The Setup: Burnt Out in Buenos Aires
I rolled into Santiago with precisely three weeks, a half-empty water bottle, and the kind of exhaustion that comes from six months of 'efficiency'. Global Hobo doesn't pay for loitering, right? Wrong. Dead wrong.
I'd spent the previous summer thrashing through Peru like a man possessed—fourteen cities in thirty days, snarky captions written at midnight, the works. My editor gently suggested I was writing like a man speedrunning a video game. She was right. I'd forgotten that travel isn't a box-ticking exercise; it's supposed to feel like something.
So when I landed in Santiago, I made a promise to myself: no rushing. No 'did Peru in a fortnight' flexing. Just slow. Just real.
Chile, I figured, would teach me. It nearly killed me first.
The High (And I Mean High)
My mate Saskia—a Scottish climbing photographer who freelances with us—had already made it down to Pucón. She'd been pestering me for weeks about the Villarrica Volcano Ascent Villarrica Volcano Ascent, so naturally I took a bus from Santiago that felt like it was held together with duct tape and prayer, arrived at midnight shattered, and agreed to her plan without thinking.
We started at 6 a.m. Mistakes were made.
Look, I'm not a mountain person. I'm a 'paddle on the ocean' person. But Villarrica is one of Chile's most active volcanoes, which meant the views were genuinely mental—dense Patagonian forest below, volcanic rock above, and somewhere in the middle, me wheezing like a troubled accordion.
The eight-hour slog wasn't the postcard experience you might expect. It was proper work. My quads hated me. My lungs filed a formal complaint. At about hour five, I was convinced I'd die on a volcano in the middle of nowhere, and somehow that felt fair.
But then you break treeline. The forest disappears. Suddenly you're on ash and stone, standing on the back of something genuinely alive. Villarrica still smokes. You can smell it. And despite the pain and the altitude and the fact that I'd definitely regret this tomorrow, something clicked. This was real. This mattered.
Saskia grinned at me from the summit. I was too knackered to smile back.
The Reset: Patagonian Water Therapy
I spent the next two days barely leaving my cabin. Muscles I didn't know existed were having a mutual rebellion. Saskia sent me a photo of her calves with the caption 'never again' and then immediately booked a different volcano. She's mad.
But I needed to move. Not fast—move. So I drove north-west towards Villa la Angostura, a small town in the Lake District that feels like someone photoshopped Switzerland into Argentina and nobody complained.
I've paddled plenty of oceans. Lakes, though—freshwater lakes surrounded by Patagonian beech forest—were new. 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 mostly because I couldn't be arsed walking anywhere.
Our guide, Cristian, had the exact energy of someone who'd lived next to a lake so long he'd become part of it. We paddled out onto Nahuel Huapi Lake in the early morning, before the wind picked up, and the water was that glacier-fed turquoise that makes your brain glitch—impossible colour, too clean to be real.
No rushing. Just the sound of paddles, dripping water, and mist rising off the forest. We stopped at a rocky outcrop for the picnic—sourdough bread, local cheese, some kind of pickled vegetable situation that Cristian kept calling 'tradition'. We didn't talk much. Didn't need to.
For the first time in months, I wasn't thinking about word count.
Sideways Through Valparaíso
After a week of quiet—too much quiet, actually, I was getting weird—I needed people. Noise. Life. So I pointed myself at Valparaíso, the port city that looks like someone stacked a bunch of mismatched houses on a cliff and said 'sure, that's a city'.
I could've done the usual thing: random wandering, getting properly lost, writing about how 'authentic' it felt. Instead, I did 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.
Yes, I booked a structured tour. The old Roo would've found that embarrassing.
Our guide, Patricia, was a local who'd lived in Valpo her whole life and moved through the city like she owned it (she sort of did, philosophically speaking). Instead of the tourist highlights, we rattled through on funiculars held together by decades of faith, caught electric trolleybuses that squealed like angry geese, and she showed me the neighborhoods where actual humans live—not the Instagram backdrops.
We got coffee from a hole-in-the-wall spot where the owner knew her. We bought empanadas from a cart and ate them on a bench. We rode the old train. Patricia told stories about Valpo's poetry scene, its maritime history, the families who've been there for generations.
Structured? Yeah. But it felt real because Patricia made it matter. She wasn't performing tourism; she was showing me her home.
The Weird Turn: Atacama's Sonic Wormhole
From Valparaíso, I flew north to San Pedro de Atacama—driest place on Earth, looks like Mars, your skin immediately starts filing for divorce. I'd been riding high on all this 'slow travel' momentum, and I was feeling good. Grounded. Centred. Spiritually unblocked or whatever.
Then I did something completely unhinged: I booked a Gong Bath in the Magic Forest in San Pedro de Atacama Gong Bath in the Magic Forest in San Pedro de Atacama.
In the middle of the Atacama Desert. There is no forest here. There's stone and sand and the kind of silence that makes your ears ring.
But that's the thing about Chile—it surprises you. The 'Magic Forest' actually exists: a planted zone with actual trees growing in the desert, and someone built a wellness space in there. The therapist, a woman named Carolina, had me lie on a mat and then spent two hours playing vibrational instruments—gongs, singing bowls, weird things I couldn't name.
I was cynical. I was ready to hate it. But lying there in the dark, surrounded by trees that shouldn't exist, listening to frequencies that made my chest vibrate—I couldn't think. Couldn't write. Couldn't plan. Just... existed.
It was deeply strange. Deeply necessary.
The Story in the Bottle
My last stop before heading home was the Cachapoal Valley, wine country. I'm not a wine guy—I'm a beer in a plastic cup at the beach kind of guy—but I went to Butón Budinich for the Legacy Family Tour Lunch or Dinner Pairing 4 Strokes Legacy Family Tour Lunch or Dinner Pairing 4 Strokes.
The winery is old. Not 'oh, established 1995' old. Actually old. The family's been making wine since before my country existed as a nation. The tour walked through everything—greda vats (clay vessels that are centuries old and still used), ancient wooden fudres, French oak barrels, modern stainless steel tanks. Each one tells a different story about how they make wine.
The lunch was paired thoughtfully. Not ostentatiously. A local red with some kind of slow-braised meat situation. The winemaker, a bloke named Roberto, sat down and talked about decisions—about which traditions to keep, which to change, how to honour the past while moving forward.
It hit different, somehow. This wasn't tourism. It was a family's argument with time, plated up and served with bread.
The Actual Lesson
I went to Chile burnt out, exhausted, trying to consume it like a checklist. What I learned is that slow doesn't mean lazy—it means paying attention. It means taking eight hours to climb a volcano and feeling it. It means letting a lake teach you to be quiet. It means letting a city's rhythm dictate your pace instead of forcing it to match yours.
I came home with fewer destinations stamped in my passport. But I came home remembering why I travel in the first place: not to own the experience, but to let it own you.
Chile moves slow. You have to move slow to keep up.
