Christopher Stocks

Journalism

Desert Luxury | Evening Standard

With Argentina and Brazil now firmly ensonced on any serious traveller’s South American tour, it’s high time that Chile – easily the most varied country on the whole continent – finally started to get a decent look-in. Its 4,000-kilometre length offers everything from the driest desert on earth to the world’s third-biggest ice sheet and most things in between, with the added advantage that it’s one of the safest Latin American countries to visit, and among the most welcoming.

It may be a great destination, but what Chile, like the rest of Latin America, lacked until recently was the kind of smaller ‘design’ hotel we’ve grown accustomed to elsewhere. Things started to look up in 1987, when the Santiago-based Explora group opened Explora en Patagonia at the windswept southern tip of the continent. Though its uncompromisingly modernist shape might not be to everyone’s taste (especially in a prime stretch of virgin national park) Explora en Patagonia brought a new level of sophistication to what’s literally one of the ends of the earth.

The second Explora hotel opened a little over two years ago, near the primitive little backpackers’ town of San Pedro de Atacama, 2,400 metres above sea-level. Like its Patagonian precursor, what’s extraordinary about Explora en Atacama is not so much its design, striking though that is: it’s the audacity – some might say the folly – of building a $20 million luxury hotel in one of the harshest environments outside space. There are places in the Atacama Desert, which straddles Chile’s borders with Peru, where it hasn’t rained for over 400 years; it’s so dry, in fact, that NASA tested their moon vehicles there. So to stay in a hotel with four 25-metre swimming pools, shower-heads the size of hub-caps and a Jacuzzi in every room does feel pretty decadent, however much Explora protests that there’s actually plenty of water underground.

Equally remarkable is the quality of the food, delivered by refrigerated truck after a three-day drive from Santiago. Despite the fact that a hundred miles of lifeless mineral deposits separates the hotel from the nearest stretch of Pacific Ocean, the hotel’s outdoorsy restaurant, with its views across to the 5,900-metre high volcano of Licancabur, serves some of the best fresh seafood I’ve ever had, with a short yet varied menu which offers simply cooked but delicious dishes such as scallops in saffron sauce and conger eel – somewhat less terrifying on a plate than in the sea. With 90 staff for a maximum of 100 guests, standards of service are correspondingly high – and genuinely friendly.

But what most people (largely well-off South Americans and Europeans rather than Americans, who have, after all, deserts of their own) come for is not so much the food or the service than the twice-daily excursions which revolve around the hotel’s three main modes of transport: horses, mountain bikes, and a fleet of fiercely air-conditioned Ford Econoline people-carriers.

The surrounding landscape must be one of the strangest on earth: think Mars with air. Weirdly sculpted hills enclose the 300,000-hectare salt flats of the Salar de Atacama, whose slushy lakes are home to three varieties of flamingo and whose farthest edge – 50 miles away – is clearly visible thanks to the incredible dryness of the atmosphere. Immediately to the east rises the single vast slope of the Andes, topped by an almost continuous succession of conical grey volcanoes.

Explora’s excursions set out in every direction, rarely with more than six or seven people but always accompanied by an Explora guide, who carries a walkie-talkie, water and (if you’ve lucked out) bars of chocolate wherever you go – reassuring when you’re 40 miles from the nearest Mars bar. There’s something for everyone except, perhaps, devotees of extreme sports, who would mostly be gasping for breath at these altitudes anyway: hiking up to a pre-Inca fortress, galloping across the desert, mountain-biking at breakneck speed down jagged sandstone gullies, driving before dawn to the world’s highest geyser field… In summer you can climb volcanoes; when the moon’s full there are outings to see the dunes by its glittering silver light, supplanted by the sensational southern starscape when it’s dark.

For my money, though, it’s hard to beat the two-hour hike into the mountains that ends at Explora’s own hot springs, where you’re met, surreally, by a bevy of staff serving a buffet lunch. As rewards go, reclining in a thermal pool 3,300 metres up the Andes with a glass of wine and a selection of fresh fruit gives the idea of luxury an entirely new perspective. Let’s call it desert deluxe.