Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile by Sara Wheeler
What I want from a travel book is to feel as if I have taken the journey along with the author. This book succeeds in this, and it also makes me dearly wish that I could take a similar journey. Well, maybe not similar. I’d happily go without the desert heat, getting scabies on damp mattresses, being stuck in Patagonia wondering if/when I’d be able to catch a ride on a boat, being lonely, and eating food of questionable quality. But the rest of it sounded awesome.
Wheeler travels from the north of Chile all the way to Antarctica, with a few backtracks to cover things she misses along the way. She’s fortunate enough to have friends to visit, who give her a more in-depth look into the culture than most tourists are able to secure. She’s also far more inured to hardship than I would be, even though much of her hardship is self-inflicted by a fondness for pisco sours. Wheeler intersperses details of her travel with stories and information about the history of Chile, especially its rough history with Pinochet (still fresh in the minds of people when the book was written in the early 1990s) and with its historical subjugation of indigenous people.
If you want a good secondhand adventure and/or if you’re interested in South America, this is a good addition to your library.
