduction, she tells of how much Chile had changed between her visits. The same would ring true today, one would have thought.
Recommended travel writing.
January 20, 2010
I really wanted to like this book. Some of it was a little interesting, but honestly i would have had a more enjoyable time reading the wikipedia article on Chile.
Example of this book:
I went to have dinner with my friends, we ate shellfish, it was ok.
The next moring i got a shower, it was cold.
The roads were muddy, I rode a bus.
Chile is beautiful.
This book has not begining middle or end, its a list, a poorly written list of things she did in Chile. I don't feel like she had an adventure, because nothing interesting ever happened.
Example of this book:
I went to have dinner with my friends, we ate shellfish, it was ok.
The next moring i got a shower, it was cold.
The roads were muddy, I rode a bus.
Chile is beautiful.
This book has not begining middle or end, its a list, a poorly written list of things she did in Chile. I don't feel like she had an adventure, because nothing interesting ever happened.
April 10, 2022
Sara Wheeler says in her introduction:
“What I fear I cannot do is convey to you adequately at the beginning of the book how passionately I felt about the country at the end of the journey.”
And indeed, that rather mirrors my reading experience: this is a book that really grew on me as I journeyed, virtually, with her from the Atacama Desert in the far north to misty Patagonia and even Antarctica. Yet at the start – when she spent some time lolling about with backpackers – I wasn’t at all hopeful about learning anything much about Chile.
Wheeler is a hugely resourceful traveller and quite engaging writer, though not a lyrical one – her prose can be a bit flat, but she does have a nice self-deprecating style. Because she didn’t know much about Chilean history at the time, her travel writing is interspersed with historical commentary, with an anti-colonial slant, that I found very informative.
She is at her best when travelling alone or with various idiosyncratic natives and others that she meets along the way; much more interesting types than the privileged dilettantes and fixers from Chile’s impossibly rich classes that she also hobnobbed with.
I hadn’t really appreciated that there were such extremes of wealth and utter poverty, but Wheeler manages to move between the two worlds fluidly. In doing so, she provides a much more balanced picture of Chile’s reality than if she had been only a minimalist backpacker herself (which I suspect some of her negative reviewers were expecting) or only cruised the country in comfort (which she certainly did, but not exclusively).
Her travels occupied six months from the end of 1991, so many of her observations are undoubtedly thirty years out of date now. However, what she has here is a valuable portrait of Chile during the nervous post-Pinochet years (though he was still head of the army) when the country was still attempting to come to terms with the horrors of the dictatorship – and which was still strongly supported, she discovers, by many of the Chileans, both rich and poor, who she encounters.
Four stars plus!
“What I fear I cannot do is convey to you adequately at the beginning of the book how passionately I felt about the country at the end of the journey.”
And indeed, that rather mirrors my reading experience: this is a book that really grew on me as I journeyed, virtually, with her from the Atacama Desert in the far north to misty Patagonia and even Antarctica. Yet at the start – when she spent some time lolling about with backpackers – I wasn’t at all hopeful about learning anything much about Chile.
Wheeler is a hugely resourceful traveller and quite engaging writer, though not a lyrical one – her prose can be a bit flat, but she does have a nice self-deprecating style. Because she didn’t know much about Chilean history at the time, her travel writing is interspersed with historical commentary, with an anti-colonial slant, that I found very informative.
She is at her best when travelling alone or with various idiosyncratic natives and others that she meets along the way; much more interesting types than the privileged dilettantes and fixers from Chile’s impossibly rich classes that she also hobnobbed with.
I hadn’t really appreciated that there were such extremes of wealth and utter poverty, but Wheeler manages to move between the two worlds fluidly. In doing so, she provides a much more balanced picture of Chile’s reality than if she had been only a minimalist backpacker herself (which I suspect some of her negative reviewers were expecting) or only cruised the country in comfort (which she certainly did, but not exclusively).
Her travels occupied six months from the end of 1991, so many of her observations are undoubtedly thirty years out of date now. However, what she has here is a valuable portrait of Chile during the nervous post-Pinochet years (though he was still head of the army) when the country was still attempting to come to terms with the horrors of the dictatorship – and which was still strongly supported, she discovers, by many of the Chileans, both rich and poor, who she encounters.
Four stars plus!
December 13, 2009
A woman traveling (mostly) solo in South America for 6 months. How could I possibly not love this book? I'm still trying to figure that out, as I've been looking forward to eating it up.
The author's account of traveling from the northern tip of Chile to the southern tip manages to be boring. How can that be? Everything about South America is fascinating to me. I haven't been to Chile, but the other parts of Latin America I have traveled in have been lively, passionate, gorgeous, heart-breaking, extreme, alluring and funny.... it's hard to make it boring!
The writing style felt snootily-British to me. (In a manner I haven't really encountered in contemporary writing.) Seeing Chile through what came across as unengaged, uninterested eyes was bizarre. I couldn't finish it, despite the fact that I assumed the book would get better the longer she traveled. For someone who writes travel books, she doesn't come across as enjoying it all that much.
It's a shame the writing wasn't different, because many of the things she did were brave and inherently interesting, despite not coming across that way in the book. I know this because I've done similar things in South America, or, turned back from similar things because my instinct told me the activities were too reckless, too slap-dash, or just too bizarre for a solo gringa.
I'll have to cleanse my travel writing palette with some Pico Iyer now.
The author's account of traveling from the northern tip of Chile to the southern tip manages to be boring. How can that be? Everything about South America is fascinating to me. I haven't been to Chile, but the other parts of Latin America I have traveled in have been lively, passionate, gorgeous, heart-breaking, extreme, alluring and funny.... it's hard to make it boring!
The writing style felt snootily-British to me. (In a manner I haven't really encountered in contemporary writing.) Seeing Chile through what came across as unengaged, uninterested eyes was bizarre. I couldn't finish it, despite the fact that I assumed the book would get better the longer she traveled. For someone who writes travel books, she doesn't come across as enjoying it all that much.
It's a shame the writing wasn't different, because many of the things she did were brave and inherently interesting, despite not coming across that way in the book. I know this because I've done similar things in South America, or, turned back from similar things because my instinct told me the activities were too reckless, too slap-dash, or just too bizarre for a solo gringa.
I'll have to cleanse my travel writing palette with some Pico Iyer now.
July 11, 2011
This is probably a 4 star but have only rated it 3 because I don't really know how to review it. I enjoyed it totally = Wheeler writes well and has combined a heck of a lot of history with documenting her travels through Chile. For someone about to go to Chile it would be invaluable (if a little dated) - I mean don't rely too much on her transport timetables since that would be changed in the years since she wrote it) although I get the feeling progress is slow due to the nature of the terrain. I would have liked an historical timeline maybe in the index but it wasn't that kind of book. In the context of her travels she quotes a fair number of authors from Chile and/or other books to read regarding historical aspects and for that reason alone it's worthwhile to have on your shelf if you are interested in the country. She mentions Bruce Chatwin's Patagonia as still being relevant to travellers in Chile and I hope to track that down sometime soon. There are so many incidents she recounts that touch the heart in many ways - covering the geography, history, politics and humanity of the country it is impossible to single any one out here. Chile is one of those places that not many people seem to know much about. While reading this the student riots there were happening and so I could relate to what I saw on the news. I was impressed that Wheeler was able to wrangle herself down to the Chilean South Pole base and her commitment to venturing further into the unknown Chile than many tourists do.
$2 today 11/7/11
$2 today 11/7/11
June 20, 2010
I am giving up on this. Other reviews have commented that the author doesn't seem to absorb her surroundings and isn't likable. That's my impression as well. It seems as though she wouldn't be able to get from one place to another without the assistance of locals, expats, and other travelers; she repays them all with mildly patronizing character sketches.
It might be bearable if she stuck to poking fun at the "tack" she sees everywhere (manjar blanco, nescafé, peasant children clumsily named for Lady Di), but once she gets into talking about the Chilean revolution I was even more turned off and had to give up. She isn't snarky about that part (which is good) but it just seems like she reduced stories that were probably intensely personal and emotional to her sources, in a facile and not very thoughtful way.
I'm sure there are better books about Chile out there.
It might be bearable if she stuck to poking fun at the "tack" she sees everywhere (manjar blanco, nescafé, peasant children clumsily named for Lady Di), but once she gets into talking about the Chilean revolution I was even more turned off and had to give up. She isn't snarky about that part (which is good) but it just seems like she reduced stories that were probably intensely personal and emotional to her sources, in a facile and not very thoughtful way.
I'm sure there are better books about Chile out there.
February 1, 2010
I read about a hundred pages of this and decided I wasn't very interested in finishing it. The set-up is enviable: an extensive, top-to-bottom, six-month-long tour of one of the countries I find most interesting. However, Wheeler's prose style isn't particularly alluring, her characterizations aren't very precise or captivating, and none of her adventures (at least in the first several chapters) are very interesting. I lost interest rather quickly.
March 16, 2017
I'd give it 1 1/2 if I could, but will round up to 2 since she did bother to toss in some history, simplistic and anglo-centric as it was.
The marketing pitch: Solo female travel writer tackles traveling the length of Chile, a country she's never been to before. Working her Rolodex and waving her press pass, she contrives to visit parts of the country off-limit (or off good sense) to either the average traveler or most Chileans: a private tour of the Presidential Palace, the Chilean Air Force's Antarctic station, parts of wineries not open to the public, etc.
The reality: Solo female travel writer tackles traveling the length of Chile, a country she's never been to before and seems to care little about except for what travel bragging rights it will give her. Working her contacts and waving her press pass, she manages to get people to either arrange for or act as her host to amazing places, none of which seem impress her in the least except that she can then check them off her list and can bring them up to other travelers over drinks at some point. Interspersed with her monotone and shallow observations and always slightly derisive comments about the people and culture, she includes some bits of history that feel like she pulled them out of a college textbook, one written with a decidedly English slant. (It couldn't be from Wikipedia. The Wiki page on Chile is far more interesting than anything in this book.)
If she's paying, she makes it a point to stay in the worst accommodations (also for bragging rights--she points out hos disappointed she was not to be able to find an F or G-rated flophouse, which is the very worst rating.) If she's not paying, she still finds something condescending and snide to say about her hosts and their accommodations, no matter if it is the humble shack of someone who took pity on the dumb gringa and gave her their bed for the night or the uber-rich winery owner who played host by offering access to his luxurious home and staff. When her guides, usually locals who are excited to be showing a foreigner their country, bring up anything that even remotely touches on British history (Drake, the Faulkland Islands), she contradicts them with the English version of history. She wants to see the homes of Pablo Neruda (got to check those off the list), but she states he "wasn't a very good poet."
So, basically, instead of this being a fascinating look at a complex country and its people, it is perhaps one of the most boring and superficial travelogues ever. It is six months of bitch, moan, grouse, complain, condescend: the food isn't very good; the weather is too wet/dry/windy/unpredictable; the poor people's houses and clothes are dirty; the roads are bad; nothing runs on time; the children are unkempt. (She actually calls a couple of eight year olds "thuggish"); the houses and stores are tacky; the men are sexist. (No shit, Sherlock, So are most of the men in Asia, Africa and a fair number of them in your beloved Europe.); this village in the middle of nowhere isn't very interesting; people won't discuss traumatic and politically sensitive topics with me; I picked up fleas from some child I held; Patgonia is very flat; the south part of the country is windy. Well, gee, thanks for that sparkling commentary and such detailed, insightful observations. All I can figure is she must be a hell of a lot more charming a conversationalist in person than she is in her writing because she comes across as a most misanthropic, ethnocentric, arrogant, and thoroughly unpleasant person. About halfway through the book, I noticed that the only time she seemed interested in anything, there was a drink involved and/or she met up with someone from England. Maybe the first clue was when she was unduly miffed that her traveling companion of the moment "forgot" to get wine for their foray into the desert. (Smart man.) Seriously, if the only things she's interested in is drinking and other Brits, why not keep her butt at home and just go to a pub? I'm sure the Chileans wouldn't have missed her, especially the ones she makes snotty remarks about in the book.
There was one anecdote that amused me. The first is that she manages to get a tour at one of the amazing observatories in the Chilean desert and seems to have these delusions of channeling Carl Sagan or something. These are telescopes that scientists must wait months, if not years, for a chance to spend mere hours using. (I'd give my eyeteeth to tour this place.) The fact that she thought her little press pass was going to get her time on the telescopes was laughable, but that she thought she was going to have bragging rights on these scopes in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY had me in stitches.
I finished the book for (apparently) the same reason she travels, to check it off my to-do list. I certainly don't recommend it or think I got any return on the investment of time or money. The only remarkable things were that someone could make an entire country and trip seems so boring and that she makes a living doing it.
The marketing pitch: Solo female travel writer tackles traveling the length of Chile, a country she's never been to before. Working her Rolodex and waving her press pass, she contrives to visit parts of the country off-limit (or off good sense) to either the average traveler or most Chileans: a private tour of the Presidential Palace, the Chilean Air Force's Antarctic station, parts of wineries not open to the public, etc.
The reality: Solo female travel writer tackles traveling the length of Chile, a country she's never been to before and seems to care little about except for what travel bragging rights it will give her. Working her contacts and waving her press pass, she manages to get people to either arrange for or act as her host to amazing places, none of which seem impress her in the least except that she can then check them off her list and can bring them up to other travelers over drinks at some point. Interspersed with her monotone and shallow observations and always slightly derisive comments about the people and culture, she includes some bits of history that feel like she pulled them out of a college textbook, one written with a decidedly English slant. (It couldn't be from Wikipedia. The Wiki page on Chile is far more interesting than anything in this book.)
If she's paying, she makes it a point to stay in the worst accommodations (also for bragging rights--she points out hos disappointed she was not to be able to find an F or G-rated flophouse, which is the very worst rating.) If she's not paying, she still finds something condescending and snide to say about her hosts and their accommodations, no matter if it is the humble shack of someone who took pity on the dumb gringa and gave her their bed for the night or the uber-rich winery owner who played host by offering access to his luxurious home and staff. When her guides, usually locals who are excited to be showing a foreigner their country, bring up anything that even remotely touches on British history (Drake, the Faulkland Islands), she contradicts them with the English version of history. She wants to see the homes of Pablo Neruda (got to check those off the list), but she states he "wasn't a very good poet."
So, basically, instead of this being a fascinating look at a complex country and its people, it is perhaps one of the most boring and superficial travelogues ever. It is six months of bitch, moan, grouse, complain, condescend: the food isn't very good; the weather is too wet/dry/windy/unpredictable; the poor people's houses and clothes are dirty; the roads are bad; nothing runs on time; the children are unkempt. (She actually calls a couple of eight year olds "thuggish"); the houses and stores are tacky; the men are sexist. (No shit, Sherlock, So are most of the men in Asia, Africa and a fair number of them in your beloved Europe.); this village in the middle of nowhere isn't very interesting; people won't discuss traumatic and politically sensitive topics with me; I picked up fleas from some child I held; Patgonia is very flat; the south part of the country is windy. Well, gee, thanks for that sparkling commentary and such detailed, insightful observations. All I can figure is she must be a hell of a lot more charming a conversationalist in person than she is in her writing because she comes across as a most misanthropic, ethnocentric, arrogant, and thoroughly unpleasant person. About halfway through the book, I noticed that the only time she seemed interested in anything, there was a drink involved and/or she met up with someone from England. Maybe the first clue was when she was unduly miffed that her traveling companion of the moment "forgot" to get wine for their foray into the desert. (Smart man.) Seriously, if the only things she's interested in is drinking and other Brits, why not keep her butt at home and just go to a pub? I'm sure the Chileans wouldn't have missed her, especially the ones she makes snotty remarks about in the book.
There was one anecdote that amused me. The first is that she manages to get a tour at one of the amazing observatories in the Chilean desert and seems to have these delusions of channeling Carl Sagan or something. These are telescopes that scientists must wait months, if not years, for a chance to spend mere hours using. (I'd give my eyeteeth to tour this place.) The fact that she thought her little press pass was going to get her time on the telescopes was laughable, but that she thought she was going to have bragging rights on these scopes in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY had me in stitches.
I finished the book for (apparently) the same reason she travels, to check it off my to-do list. I certainly don't recommend it or think I got any return on the investment of time or money. The only remarkable things were that someone could make an entire country and trip seems so boring and that she makes a living doing it.
December 11, 2009
The author combines history, political intrigue, stories of people she travels with or meets along the way, verbal snapshots of unbelievable landscape, and box after box of wine (mixed with Coke) into a travel book that has made Chile even more of a mystery to me NOW than when I started reading it.
The country stretches along South America and includes icebergs, rainforests, desert, mountains, island regions, wine country, with a diversity of old European colonials and (mostly extinct) native people groups. She never travels to Easter Island, but it seems like it is more Polynesian than anything else (and I still have a book to read for it by itself). I learned about quite a few more cold weather islands that I didn't know about (hooray) but if traveling there is anything like she describes in 1992, I'm not sure I could do it (boo).
Quotation tidbits I liked:
"'The problem is,' he went on, 'that you don't stop being an exile when you get home. It becomes a state of mind. You can be an exile inside your head. Perpetual travellers are often like that... Mind you, you don't necessarily have to go anywhere to feel that kind of permanent alienation. Perhaps the worst kind of exile is mental.'"
"It was unutterably peaceful. At that moment the past held no regrets and the future no fears; I could have given up everything worldly to live the rest of my life on that island."
Cold weather islands to explore:
Juan Fernandez Islands
Isla Mocha (in a folk song, not on a map, Mapuche lived there, no public transport to it)
Chiloe'
Tierra del Fuego (I knew a piano piece with this title)
Isla Grande
Almirantazgo Sound
Dawson Island
Isla Navarino
Lennox
Picton
Nueva
Hoste Islands
Mornington Island
Food tidbits to look into:
chirimoyas - she describes this fruit as tasting of pears and honey
papaya - "the stalls on the highway out of La Serena were touting papaya honey, syrup, juice, sweets, cakes, bars and peeled papayas suspended in jars of sugar syrup. There was clearly nothing which could not be made out of a papaya." (ooh gotta love a challenge)
The country stretches along South America and includes icebergs, rainforests, desert, mountains, island regions, wine country, with a diversity of old European colonials and (mostly extinct) native people groups. She never travels to Easter Island, but it seems like it is more Polynesian than anything else (and I still have a book to read for it by itself). I learned about quite a few more cold weather islands that I didn't know about (hooray) but if traveling there is anything like she describes in 1992, I'm not sure I could do it (boo).
Quotation tidbits I liked:
"'The problem is,' he went on, 'that you don't stop being an exile when you get home. It becomes a state of mind. You can be an exile inside your head. Perpetual travellers are often like that... Mind you, you don't necessarily have to go anywhere to feel that kind of permanent alienation. Perhaps the worst kind of exile is mental.'"
"It was unutterably peaceful. At that moment the past held no regrets and the future no fears; I could have given up everything worldly to live the rest of my life on that island."
Cold weather islands to explore:
Juan Fernandez Islands
Isla Mocha (in a folk song, not on a map, Mapuche lived there, no public transport to it)
Chiloe'
Tierra del Fuego (I knew a piano piece with this title)
Isla Grande
Almirantazgo Sound
Dawson Island
Isla Navarino
Lennox
Picton
Nueva
Hoste Islands
Mornington Island
Food tidbits to look into:
chirimoyas - she describes this fruit as tasting of pears and honey
papaya - "the stalls on the highway out of La Serena were touting papaya honey, syrup, juice, sweets, cakes, bars and peeled papayas suspended in jars of sugar syrup. There was clearly nothing which could not be made out of a papaya." (ooh gotta love a challenge)
February 12, 2018
Subtitled A Journey Through Chile, Travels in a Thin Country is a memoir of Sara Wheeler's exploration of the entire length of this South American Country.
I love travel books, and was eagerly anticipating being immersed in this one, but I found it a bit disappointing. First, where were the locals? It seemed as if Wheeler, despite taking extensive language courses beforehand, never talked to native Chileans. Every single person she came into contact with was an expat. It gave you the impression that either a) Chileans didn't exist or b) Wheeler was a cultural snob who did not wish to fraternize with the locals. Second, if Wheeler's descriptions are any indication, Chile is nothing but mountainous desert and frozen tundra, with a city in the middle. The other day I watched an episode of House Hunters International, where the family decided to relocate to Chile. It was so beautiful! The footage of mountains, lakes and stunning ocean vistas were so gorgeous, I would never have guessed this was Chile if Wheeler's book was all I had to go by.
Before I completely turn you off of this book, I will say that Wheeler presented an interesting history of Chile and some amusing anecdotes. So it wasn't a complete loss. But it could have been so much more.
I love travel books, and was eagerly anticipating being immersed in this one, but I found it a bit disappointing. First, where were the locals? It seemed as if Wheeler, despite taking extensive language courses beforehand, never talked to native Chileans. Every single person she came into contact with was an expat. It gave you the impression that either a) Chileans didn't exist or b) Wheeler was a cultural snob who did not wish to fraternize with the locals. Second, if Wheeler's descriptions are any indication, Chile is nothing but mountainous desert and frozen tundra, with a city in the middle. The other day I watched an episode of House Hunters International, where the family decided to relocate to Chile. It was so beautiful! The footage of mountains, lakes and stunning ocean vistas were so gorgeous, I would never have guessed this was Chile if Wheeler's book was all I had to go by.
Before I completely turn you off of this book, I will say that Wheeler presented an interesting history of Chile and some amusing anecdotes. So it wasn't a complete loss. But it could have been so much more.
January 19, 2016
Another book I read in advance of our upcoming trip to Chile. I loved this travelogue describing the six months the author spent wandering Chile from top to bottom. Her dry British wit had me laughing out loud, and she managed to work in lots of information about Chile's history and culture at the same time. My one disappointment was that she spent so little time in Torres del Paine National Park (only a day!) because that's going to be the focus of our trip, but that's a personal quibble. Overall this was delightful.
August 1, 2010
Dry. I would not have finished this book if it weren't for a strong interest in Chile since my son will be living there for two years. This book truely was mainly about her travels - how she traveled and who she traveled with and not enough about the country she traveled thru. I had to look up the areas she visited on the internet in order to get a visual due to a lack of description. Once I saw the beautiful country she was in I wondered why she wrote this book if she wasn't going to give it justice? However, I did learn a few interesting things about Chile, thanks to the interenet as well.
December 30, 2025
Such a desperately boring book. I visited Chile 11 years ago and my memories are infinitely more vivid than anything I read in this book. it's like the author has described a faint dream of a country, not an actual place. Nobody encountered along the way is presented as anything else than a paper-thin NPC, a big part of the book are complaints about accommodation. A great example of how to describe a fascinating country in the worst possible way.
August 18, 2025
Does this woman even wanna be here?
June 13, 2013
I was given this book just before my current my trip to Chile. I lived in the Vina Del Mar area for a year and a half during 2009-2010. Travels in a Thin Country captured Chile magnificently.
Written almost twenty years ago, this book manages to paint the nuances of the country so well that the armchair traveler gets a real sense of what it means to be in Chile. Wheeler's descriptions of the regional flavor, the society, the political landscape is spot on to this day.
Some reviewers seemed to resent she came with credentials. Well, she was a sponsored writer. Good for her! Others complain of the posh digs she stayed in. My memory is that though there were a few accommodations I will never see the likes of, most of the time she stayed in pretty humble lodgings. Her bout with scabies is testimony to this.
I loved her writing style, her dry British humor, her wonderful vocabulary, and her spunk. In regard to Pinochet, she writes about the same confusion I have had living and visiting here. I have heard more people than I would ever believe, from the ricas to the fishmongers, say things like "Pinochet saved Chile." This has been the most disturbing part of living in this country, though the economic tragedy of Allende´s tenure created great scars in the country as well, created in a large degree by Nixon and Kissinger´s manipulations in Washington. I have also heard of human rights abuses during this time as well.
In many ways Chile is my second country. By the end of the book, I felt my understanding of Chile had grown, and I felt her sadness when she left reflects my own bittersweet feelings each time I return to the U.S.
Written almost twenty years ago, this book manages to paint the nuances of the country so well that the armchair traveler gets a real sense of what it means to be in Chile. Wheeler's descriptions of the regional flavor, the society, the political landscape is spot on to this day.
Some reviewers seemed to resent she came with credentials. Well, she was a sponsored writer. Good for her! Others complain of the posh digs she stayed in. My memory is that though there were a few accommodations I will never see the likes of, most of the time she stayed in pretty humble lodgings. Her bout with scabies is testimony to this.
I loved her writing style, her dry British humor, her wonderful vocabulary, and her spunk. In regard to Pinochet, she writes about the same confusion I have had living and visiting here. I have heard more people than I would ever believe, from the ricas to the fishmongers, say things like "Pinochet saved Chile." This has been the most disturbing part of living in this country, though the economic tragedy of Allende´s tenure created great scars in the country as well, created in a large degree by Nixon and Kissinger´s manipulations in Washington. I have also heard of human rights abuses during this time as well.
In many ways Chile is my second country. By the end of the book, I felt my understanding of Chile had grown, and I felt her sadness when she left reflects my own bittersweet feelings each time I return to the U.S.
November 10, 2016
In the early 90's, Sara Wheeler leaves Britain for Chile, a country unknown and appealingly rectilinear. Fascinated by the prospect of having to pack for both deserts and glaciers, Wheeler sets out to map the entire territory one region at a time, one national park at a time with the humorous self-confidence only a Briton can have . From north to south and onward to Antartica, Wheeler opens up an entire society for the reader, from Bolivian truckdrivers to the Santiago elite, from llamas to exotic birds with precise English names, "bejewelled Argentinians" and Russian souvenir sellers in Antartica, it's a magical ride through that exclamation mark land that links the bottom of the world and an accidentally romantic reminder of the era of fax-machine, poste restante and cassette tapes.
December 30, 2009
This book is a 1st-person account of a British woman traveling through Chile. I got through about two chapters before having to return it to the library. The author is not a very likable person and I don't think it was interesting enough for me to finish. I liked the title, though.
Read
December 13, 2021An account of visiting Chile from Sara Wheeler, a Brit who visited for several months in the early 90s, as an expat writer making a trip in her youth as she travelled top-to-bottom throughout the country. Her point-of-view as a curious and empathetic outsider with at least some awareness of her privilege made this an interesting read - much more so than Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” which I had started to read concurrently but had abandoned partway in. She clearly loved her time in Chile which shows abundantly throughout the book.
“There was nothing I had ever wanted to do less than leave Chile.”
“I was supposed to be leaving the luxuries of the metropolis for the southern half of the country, but there was always a reason to stay another day, and then another. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go–I felt a leap of excitement whenever I thought of the glaciers and the fjords of the far south–but Santiago was a cornucopia, and I was very happy.”
“Chile took in the driest desert in the world, a glaciated archipelago of a thousand islands and most of the things you can imagine in between.”
“I found that I couldn’t buy the fine wines I tasted on my tour in the supermarkets. It was all being sent abroad.”
“My friends left for Santiago. They had found a bottle of pisco that was fifty per cent proof. Their holiday, they felt, had been a learning curve from thirty per cent pisco through to fifty. This was quite an astute observation, as Chileans are very conscious of the strength of a pisco, always seeking out the higher end of the scale and scorning the lower echelons, which they seem to think are produced exclusively for the faint-hearted and foreign, though these two categories are effectively synonymous.”
“As the stars came out an Argentinian bank manager tried to point out formations and constellations. People were always doing that, and I hated it; I didn’t need sordid terrestrial labels bringing the stars under control. Giving them shapes from our world (the Plough; the Hunter) robbed them of their otherness. They belonged to the land of the imagination, the most beguiling country of them all. I had spent many nights alone with the Chilean stars, and I wasn’t going to let a bank manager turn them into agricultural implements.”
“Despite abundant evidence of what economic pundits called, ‘the Chilean tiger’, 95 per cent of wealth remained in the hands of the old central valley elite.”
“The Mapuche were systematically deprived of their lands by theft and discriminatory legislation for generations. Little has changed. The majority of Chileans remain indifferent to the distress of the marginalized, impoverished Mapuche and their culture, and to call someone an ‘indio’ is a great insult. And actually the Mapuche weren’t and aren’t warlike by nature. They just happened not to go for the idea of their own genocide.”
“The future of the Quinquen region Pehuenche and their traditional way of life is still insecure. I could go into these disputes in great detail, but you know the story, and its themes of moral turpitude, greed and a dominant culture. You have heard it told about many countries, in both hemispheres, probably so often that the words no longer register.”
“According to one of the most cautious academic sources, between 3000 and 10,000 Chileans were killed in the immediate aftermath of the coup. The Rettig Commission recorded less than 3000 deaths and disappearances, but a new national reparation and reconciliation corporation has subsequently added many hundreds of cases to that figure. Somewhere between 40,000 and 95,000 people were taken prisoner for some period in the first three years. Hadn’t the Pinochetistas I met (43 per cent voted to keep him in 1988) read all those accounts I had read about torture and depravity and murder? Hadn’t they met the woman whose three sons had been killed, as I had, or the hideously disfigured man who had set fire to himself in the village square to draw attention to the disappearance of his daughter, who at that moment was being raped by the eleventh man that day? Well, hadn’t they?”
“Acute poverty is less visible in urban Chile than in the shanty towns of Brazil and Peru–but it is no less deadly. Chronic unemployment and chronic overcrowding lead to endemic social dysfunction and endemic misery; I didn’t have to look far to see that.”
“Pinned to the seat by their bodies, I tried to work out how I felt about being in the slum. First of all I felt alienated; I believe that emanated from disgust at my rich and privileged life. I also felt despair… Their lives were never going to get any easier, or less anguished, or more comfortable. The power of despair to diminish struck me very hard during that bus journey… I suspect now that hope was my bourgeois luxury.”
“On my last Friday I climbed Santa Lucia hill in the centre of the city in the late afternoon ready for the thirty minutes or so when the sky turned salmon pink. I always made a point of stopping to observe this; half the sky became a slow gradation of colour from dark to light, the glow concentrating behind the black hills. When there were clouds, they formed a ridged panoply of blue and pink.”
“You couldn’t sleep through the colours of an Andean dawn.”
[On Antarctica] “Nobody owned it–that was the thrilling thing. Seven countries might have ‘claimed’ a slice for themselves, and there might be pushing two hundred little ‘research’ camps, but the continent wasn’t really owned by anyone. It was like seeing the earth for the very first time, and I felt less homeless there than I had ever felt anywhere. All the sordid failures and degradations of humanity and the morass of personal anxieties we struggle to live within shrank to insignificant specks as I looked out over the Antarctic snowfields.”
— Chile: Travels In A Thin Country by Sara Wheeler
https://a.co/7CUbfES
“There was nothing I had ever wanted to do less than leave Chile.”
“I was supposed to be leaving the luxuries of the metropolis for the southern half of the country, but there was always a reason to stay another day, and then another. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go–I felt a leap of excitement whenever I thought of the glaciers and the fjords of the far south–but Santiago was a cornucopia, and I was very happy.”
“Chile took in the driest desert in the world, a glaciated archipelago of a thousand islands and most of the things you can imagine in between.”
“I found that I couldn’t buy the fine wines I tasted on my tour in the supermarkets. It was all being sent abroad.”
“My friends left for Santiago. They had found a bottle of pisco that was fifty per cent proof. Their holiday, they felt, had been a learning curve from thirty per cent pisco through to fifty. This was quite an astute observation, as Chileans are very conscious of the strength of a pisco, always seeking out the higher end of the scale and scorning the lower echelons, which they seem to think are produced exclusively for the faint-hearted and foreign, though these two categories are effectively synonymous.”
“As the stars came out an Argentinian bank manager tried to point out formations and constellations. People were always doing that, and I hated it; I didn’t need sordid terrestrial labels bringing the stars under control. Giving them shapes from our world (the Plough; the Hunter) robbed them of their otherness. They belonged to the land of the imagination, the most beguiling country of them all. I had spent many nights alone with the Chilean stars, and I wasn’t going to let a bank manager turn them into agricultural implements.”
“Despite abundant evidence of what economic pundits called, ‘the Chilean tiger’, 95 per cent of wealth remained in the hands of the old central valley elite.”
“The Mapuche were systematically deprived of their lands by theft and discriminatory legislation for generations. Little has changed. The majority of Chileans remain indifferent to the distress of the marginalized, impoverished Mapuche and their culture, and to call someone an ‘indio’ is a great insult. And actually the Mapuche weren’t and aren’t warlike by nature. They just happened not to go for the idea of their own genocide.”
“The future of the Quinquen region Pehuenche and their traditional way of life is still insecure. I could go into these disputes in great detail, but you know the story, and its themes of moral turpitude, greed and a dominant culture. You have heard it told about many countries, in both hemispheres, probably so often that the words no longer register.”
“According to one of the most cautious academic sources, between 3000 and 10,000 Chileans were killed in the immediate aftermath of the coup. The Rettig Commission recorded less than 3000 deaths and disappearances, but a new national reparation and reconciliation corporation has subsequently added many hundreds of cases to that figure. Somewhere between 40,000 and 95,000 people were taken prisoner for some period in the first three years. Hadn’t the Pinochetistas I met (43 per cent voted to keep him in 1988) read all those accounts I had read about torture and depravity and murder? Hadn’t they met the woman whose three sons had been killed, as I had, or the hideously disfigured man who had set fire to himself in the village square to draw attention to the disappearance of his daughter, who at that moment was being raped by the eleventh man that day? Well, hadn’t they?”
“Acute poverty is less visible in urban Chile than in the shanty towns of Brazil and Peru–but it is no less deadly. Chronic unemployment and chronic overcrowding lead to endemic social dysfunction and endemic misery; I didn’t have to look far to see that.”
“Pinned to the seat by their bodies, I tried to work out how I felt about being in the slum. First of all I felt alienated; I believe that emanated from disgust at my rich and privileged life. I also felt despair… Their lives were never going to get any easier, or less anguished, or more comfortable. The power of despair to diminish struck me very hard during that bus journey… I suspect now that hope was my bourgeois luxury.”
“On my last Friday I climbed Santa Lucia hill in the centre of the city in the late afternoon ready for the thirty minutes or so when the sky turned salmon pink. I always made a point of stopping to observe this; half the sky became a slow gradation of colour from dark to light, the glow concentrating behind the black hills. When there were clouds, they formed a ridged panoply of blue and pink.”
“You couldn’t sleep through the colours of an Andean dawn.”
[On Antarctica] “Nobody owned it–that was the thrilling thing. Seven countries might have ‘claimed’ a slice for themselves, and there might be pushing two hundred little ‘research’ camps, but the continent wasn’t really owned by anyone. It was like seeing the earth for the very first time, and I felt less homeless there than I had ever felt anywhere. All the sordid failures and degradations of humanity and the morass of personal anxieties we struggle to live within shrank to insignificant specks as I looked out over the Antarctic snowfields.”
— Chile: Travels In A Thin Country by Sara Wheeler
https://a.co/7CUbfES
August 28, 2026
As a Chilean, I loved seeing my country through the eyes of a foreigner. Sara Wheeler travels from the deserts of northern Chile all the way down to Patagonia and even Antarctica, meeting fascinating people and having plenty of adventures along the way. She also includes lots of historical facts and cultural explanations, which add a lot of depth to the journey. A really enjoyable way to rediscover Chile from a completely different perspective.
January 16, 2021
Fueling my wanderlust
Reading about Chile as I continue to socially isolate during this pandemic. The author manages to paint a picture of Chile through a foreigner’s eye without being annoying and self aggrandizing which I appreciated. Having traveled south to north in Argentina, this book managed to make me feel nostalgic for a place I’d never been.
Reading about Chile as I continue to socially isolate during this pandemic. The author manages to paint a picture of Chile through a foreigner’s eye without being annoying and self aggrandizing which I appreciated. Having traveled south to north in Argentina, this book managed to make me feel nostalgic for a place I’d never been.
January 2, 2020
Sublime, droll, insightful, effortlessly amusing, brilliant travel writing. Wheeler travels the length of Chile post-Pinochet, pre-internet, apps, GPS and smart phones.
September 15, 2023
3.5 stars.
August 5, 2024
Very interesting book. Brought back memories of our own trip through Chile in 1990's, nice to recognise place names and descriptions.
August 9, 2025
Fun little book. A nice retelling of her trip with some arrogance baked in toward some of the local people. She’s not so bad that she doesn’t recognize some of it though.
July 6, 2022
This was good. I enjoyed the leisurely way she wrote about her travels, which perfectly matches Chile.
January 3, 2012
I enjoyed Travels in a Thin Country even though I had my misgivings about the author. She certainly knew how to write well, but I felt she went about her travels the wrong way. She landed in Santiago with a little black book full of names and addresses, but with very little deep understanding of Chile, its culture and literature. She picked up some as the trip moved from the Atacama Desert in the north to the colder south around Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, and even Antarctica (where Chile lays claim to a slice of the subcontinent).
Somehow, I would feel unequipped to write about Chile without understanding more about its world-famous Poets, Neruda and Mistral, as well as a host of historians and writers of prose fiction. Instead, Sara Wheeler gives a voice to various backpackers and others encountered during her long journeys down the Pan-American Highway and the Carretera Austral -- as well as all the detours to the Andes and the Pacific Coast. Fortunately, she didn't just associate with roving Aussies and Austrians, but also made some effort to interview the people of Chile. This is where the book shines. Where it fails is when she is spending too much time dealing with random foreigners she meets up with and travels with.
Having just finished an extensive reading program in preparation for a 3-week trip to Argentina (November-December 2011), I thought that surely there must be more that she could have added by more preparation. Her book has a rather random bibliography and does refer to some classics, such as Chatwin's In Patagonia and Lucas Bridges's The Uttermost Part of the Earth. But I was put off by her dismissal of Neruda's poetry and her failure to discuss Gabriela Mistral except in passing.
I rather suspect that, writing about Chile, was General Pinochet was still in power (no longer as President, but as Commander in Chief of the Army), Wheeler was a bit overly sympathetic with the former dictator -- especially as so many of her Chilean contacts were big landowners and latifundistas.
However leery I am of Miss Wheeler herself, I admit that she writes well. But when compared to Bruce Chatwin and Lucas Bridges, she is far from the highest levels of travel literature.
Somehow, I would feel unequipped to write about Chile without understanding more about its world-famous Poets, Neruda and Mistral, as well as a host of historians and writers of prose fiction. Instead, Sara Wheeler gives a voice to various backpackers and others encountered during her long journeys down the Pan-American Highway and the Carretera Austral -- as well as all the detours to the Andes and the Pacific Coast. Fortunately, she didn't just associate with roving Aussies and Austrians, but also made some effort to interview the people of Chile. This is where the book shines. Where it fails is when she is spending too much time dealing with random foreigners she meets up with and travels with.
Having just finished an extensive reading program in preparation for a 3-week trip to Argentina (November-December 2011), I thought that surely there must be more that she could have added by more preparation. Her book has a rather random bibliography and does refer to some classics, such as Chatwin's In Patagonia and Lucas Bridges's The Uttermost Part of the Earth. But I was put off by her dismissal of Neruda's poetry and her failure to discuss Gabriela Mistral except in passing.
I rather suspect that, writing about Chile, was General Pinochet was still in power (no longer as President, but as Commander in Chief of the Army), Wheeler was a bit overly sympathetic with the former dictator -- especially as so many of her Chilean contacts were big landowners and latifundistas.
However leery I am of Miss Wheeler herself, I admit that she writes well. But when compared to Bruce Chatwin and Lucas Bridges, she is far from the highest levels of travel literature.
February 26, 2008
I bought this book a few months before I moved to Chile. Sara tours Chile from north to south and shares her experiences that she has with residents of various towns along the way. I found the book useful for learning a little about the geography, history, and spots of interest in Chile, but the author's style turned me off a lot. I almost felt like she felt her way of traveling was superior to other backpackers because she had a more authentic experience and did things off the beaten path. I also lost interest during some of her anecdotes when she rambled a little too much. I wish I could have gotten all of the information but in a different style.
April 22, 2019
The book was so superficial and biased. I can’t believe that Chile is all bad and all the Chileans are living in a misery!!!! I have friends who have visited the cot and they say it is just like any other country where their is the good and bad but it’s a beautiful country.
The author should have been neutral by stating what she has seen in the country and let the reader make his own judgments.
What a waste of time and money reading such a book!!!
My advise don’t waste your time or money by buying and reading this biased book.....
The author should have been neutral by stating what she has seen in the country and let the reader make his own judgments.
What a waste of time and money reading such a book!!!
My advise don’t waste your time or money by buying and reading this biased book.....
August 12, 2025
As someone who is from chile, this book did nothing to invest me into it. Her writing style is very dry and almost reads like a diary than a book. The nonexistent descriptiveness ranges from a photograph in my mind to not even being able to recognize the area. Finishing this book was a challenge BUT DOES make me want to travel to write a better book than this. Chile deserves better light than this gives it.
October 12, 2018
Lovely description on page 281:
and the next morning I disappeared for good, on a bus to Balmaceda, whence a plane took me to Puerto Montt. It flew low, and the late afternoon sun turned the multitudinous rivers into gold ribbons between brown crepey mountains. The glaciers rippled, like folds of glossy cloth, and out to the west the archipelago throbbed, suffused in an amber glow.
and the next morning I disappeared for good, on a bus to Balmaceda, whence a plane took me to Puerto Montt. It flew low, and the late afternoon sun turned the multitudinous rivers into gold ribbons between brown crepey mountains. The glaciers rippled, like folds of glossy cloth, and out to the west the archipelago throbbed, suffused in an amber glow.
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