The Wrong Turn
I landed in Santiago with the kind of sleep deprivation that makes every street corner look like a film noir set. Thirty hours of flights and airport lounges will do that. The plan was simple: hit the highlights, tick the boxes, file the story. Instead, I found myself standing in my hostel at midnight, wide awake, staring at my phone like it held the secrets of the universe.
A girl from reception—Marisol, covered in tattoos of Atacama salt flats—saw me pacing and said: "You can't sleep? Good. Chile doesn't sleep either. Not really."
She wasn't wrong.
I should've flown straight to the north, to San Pedro de Atacama, where the stars go on forever and the desert swallows sound. But instead, I got recommendations that pulled me south first, into the lakes region where the forests are so thick they seem to generate their own darkness.
The Kayak That Led Nowhere
Villa la Angostura appeared in my feed like a postcard someone had left on a bench. Alpine, quiet, ringed by mountains that looked computer-generated. I booked the Guided Half Day Kayak Tour with Picnic in Villa la Angostura Guided Half Day Kayak Tour with Picnic in Villa la Angostura half-delirious on my second night awake, thinking: water will fix this. Water fixes everything.
It didn't.
The guide was a young bloke named Carlos who'd clearly seen too many red-eyed gringos stumble into his tour. He didn't ask questions. We paddled out onto Nahuel Huapi Lake at 6 a.m., when the water was so still it looked like spilled mercury. The kayak cut through glacier-fed turquoise, past rocky outcrops where the forest climbed so steeply it seemed to be escaping something. Mist hung in the trees like trapped ghosts.
Carlos kept talking—facts about the lake, the mountains, the history. I heard maybe half of it. The rest of my brain was still spinning on a turbine of espresso and paranoia, convinced that the mountain across the water was getting closer. That something up there was watching.
We stopped for the picnic on a rocky beach. Carlos unpacked thermos coffee, bread, cheese. I tried to eat. The food tasted like cardboard mixed with anxiety. Carlos studied me the way you'd study a faulty engine.
"You should go to Pucón," he said finally. "Climb the volcano. It'll help you sleep."
I laughed. "Mountain climbing at altitude is definitely the move when you're already wrecked."
He shrugged. "Trust me."
The Mountain That Glows
Pucón was four hours away. I drove it in a rental that smelled like old cigarettes and regret, arriving at dusk when the whole town had this nervous energy—everyone drinking in bars, nobody really talking. The volcano loomed above it all, dark and ancient and radiating the kind of threat that keeps you awake even more.
I showed up at the departure point at 4 a.m. for the Villarrica Volcano Ascent Villarrica Volcano Ascent. Still no sleep. The guide, a woman named Rosa with the calves of someone who'd climbed this mountain approximately six thousand times, looked at me like I was either very brave or very stupid. She was probably right on both counts.
The first three hours were fine—steep, but manageable. Forest gives way to volcanic rock, rock gives way to scree, scree gives way to the kind of landscape that looks like the world's crust got turned inside out. My legs worked on autopilot. My mind was somewhere else entirely, probably still on that kayak, probably still convinced the mountains were getting closer.
Around hour five, something shifted.
We crested a ridge and the snow started. Not the pretty postcard kind—raw, wind-scoured, brutal. The summit sat another hour above us, and the air was thin enough that every breath felt like negotiating with your own lungs. Rosa kept checking on me, not unkindly, just like a shepherd watching a particularly stupid sheep.
But then we reached it.
The crater was smoking. Actually smoking—hot gas venting from fractures in the rock, the rim glowing faintly with heat. One of Chile's most active volcanoes, doing its thing six thousand metres above sea level while I stood there half-conscious and completely unravelled. The sun was rising behind us, painting everything gold and red. The sky was turning that particular shade of blue that only exists at altitude, that makes you feel like you've stumbled outside of regular Earth.
I stood there for maybe twenty minutes without moving. Rosa let me. She'd probably seen this reaction before—the moment when the mountains finally shut your brain up.
I slept that night for the first time since arriving in Chile. Twelve hours straight, like someone had switched me off.
The Sound Bath at the End of Everything
I stayed in Patagonia too long after that, chasing something I couldn't name. By the time I made it north to San Pedro de Atacama, my sleep schedule had inverted again—I was wired at midnight and useless by noon. The desert does that to you. It strips away the usual rhythm and leaves you operating on some stranger's clock.
Maybe that's why the Gong Bath in the Magic Forest in San Pedro de Atacama Gong Bath in the Magic Forest in San Pedro de Atacama worked.
I showed up at sunset, still skeptical, still running on fumes. The therapist was this serene-looking woman named Valentina who didn't bother with small talk. She laid me on a mat in actual forest—not a spa, actual trees with actual soil—and told me to stop thinking.
Then she played a gong.
I can't really explain what happens when someone plays a gong for two hours straight while you're lying on the ground in the middle of nowhere. It's not relaxation, exactly. It's more like your brain decides to stop arguing and just... surrenders. The vibrations move through the earth into your body. The forest gets darker. The gong's tone seems to shift and settle into something almost alive.
Somewhere in hour one, I cried. Just tears, no drama, just my nervous system finally admitting defeat.
When it was done, I sat up. The stars were out. The desert was utterly silent. I felt like I'd been reset.
The Places That Actually Exist
I made it to Valparaíso in the last week of the trip, stumbling into the Valpo in 1 day: Authentic + Famous! Semi-private Walking Tour & Public Transport Valpo in 1 day: Authentic + Famous! Semi-private walking tour & public transport because I'd been told that if you want to understand Chile, you can't just stay in the mountains.
Our guide, Rodrigo, was a local who moved through the city like he owned it—which in a way, he did. We took funiculars up crumbling hillsides, rattled on electric trolleybuses past murals and street markets, got genuinely lost on purpose. No sanitised tourist trail. Just the actual, complicated, beautiful mess of a Chilean port city.
Valparaíso doesn't pretend to be anything. It's colourful and chaotic and full of people trying to live. We grabbed empanadas from someone's front window. Rodrigo knew the owner's mother. We sat in cafés that definitely hadn't been Instagram-optimised.
It was perfect precisely because it wasn't trying to be.
The Winery at the Other End of Time
My final stop was the Legacy Family Tour Lunch or Dinner Pairing 4 Strokes Legacy Family Tour Lunch or Dinner Pairing 4 Strokes at Butón Budinich in the Cachapoal Valley. By this point, I was operating on the kind of clarity that only comes from complete exhaustion—I could see everything very clearly because I'd stopped caring about any of it.
The winery was like walking into a family's diary written in vats and oak and concrete. Greda vats that'd been there since the Spanish were still running things. Fudres sitting in dark corners. French oak next to stainless steel. The whole thing was a contradiction, and somehow that made perfect sense.
Tomás, the sommelier doing the tour, walked us through four wines while telling stories about generations of the same family choosing what to do with grapes. Each glass tasted like a decision someone had made decades ago.
I paid attention. Really paid attention. For the first time since I'd landed, my brain was quiet.
The Way Home
Chile didn't fix my insomnia. But it changed what the insomnia was about.
I came looking for stories. Instead, I found that the mountains and forests and deserts and oceans were all asking questions I hadn't learned to answer yet. The gong was the only thing that admitted there might not be answers—just vibrations and darkness and the occasional moment of light.
I left Chile more wrecked than I arrived. But finally, mercifully, I slept on the flight home.
