Chile

6 routes

Real JourneysApproximate

In Patagonia: Chatwin's Road South to the Sloth Cave

In 1974 Bruce Chatwin set out for Patagonia to find his own "piece of brontosaurus": a scrap of skin sent to his grandmother by her cousin, Charley Milward the sailor. Six months of travel became In Patagonia, the book that made his name. This route follows the quest from a natural history museum in La Plata through the Welsh coast, Butch Cassidy's cabin and Milward's house in Punta Arenas, to the cave where the skin was found. Chatwin's tales were not always literal, so most pins mark areas, not scenes.

5 locations3/5 visitable

HistoryApproximate

San Martín: Across the Andes, 1817

In January 1817 General José de San Martín led an army out of Mendoza and over the Andes to free Chile from Spanish rule. The crossing took 21 days, and the feat has been compared to Hannibal's and Napoleon's crossings of the Alps. The route follows the campaign from the hill monument in Mendoza and the El Plumerillo camp, over the two passes the columns used, to the victories at Chacabuco and Maipú. The mountain stops are pinned approximately; the passes are long, and the army's exact tracks are not.

6 locations2/6 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Che Guevara and Alberto Granado: The 1952 Journey

In January 1952 Ernesto Guevara, a 23-year-old medical student from Buenos Aires, and his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist, set off to cross South America on an old 1939 Norton 500 they called La Poderosa, "The Mighty One". The bike died in Chile, and they went on by truck, steamer, raft, horse and on foot — some 8,000 kilometres in about nine months, ending at a leper colony on the Amazon and in Caracas. Guevara's diary of the trip, published decades later as The Motorcycle Diaries, records how poverty, exploited miners and the lepers they worked with changed him; within a few years he was "Che", a leader of the Cuban Revolution. The route follows the journey from both men's accounts as summarised by historians.

7 locations5/7 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Ida Pfeiffer's First Journey Around the World

In May 1846 Ida Pfeiffer, a 48-year-old Viennese widow with grown-up sons and very little money, set off to go round the world — mostly alone, on cargo ships, on horseback and with caravans. She came home two and a half years later, in the middle of a revolution, and turned her diaries into a bestseller translated into seven languages. The Royal Geographical Society in London would not admit her, because it did not accept women. The route follows her first world journey in order, from her own book, A Woman's Journey Round the World: Hamburg, the Brazilian forest, Cape Horn and Valparaíso, Tahiti, Canton, Baghdad, Persia and home. There are no visitor tips for Iraq or Iran.

9 locations7/9 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle

In December 1831 a 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with a passion for beetles and rocks sailed from Plymouth as an unpaid naturalist on HMS Beagle, a ten-gun survey brig. The voyage was meant to take two years and took five. Charles Darwin came home with crates of fossils, skins and notebooks — and with questions about the islands that would lead him, two decades later, to On the Origin of Species. The route follows the ship around the world in order, using Darwin's own Journal of Researches for dates and details: the volcanic Cape Verde islands, the Brazilian forest, the fossil beds of Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, a great Chilean earthquake, the Galápagos, Cape Town and home to Falmouth.

9 locations4/9 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Endurance: Shackleton's Rescue Journey

Ernest Shackleton set out in 1914 to cross Antarctica on foot. He never even landed. His ship, Endurance, was trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, drifted for ten months and was crushed and sunk, leaving 28 men on the ice with three lifeboats. What followed — months on drifting floes, a landing on Elephant Island, an 800-mile voyage in an open boat and a march across the mountains of South Georgia — ended with every one of them coming home alive. The route follows that escape from South Georgia to the wreck and back, with dates from Shackleton's own account, South. Most of these places can only be reached by expedition ship.

7 locations2/7 visitable