South America

In Chile, if you want to see everything at once. The country stretches about 4,300 kilometres from north to south and never exceeds 400 kilometres in width. In a single drive up you go from the driest desert on earth to the glaciers of Patagonia, a thread unrolled in my Chilean travel notebooks. Argentina works the other way, by sheer mass. The southern share alone covers 1,140,532 square kilometres across five provinces. The two fit together well, crossing at the passes. It took me weeks to grasp the scale. You look at a map, then you start counting in driving days. The Atlantic side is in my Argentinian travel stories.

South of Santiago, between Araucanía and Los Lagos. This is araucaria country, the national tree, which grows above 1,200 metres, reaches 50 metres and lives close to 2,000 years; the araucaria madre of Conguillío park is dated at 1,800, and it is under those branches that the mythical land of Araucanía begins. Around it, volcanoes set the pace: Villarrica peaks at 2,847 metres and has had some fifty eruptions since 1558, the last in 2015, Llaima rises to 3,125 metres, and Osorno to 2,661 above Lake Llanquihue and its 178 square kilometres. I ended the day in the Los Pozones hot springs, between 30 and 42 degrees. The rest of the country waits in Chile from north to south.

In the salt lagoons, on both sides of the border. In Chile, the Salar de Atacama covers 3,000 square kilometres of grey salt crust, and the Los Flamencos national reserve, the first site co-managed by the state and the Lickan Antai people, protects the Chaxa, Barros Negros, Salada and La Punta lagoons, where my mornings in pink flamingo were spent. Three species meet there: the Chilean flamingo with grey legs and red joints, the Andean one with yellow legs and black wingtips, and the James with a yellow bill tipped in black. They fly at 60 kilometres an hour. Higher up, in Bolivia, Laguna Cañapa and its 1.4 square kilometres hold them too, ringed by volcanoes, as told in the lagoons of the altiplano.

Like a planet someone had drained of water. The Atacama is the driest desert on earth, 100,000 square kilometres. San Pedro de Atacama serves as base camp, founded in 1450 at 2,400 metres and home to about 5,000 people, and it is the starting point of my days alone on Mars. The Licancabur volcano closes the horizon at 5,916 metres, and the Chuquicamata mine digs a pit five kilometres by three, a kilometre deep. The moon valley next door has been a natural sanctuary since 1982. At dawn, the Tatio geysers erupt at 4,300 metres in minus ten degrees. Across the border, the Salar de Uyuni lays out 10,580 square kilometres of salt in eleven layers over 120 metres, which is where a dream of another world takes over.

On Lago Argentino, all year round. Los Glaciares national park, created in 1937 and listed by Unesco in 1981, covers 600,000 hectares and holds 47 major glaciers. The lake itself spreads over 1,466 square kilometres, reaches 500 metres deep and takes its milky colour from sediment; thirteen glaciers pour into it, and I sail between them in a drift of frostwork beauties. Perito Moreno, 80 kilometres from El Calafate, measures 30 kilometres long by 5 wide. It advances 700 metres a year, until it blocks one arm of the lake. Upsala remains the largest glacier in the southern hemisphere at 1,000 square kilometres. Of an iceberg you see only 15 per cent. The rest of the country is in the roads north out of Patagonia.

Tierra del Fuego, named by Magellan in 1520. The archipelago covers 68,000 square kilometres, 400 kilometres north to south and 700 east to west. The Isla Grande, 48,000 square kilometres, is shared with Chile, and it is the island I cross in an Argentinian end of the world. The mean annual temperature sits around 5.4 degrees, and summer moves between 7 and 17. The national park, created in 1960 across 63,000 hectares, protects the southernmost subantarctic forests; Bahía Lapataia closes national route 3 and the Panamerican highway. On the Chilean side, Torres del Paine has covered 181,000 hectares since 1959, and the word paine means blue in Aónikenk. The wind tears water off the lakes. The range next door is in my fifty shades of blue.

Easter Island, far out in the Pacific. It lies 3,700 kilometres off the mainland coast and fits into 162 square kilometres of rock. It was reached on an Easter day in 1722 by Jacob Roggeveen, which is how it got its name, and that ground is walked in the mysterious Rapa Nui. Surveys have recorded 887 moai. At Ahu Tongariki, fifteen statues were raised again after the 1960 tidal wave; at Ahu Akivi, seven scouts face the ocean, the only ones on the island to do so. The largest moai ever erected, at Te Pito Kura, stands about twelve metres for 80 tonnes, and the pukao crowning them weigh nine to twelve tonnes. On the mainland, the stopover is the painted port of Valparaiso.