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| A guanaco mother and calf were with other guanacos near a road in Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia. The indigenous wild guanacos and vicuna, which are found at different elevations, were crossbred by the earliest human settlers in the Andes to produce two new domesticated breeds, the llama and the alpaca. |
In looking for a destination for a November-December 2024 trip, Jane and I were interested in great scenery, interesting culture, good weather, good food and good wine. Chile fit the bill. Patagonia? Of course. Then we added the Atacama Desert in the north. Santiago is unavoidable and easy. And to make it even more exotic, Rapa Nui (Easter Island or Isla de Pascua), a five-hour flight from Santiago to the world's most remote inhabited place. And cap it off with a Tierra del Fuego cruise from Puenta Arenas, Chile, to Ushuaia, Argentina, which promotes itself as the world's southernmost city. Reading "The Wager," a recent bestseller account of an 18th-century British shipwreck near Cape Horn, prepared us for this inhospitable but beautiful part of the world.
It wasn't our first time in Chile or Argentina. In 2007 we visited Buenos Aires, El Calafate in Argentine Patagonia, and Mendoza, the heart of Argentine wine production, before crossing the Andes by road to Santiago, Chile. There we spent a couple of days, leaving the city only to visit the nearby Maipo Valley wine area. This time the focus was Chile, with two stops in Argentina on the way home. Click on links in this text for separate postings about each place.
We left San Diego on the 15th of November, a Friday, flying American Airlines through Dallas to Santiago. The long Dallas-to-Santiago leg was aboard at Boeing 787, my first time on a Dreamliner. More spacious and comfortable (with bigger restrooms) than most Boeings and Airbuses, and certainly an improvement on the Boeing 777 that took us from Buenos Aires to Dallas on the way home.
We got to Santiago before 8 a.m. on the 16th and spent two nights at Hotel Cumbres in the lively Lastarria district. We were within walking distance of Santiago's Central Market, the author Pablo Neruda's La Chascona house, and a funicular railroad to a hilltop with views of almost the entire city.
On Monday, the 18th of November, we flew LATAM (pronouced lah-TAHM) to Rapa Nui on another Boeing 787 and stayed four nights at the first of three Explora lodges that we booked for this trip. I'll discuss the Explora experience at the end of this post. The moai, the famous megalith-like sculptures of Rapa Nui, were even more amazing in person than they are in photographs. There are about 900 moai on the island, about 30 of which have been restored to a standing position. Most are where they fell when toppled during clan wars centuries ago.
Then we were back in Santiago for one night at the airport's Holiday Inn before a LATAM flight to Calama in the Atacama Desert. We met several people who had itineraries like ours, with overnights in Santiago between other far-flung destinations, and who also used the Holiday Inn, which is just across a driveway from the domestic terminal. Later, at the hotel again for a night between Atacama and Patagonia, Jane left her backpack in our Holiday Inn room, realizing it only when we were in the line for security clearance. She simply ducked back across the street, got her backpack and was back in plenty of time. One tip: the hotel's bar is better than its restaurant.
But back to our first Holiday Inn visit. We arrived in time for dinner and left the next morning after an early breakfast for our flight to Calama, a mining town where we were met by Explora for the hour-and-15-minue drive to the San Pedro de Atacama Explora lodge, where we stayed four nights.
Here the attractions include geysers at an elevation of almost 4700 meters or almost three miles above sea level, hot spring pools for soaking, countless volcanic craters, vicuna and three types of flamingos (Andean, Chilean and James). We also were looking forward to stargazing in this super-dry climate, especially since this Explora has its own optical telescope in its own observatory, but skies were overcast and we settled for seeing Jupiter and its moons one night and Saturn and its rings another.
After another stop at the Holiday Inn, this one with enough time to go into Santiago for lunch, we flew to Puerto Natales en route to our last Explora lodge, inside Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia. The park's famous Torres (towers) were only partially visible from the lodge, but the Torres del Paines Horns, mountains that conceal the Torres, were on full display. Take any of Explora's many guided hikes and you're unlikely to reach a better viewing spot than the lodge itself. We did a couple of trail rides here, which I always enjoy.
By now it was Monday, the 2nd of December, and Explora arranged for our four-hour drive to Punta Arenas, complete with lunch included at an isolated roadhouse. "Have you been to my house before?" asked the proprietor/hostess as she seated us at a table prepared with Explora-branded menus. The driver then dropped us off at the Punta Arenas harbor for our four-night cruise aboard the Australis ship the Ventus. The ship can accomodate 210 guests but seemed only two-thirds full.
High winds kept us from a zodiac excursion to a penguin colony and later prevented us from landing on Cape Horn, though we did get views of its famous lighthouse. In calmer weather, we used zodiacs to land on several islands for hikes or simply to look at the face of a glacier. In one day aboard the Ventus we saw 11 named glaciers. When we passed the French Glacier, Edith Piaf songs were played and sparkling wine was served. When we passed the German Glacier, it was beer. We were offered bites of pizza when we passed the Italian Glacier. We had it so much better than sailors aboard the Wager almost three centuries earlier.
The cruise ended in Ushuaia, Argentina, where we disembarked in late morning, dropped off our luggage at our hotel, the Lennox, and booked an afternoon visit to a penguin colony on a nearby island. Penguins at last, the megellanic ones. Ushuaia, which calls itself the end of the world, is about as tourist-centric as a town can be, and one night was enough for us.
The next day we flew Aerolineas Argentinas to Buenos Aires, where we stayed at the Miravida Soho Hotel & Wine Bar for three nights. Some people love Buenos Aires for its tango clubs, its Paris-like boulevards and architecture, its complicated history and its Argentine red meats and its Argentine wines. The wines and food can be very good, but its complicated history and its topsy-turvy economy have produced a city that appears very down at the heels, especially as a severe austerity program in 2024 has cut jobs and increased poverty. It seemed much more cheerful when we were there in 2007. At the Miravida we were expecting a lively Argentine wine bar that wasn't there. It's a small hotel apparently created inside a vaguely beaux arts mansion. We saw no customers at its three-stool bar during our stay, but it does offer scheduled wine tastings with a sommelier brought in from outside. We did one with six other people. It was a lot of fun but it wasn't like being able to choose flights from a long list of wines at a real wine bar.
On Tuesday, the 10th of December, we said adios to Latin American and boarded our 10:30 p.m. red-eye American Airlines flight to Dallas. We arrived home in San Diego around 10 a.m. that Wednesday.
About Explora
We have almost never stayed at all-inclusive resorts, so I'm not sure how Explora compares with other players in this sector of the hospitality industry. Explora picked us up at the airports closest to the three lodges we visited, provided all our meals, alcoholic drinks, and a wide variety of excursions to explore Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and its moai sculptures, the Atacama Desert (at elevations from 2400 meters to almost 4700 meters above sea level) and Torres del Paine National Park (the lodge is actually in the park). All for one price per lodge, including transfer back to an airport or, in our case, a cruise port. We got a small discount for booking multiple lodges, and another guest who made last-minute bookings at two lodges said his travel agent had gotten him a 20 percent discount.
Discounts are helpful. Fodor's travel guide for Chile makes a point of the high prices charged by Explora, though it offers a lot for the money, including pools and spas at each location, well-planned excursions with expert guides and drivers, laundry service and swag including nice water bottles, small dry bags for boating, chocolates on the pillows, and more. At Atacama and Torres del Paine, Explora offers horseback riding and has its own conservation areas. In the Atacama, there is a hot springs pool that only Explora guests have access to. Just outside the Torres del Paine National Park, Explora has a ranch with stables for trail rides and a former sheep-shearing shed where Explora gauchos prepared a barbecue with whole lambs, steak, chicken, sausages, empanadas and a large table of side dishes.
But here comes the "but." You're pretty much locked into the Explora experience. We did get a brief tour of the one small town on Rapa Nui and a couple of its handicraft markets, but our interaction with the locals was pretty much limited to our guides, some of whom were Rapa Nui natives. Our excursions were focused on the island's mysterious past, not its 21st-century life. In the Atacama, the lodge is in the village of San Pedro de Atacama, but once at the property, you wouldn't know there was any local community. San Pedro has an archaeological museum, a meteorite museum, an historic adobe church and, according to one of our guides, excellent places for empanadas and ice cream. We saw none of these, with excursions instead focused on the area's volcanic mountains, geysers and other natural wonders. There was one exception: en route to some volcanos, our favorite guide, Carolina, suggested a quick stop at a remote village so we could see "the second oldest" church in Chile. My complaint about Explora's ignoring present-day local culture doesn't apply to Torres del Paine since there's nothing there but spectacular mountains and lakes that we were there to see
Meals are a big concern when traveling and I'd say the food experience at Explora is uneven. Breakfasts are buffets with an opportunity to order eggs or maybe waffles (Rapa Nui) or pancakes (Atacama). But I've seen better breakfast buffets at economy chain motels in the U.S. Lunches would include one or two appetizers, two or three choices for the main dish (and always a vegetarian option but never vegan), and a small dessert. Dinners would be similar but with more appetizers and larger servings. At Atacama we met a Brazilian food journalist who told us that the executive chef at that lodge is a celebrity chef from Lima, Peru, with monthslong waiting lists at his restaurants there. Here his dishes stressed local and unusual Andean ingredients, though he included some "comfort dishes" for less adventurous guests. Meals at Rapa Nui and Torres del Paine were acceptable but seldom remarkable. The one thing I could count on at all three lodges was tuna, whether cooked, raw or in a ceviche. Always excellent. The same wines (a rose, a sparkling, two whites and three reds) were offered at all the lodges, but the cocktail lists were different. Atacama and Torres del Paine offered calafate sours, pisco sours made with red calafate berries. A bit less sweet than a regular pisco sour.
My advice is not to avoid Explora. But at Rapa Nui and especially at San Pedro, I'd try to arrange some time just wandering the streets.
Here are a few photos, in no particular order, from our Nov. 15 to Dec. 11 2024 trip. Links in the text above will take you to postings about each of our stops and more photos.
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| I took this photo with my phone from our table when we sat down for lunch after arriving at Explora's lodge in Torres del Paine National Park. The mountains are the Cuernos del Paine (the Horns of Paine) and can be seen from various points in the park. In person they seem much closer and bigger than they do in this photo. The dock belongs to Explora and is home to the hotel's catamaran, which offers excusions on Pehoe Lake. |
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| A sloping hallway connects the lobby, various seating areas, the bar and the dining room at Explora Torres del Paine, Note the inconspicuous radiator along the wall. Southern Patagonia never gets warm. |
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| Kodiaks from our ship, the Ventus, took us close to glaciers in the Beagle Channel. |
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| Land and boat excusions are offered at kiosks along the harbor at Usuaia, the sothernmost city in Argentina, which promotes itself as "the end of the world" and is the jumping off point for most cruises to Antartica. Slightly farther south is Puerto William, Chile, a tiny community where our ship stopped to clear Chilean customs before entering Argentine waters. The mountains in the background are part of the Andes, the world's longest chain of mountains. |
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| Our hotel, the Miravida Soho in the Palermo Soho neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Our "attic loft" room had the two windows at the top. To the right was an open but relatively private terrace with a large jacuzzi tub, which we might have used had the hotel supplied robes. |
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| The facade design of Hotel Cumbres in Santiago is repeated in screens in the guest rooms. |
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