Between Extremes

"Chile does inspire extremes—extremes of landscape and also of experience and emotion. I thought it was fascinating that these two men who had been hostages in Lebanon and lived one of the most extreme experiences that humans can endure, came here. Apparently, while they were in Lebanon, they used to fantasize about having a farm in Patagonia. It was a random dream at the time, but they decided to make it real and to come to this part of the world and see what would happen. As when they were hostages, they get on each other’s nerves, they argue, but they are also absolutely mesmerized by the Andes mountains, the desert and Patagonia, and by the very complex history of Chile. There was a military coup in 1973 by Augusto Pinochet, which was dreadful and cruel and had awful repercussions. That clearly resonated with them, given their experience in Lebanon. Brian Keenan came up with a phrase I think is brilliant, which is ‘the disease of hatred.’ So the disease of hatred is wreaking havoc in the Middle East, but it’s also wrought havoc in Chile. The legacy of the cruelty of the military dictatorship is still something that is impacting people’s lives today, 50 years later. So their journey to Chile was, as much as anything, a search for humanity. And my experience of living here and as a storyteller, and the reason I was inspired to write my own book, was definitely also that search for humanity, for answers to questions like, ‘How is it possible that people can be so cruel to each other?’ It’s an eternal mystery and Brian Keenan and John McCarthy were also really interested in it. Keenan is also a big fan of Pablo Neruda’s poetry, the Nobel Prize-winning poet of Chile. I personally dislike his poetry and much prefer the song lyrics of his compatriot Violeta Parra, but I’ll forgive Brian Keenan for that because it’s just such fun reading their story and their response to this extreme country. No, they didn’t. I think they were glad to get rid of each other again once they finished their journey. They didn’t travel all the way from the north to the south. They flew north and experienced the desert. They did a horse trekking journey out of Santiago in central Chile. Then they flew to Patagonia. So they cherry picked different experiences, different extremes of the country. That’s what most tourists do because you can’t possibly explore Chile in a couple of weeks. People fly into Santiago, which is in the middle of the country, and then they fly north for a week, and they fly south for a week. So they get a taste of the country, but you really have to be here for a long time to get a feeling of the immensity of it."