Back to Cape Horn

"Her story is about riding a horse from the Atacama Desert to Cape Horn, which is a distance of about 4,300 kilometres (or nearly 3,000 miles). That gives you an idea of the extraordinary length of this country that is Chile. Rosie Swale naively thought, ‘Oh, I’ll do that in four months’, but it took a year-and-a-half. It’s a story of endurance, which is crucial if you want to live in Chile. And you really get the sense of how crazy long this country is and how diverse, because she starts off in the driest desert in the world, and she ends up in the ice fields of Patagonia. It’s a very evocative story and I think it’s my favourite travel book on Chile. Regularly! For a start, she was riding horses in the world’s driest desert where there is no food and no water. It’s completely mad. She had trouble there, including sandstorms. She also had some incredibly moving experiences. For example, at one point she was camping, and she heard some cries in the bushes. There was a woman giving birth in the middle of nowhere and Rosie Swale helped give birth to this child. It was an amazing, completely random experience. Much later on in the journey, in Patagonia, she had a really terrifying experience. At the time she was traveling, there was great poverty in Chile. In Patagonia, she found herself in danger of losing one of her horses because someone wanted to eat it. That horse came very close to having its throat cut. She managed to save it, just out of sheer force of personality, because this man was desperate. It was a shocking experience. But that is also part of living in this part of the world—that things can get terrifying very quickly. That’s right. It was an amazing achievement. I think she was lucky to survive—and her poor horses were also lucky to survive."