I spent the day climbing grassy slopes, where herds of docile guanacos grazed, up to a cave that had clear traces of paintings done by the indigenous Aeonikenk Indians, hunter nomads who left the area in 1900. They destroyed the landscape by burning it to create animal stampedes for easier hunting. This national park was created in 1959 to restore the damage done by intensive sheep farming and to protect the rich wildlife: deer, mountain puma, guanacos and ostrich. Birds range from the giant condor to pink flamingos, herons, eagles and swans.

Lunch was a barbecue organised by local gauchos, tiny men wearing hand-knitted sweaters, leather chaps and fringed cowboy boots, with deep brown faces that were heavily lined. The steaks and lamb had been cooking slowly over hot ashes, and melted in the mouth. The rest of the afternoon was a pleasant stroll around Laguna Azul, the towers an imposing sight on the horizon.Next day was a 12-hour trip back to Santiago, where we ate at Agua, a trendy restaurant full of fashionable young Chileans demolishing massive steaks and platters of seafood. A two-hour flight after another early start took me north to Calama, on a high plateau. Thankfully this van ride was less than two hours, through bleak expanses of rocky desert and the shimmering white Salt Mountain range. San Pedro, an adobe village, sits at around 8,000 feet, and the explora hotel is on the edge of town. From our single-storey rooms we looked out over small, mud-walled fields towards Bolivia and a series of snow-capped volcanoes.The light in Atacama is extraordinary, shimmering and intense.

Next morning I hiked down a river bed from the hamlet of Gaucin, jumping from rock to rock then wading through 6ft-high pampas grass (known locally as foxtails), white in the midday sun. Giant cacti lined the walls of the river canyon and mountain parakeets chattered away above us. After lunch we drove up the Catarpe Canyon to a ridge where you could see across red, rocky hills to the north. Even climbing 500 feet made me slightly breathless, but it was worth it to hike along the edge of the ridge for two hours on a relatively flat path, with superb panoramas on every side. Later, I did a lot of sock washing (the red desert dust permeated everything) and contemplated the distant volcanoes. Altitude sickness would have to be beaten, as I was determined to climb one of them.Next day I had to start higher, and after an hour and a half in the van, we reached 4,000 metres, passing a lonely farm where a 100-year-old woman kept a herd of cattle. Machuca was a small community of thatched huts and a church, by a lake where flamingoes and ducks clustered at the edge.