New to Van Clarke? Subscribe to our newsletter for 15% off your first order. Start your haircare journey today.
Okay, it’s a bit further than Marbella, but if you love dramatic landscapes and fewer people, then add this to your list.
“Why Chile?” said Jack back in February, “We don’t speak Spanish!” “You don’t speak Spanish when you go to Spain either”, I replied. Nonplussed, he didn’t mention it again until September when one of their favourite TV shows, 'Race across the World’, hosted a clutch of celebrities struggling to get across South America from the East coast of Brazil to Chile on limited funds with no phones and no planes allowed.
We were heading out for October half term with eleven days to play with. Suddenly Chile was on the map for them, and they’d seen the amazing landscapes on screen.
Chile has a truly dramatic topography, looking onto icebergs at one end and the driest desert in the world at the other, with a central wine region, the most verdant forests, 2000 volcanoes, including the highest in the world, and with many still active, crystal clear lakes, serenely flowing rivers and roaring cascades for white water rafting. Three dozen 6000m peaks, one, only 2000 metres short of Everest, plus miles of beaches and thousands of islands as well as the famous Easter Island, a plane journey away, unless like Thor Heyerdahl you have a wooden raft for the 2000 mile trip. Chile makes for a great adventure in nature for kids and adults.
I like to take the boys out of their comfort zone, but once I realised just how vast the country was, we had to choose between north or south. We picked the middle and the north, putting Patagonia in the south on the backburner for another trip.
After a 14 hour direct overnight flight from London, extended to 16 hours while the ground crew struggled to remove the jetty from the plane, we landed ready for our ten hour road trip.
Long haul flights leave me a little disorientated and gloomy when I disembark, and I worried again about putting the twins through a trip with so many transfer days. Was it too ambitious? Should we have just stayed closer to home with a bucket and spade resort vacation?
They were going to have to work a bit for this one. South America is a big continent with huge distances, and if you want to feel it and see it you have to be prepared for distance travel.
Chile is nearly 2700 miles from top to bottom, similar to New York - LA, though only about 40 miles across at its narrowest point. A long toll road down through the country made our ten hour trip easier than much shorter journeys in the south of England.
The landscapes are beautiful, even as we drove south out from Santiago airport, and through their wine region with the Andes gracing one flank and the much lower Chilean Coastal Range on the Pacific Ocean edge. Chile is the world’s 7th biggest exporter of wine, and the vistas reminded me of the pristine wine regions of South Africa.
We broke the transfer day with dinner at a local restaurant and a night in a travel hotel. One large room for family bonding when not arguing over the single bathroom, and two double beds.
It left just two hours of driving the next morning to arrive at destination one.
Located near the start of their lake district going south, and not far from the town of Pucon, it’s an area where Chileans holiday and have second homes.
This area and the surrounding peaks reach nearly 2000 metres altitude. It was the one cloudy day with drizzle, but the canopy was so thick it barely bothered us, and in some way added to the mood of this temperate rainforest.
The long upward trails show distinctly changing vegetation, but all evergreen and dense, teeming with life, with twisted roots and rotten, fallen trees covered in moss and lichen adding to this atmospheric walk through a Tolkien novel to Middle Earth
Verdant smells and sometimes of skunk, mountain mists obscuring crashing waterfalls and rushing rivers left us wanting to go higher and continue our hike but the boys were tiring. James even found a hobbit hole for a cheeky nap.
So we returned to base. After a long trek in the misty forest a hot tub by the lake was a perfect rest.
The sky was often so blue because much of the time we were high above any cloud level.
True Tarte Tatins take time (alliteration not intended 😊), the preparation of this version is super quick. I used up a spare roll of puff pastry; apples and nuts are always on hand here.
Try these delicious treats at home. You won't be disappointed.
Here's a bit of fun for Christmas which the kids will love having a go with. You'll need the cookie cutters, but they come in all shapes, sizes and designs nowadays.