Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile

“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.