Travels in a thin country : a journey through Chile
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Travels in a thin country : a journey through Chile
Little, Brown, 1994
Available at 1 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-304)
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Squeezed in between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide - not a country which lends itself easily to maps. Nor, as Sara Wheeler found out, does it easily lend itself to a lone woman with two carpetbags who wishes to travel from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the world to the sepulchral wastes of Antarctica. Yet, despite bureaucratic, geographic and climatic setbacks, Sara Wheeler managed to complete that journey in six months, discovering en route a country that is quite extraordinarily diverse. This is an account of an odyssey which included Christmas Day spent with a llama sandwich on the Tropic of Capricorn at 13,000 feet, a sex hotel in the capital, four days wedged aboard a cargo boat, a wet tent and and high street bank in Patagonia. In Santiago she talked her way into the prisons, in Tierra del Fuego she hitched a lift around Cape Horn on a supply boat delivering a coffin, and in the high Andes she lived on a Vedic commune.
From Easter in the slums to an eventful week on Robinson Crusoe Island, the author picks her way through the complex reality of South American Catholicism and the fragile peace of a newly-born democracy. She also drinks a lot of wine. This improbable ribbon of land has been home to Andean tribes who remain the most scientifically neglected people in the world; it has been conquered by conquistadores, pillaged by Sir Francis Drake (no hero in Chile), exploited by foreign imperialists, blighted by the Panama Canal, governed by the world's first democratically-elected Marxist president and stamped upon by one of this century's most reviled dictators. And, as Sara Wheeler discovered, they have all left their mark on today's Chile - an extravagantly complex country, hidden behind the Andes and stretching to the end of the world. Other work by the author includes "An Island Apart".
by "Nielsen BookData"