Chile

Chile was the country that kept surprising me — not because I expected nothing, but because every time I thought I'd understood the scale of it, something larger would appear. I came in through Santiago, and the first thing that hit me wasn't the city at all — it was the wall of the Andes sitting right behind it, this enormous pale-grey ridge that you see from every rooftop and every street corner. The city has a certain dry, warm confidence about it: wide boulevards, loud murals on shutters, and the whole Cerro San Cristóbal hill rising up from the middle of it all.

Getting out of the city was even better. A day trip east into the mountains and suddenly the road was threading through mineral-streaked canyon walls, the kind of landscape that looks like someone has been painting in ochre and white for ten thousand years. At the end of that drive, a pool of milky turquoise water — Termas de Colina — sitting at altitude with the Andes crumbling down around it. Floating there, the air completely dry and the mountains completely still, was one of those moments that doesn't need any embellishment.

Valparaíso is its own separate world — an hour from Santiago but it feels like a different country. The port city spills down a dozen hills, and every wall is covered in work that ranges from proper commissioned murals to raw tags. The light there has a coastal brightness that makes the colours pop harder. I ate lunch in a restaurant where one window opened straight onto the bay, the Pacific sitting flat and grey-blue below, and that combination of seafood and that view might be the most Chilean thing I experienced.