Travelers shouldn't let Chile slip away

Name one thing you know about Chile.

Tango? That's Argentina.

Tortillas? Not here.

Carnival? Try Brazil.

Think. Think of a long, skinny South American country in the shape of a backward "J" hemmed in between the Andes and the blue Pacific. The one where a poet named Neruda and a dictator named Pinochet lived. The one where wine comes from, the one with alpacas in the north, penguins in the south, with deserts, forests, beaches, mountains and a middle-class standard of living, yet which remains a 2,600-mile ribbon of mystery, often even to its citizens.

Sí. Yes. You've got it now.

"People come here expecting to see something primitive," says Felipe Moreno, a Santiago painter and musician. "They're very surprised."

Its tourist infrastructure is very good, especially in the central valley and coast, where 80 percent of the population lives.

Yet even experienced American tourists who have visited Brazil, Colombia, Peru or Argentina usually miss Chile. The dilemma for travelers? In Chile, distances are so vast there is no way to see everything in one trip.

The best one can hope for is to choose two drastically contrasting areas of the nation -- for instance, Arica, a small port town in far northern Chile, and Santiago/Valparaiso, big cities in the center -- and hope to get a larger feel for the place.

Even then, Chile has a way of slipping out of your grasp.

Santiago's passionate past

But all is not as it appears. Santiago has a passionate past.

Visit La Moneda, the presidential palace on Santiago's main plaza, and see the spot where, on Sept. 11, 1973, elected Socialist President Salvador Allende, power stripped by a coup and trapped in the palace, broadcast a radio announcement to the nation, then took his own life as bomber jets soared overhead.

That started the iron rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who remained in power until 1990.

Since then, four democratically elected presidents (the current one is Michelle Bachelet) have brought Chile into modern democracy.

Now, a statue of Allende stands near the palace. Friendly ceremonial palace guards in elaborate uniforms of creamy white pose with tourists. Yesterday's tears are today's stepping stones. Yesterday's passion is today's calm.

Never one of those poor, struggling poet types, Neruda loved the finer things in life, including women (he was married three times), nice digs (he had multiple houses in Chile), and traveling (he was a diplomat, sometimes in exile).

Track down his home in the restaurant-rich Bellavista artists section of Santiago, and you will be delighted. Neruda's love nest, La Chascona, is a bright blue, funky abode with curved windows and one of his most famous love poems engraved on six pillars in front. The poem is "I Ask for Silence" ("and inside me I am dark: like a well whose water/ night drops stars into/ then moves on alone through the field").

As was said about Hemingway, Neruda didn't use many words -- he just used the right ones.

"We have many things in front of us, but only a few people can see deeper than that," says Moreno.

Sixty miles west, Chile's second-largest city, Valparaiso, is the refreshingly goofy sister to Santiago. Houses are a hodge podge of bright blue, yellow and pink, roofed with shipping container metal and painted with nautical paint. They perch on the hillsides of the Pacific port city founded by the Spanish in 1536.

Try one, and you'll see the ground through the floorboards, which don't quite meet.

Think of it as a metaphor for this slapdash port city.

Neruda also had a house in Valparaiso. The quirky four-story house, called La Sebastiana, is topped by Neruda's writing study, which is paneled with bookshelves on two walls, has a giant photograph of Walt Whitman on the third and huge windows on the fourth. The panoramic view of the crescent-shaped Valparaiso harbor is enough to start anyone spouting poetry.

Surprises in the far north

If you see only Santiago and the central coast of Chile, it's like seeing New York and thinking you know everything about the United States.

First cool thing: Just outside Arica in the Azapa Valley is a small museum that contains the Chinchorro mummies. Some found in this region are 2,000 years older than the oldest-known Egyptian mummies. Lying beneath glass in the Museo Arqueologico, they appear to be a dad, mom and child. Their arms and legs stick out like sticks of brown clay. Their faces are covered with masks. Shreds of linen strips wrap around their bodies.

Often called the driest place on Earth, the desert around Arica preserved these ancient remains, along with other prehistoric weavings, pottery, petroglyphs and more.

Second cool thing: Arica has a cathedral designed by Gustave Eiffel -- yes, the designer of the Eiffel Tower.

The church, made of iron parts, was shipped in pieces to Arica and constructed in 1876. While the exterior of the Cathedral of San Marcos is cutely painted white and brown, the interior shows the flair that Eiffel had -- the graceful iron buttresses, the proportions, the charm.

At this far northern end of Chile, you can see wonderful olive farms and a bounty of vegetables and fruits in the market. Many people here are from Peru or Bolivia -- and, in fact, this was part of Peru until Chile won it in a war in 1876.