Editor’s note: This is another installment of a monthly guest travel column written by Rebecca Fahrlander, a world traveler and professor of social psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

I remember sitting in my room on the Chile-Argentina border, reading Thomas Moore’s “Care of the Soul,” with the soft sounds of a waterfall, light rain and croaking frogs as a backdrop. The book’s theme of being in the moment and appreciating the small things in life perfectly matched the serene surroundings. It was spring in South America, the landscape transformed by sun and rain.
Before reaching the Argentine borderlands, we had been traveling about the countryside through rural enclaves of German immigrants who had recreated Alpine villages at the foot of the Andes. Walking into the small hotel we had stayed at in one town was like entering an old German home – antique lace curtains, clocks and furniture from the old country.
It was at my lodge on the Argentine border that I met a traveler from Germany, who upon hearing I was a native of Nebraska City, responded, “I have heard of it – they have apple orchards there.” It is rare enough to find an American who knows anything about Nebraska City, so I was intrigued that a European knew about the town. The German man told me the story of an old man he knew who had worked in the orchards during World War II as a POW. It is a small world indeed.
Yet while Chile is a relatively small country – described by writer Sara Wheeler in the title of her book as “a thin country” – it is far more than the Teutonic settlements at the foot of the Andes, or the waterfalls and secluded forests of the Argentine borderlands.
Santiago, the capital, is a megalopolis of historic Spanish city squares, quiet neighborhoods, modern office towers, cathedrals, crowds and traffic. Santiago sits splendidly in a “bowl” surrounded by the shimmering white-gray Andes.
Downtown, recent history surrounded us. Right out of the 1970s classic film “Missing” was the Moneda Palace, home of the president of Chile. The scars on its exterior walls were testament to that decade’s violent coup and assassination of President Allende.
The coup that brought the dictatorship of General Pinochet to power, and with it the “disappearance” of thousands of people, virtually closed off the country from travel from outside the continent for many years. It was eerie to stand there in the square where the historic event had been centered.
I recalled the scenes from “Missing” where the young American, along with the Chileans, “disappeared” from an elegant Santiago neighborhood, never to be seen again. I wondered what secrets of the disappeared were hidden in the surrounding offices and residences.
Farther south in Chile lays the fabled Patagonia region and one of the southernmost towns in the world, Punta Arenas. This town, with a population the size of Bellevue, is a charming, windswept place at the edge of the South American continent. The sunlight this far south is weak and ethereal. Buildings are brightly painted in mustard, cobalt and saffron. Evergreen trees are bent against the violent winds that blow across Drake’s Passage and the great Antarctic region.
Punta Arenas had been the disembarkation point for Antarctic explorers such as Shackleton. Indeed, we visited the private club in Punta Arenas where he planned his return voyages to Antarctica. In the center of the town, a small park came to life each morning with markets of Andean souvenirs and clothing. Dogs basked in the pale sun.
At land’s edge, penguin colonies look out across the turbulent waters of the Antarctic confluence and this thin country comes to an end.

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