FIRE AND ICE

With an appetite for wide open spaces and natural beauty, Iroshini Chua puts on her hiking boots to explore Chile’s incredible vistas

Photography KEVIN AND IROSHINI CHUA

“ RE WE LANDING on Mars?” I exclaim as we descend with the setting sun onto a landscape of pleated red mountains starkly beautiful in their utter barrenness. The Atacama Desert has me mesmerised well before my boots make first contact for two weeks of hiking, driving, riding and flying around Chile, a narrow, rivetingly beautiful strip of paradise and wilderness that stretches 4,300 kilometres from Peru to the southernmost point of South America. This otherworldly high-altitude Andean plateau of more than 100,000 square kilometres, already the driest non-polar place on earth, is rapidly becoming a “hyper-desert,” our driver tells us as we hurry from El Loa Airport, the gateway to the wonders of Chile’s far north, to our luxurious adobe lodge set in splendid isolation outside the sleepy village of…

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Tatler Hong Kong (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 1, 2016

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