The Chile day trips not to buy. Ever

To be clear from the start: it's not necessarily that where these trips take you is rubbish. Mostly, it's travel time and the fact that a quick visit simply misses the point of going there at all. These opinions are entirely our own, highly opinionated and subjective. It's OK to disagree. In fact, if you've got an informed alternative perspective, we're always ready to listen.

There's no doubt that Paine is stunning, but that's not the main focus of this tour. What matters most is how much you enjoy the inside of your bus. Set off at 5.30am for an 'exciting road trip to Puerto Natales' - exciting if you like long straight roads across vast sheep-grazing pastures. 

After a stop to have a look at Puerto Natales, you stop at the Milodón Cave, a place which manages to be so disappointing that it has its own entry in this list and yet is universally used to stop people from getting to see Torres del Paine before midday. This gives you around three hours in the park - enough to get on and off the bus at a series of viewpoints and take a photo, dare I say it, a selfie or two. 

The cherry on the cake? You'll be back in Punta Arenas by 9pm - just in time for all the restaurants to be closed. 

The island of Chiloé is culturally and historically fascinating. It also has some really stunning landscapes and wildlife (birds and marine mammals principally). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most interesting areas are those out on the dramatically exposed Pacific coast and within the protected waterways and islets of the interior Gulf Coast. A day trip from Puerto Varas will basically show you neither. 

With seven hours of driving to get through, there's not a lot of time for detours, so down the main road along the somewhat featureless middle of the island you go. The town of Castro is interesting and has some pretty corners, you'll see some palafitos (stilt houses) and you'll see some wooden churches (UNESCO World Heritage sites) but you won't spend time with the place, experience life on the island or see much wildlife - marine or avian. 

Chiloé has a humility to it. Rather than demanding your immediate affection, it grows on you - if you give it time.

This one's a combination of not enough time (Valpo), poor visitor management (winery) and being a bit rubbish (Viña). 

The journey time on this day isn't awful - there's a good motorway from the capital to the coast, built when they moved the parliament building out there so it's well maintained. First stop is typically at a winery in the Casablanca Valley, about halfway between the capital and the coast. 

I'm talking about the Casas del Bosque winery - it's a lovely spot with great wine. However, it doesn't matter how good the vintage, if you're still digesting yoghurt from breakfast, then tasting wine is a challenge. On top of this, there are different grades of wine tasting all happening in the same space, so all the groups (and there will likely be many) get an announcement to say THOSE OF YOU WITH A RED STICKER, STAND OVER THERE! BLUE STICKERS, HERE... This is followed by the revelation that lucky blue sticker people get to taste as much of the good stuff as they want, green can choose a little bit from a couple of bottles, while red can sniff the cork. Or the floor. I exaggerate, but not by much. It's a room full of dark mumbling, discontent and mutiny. Despite nobody actually wanting to drink wine at 11am. 

It's all quite funny, as long as you have a blue badge, of course. 

On to Valparaíso - the storied port city of Chile. Another UNESCO World Heritage site, it's a fascinatingly tumbledown, colorful, bohemian coastal city built on seven steep hills. It's famous for its street art and is a contender for the world's most gravity-defying overhead wiring award. It's got an edge to it, a creative friction, which makes it quite cool, but it's a lot to take in. Which means it's not really ideally suited to a quick strike in/out mission. Likely, you'll be lined up to have lunch in the city, so most likely your interaction with the place will involve relatively little time with feet on the street. 

You'll undoubtedly ride from high to low city on one of the old funiculars or elevators. The typical experience here is to be dropped off by your driver at the top, you get to stand in line and look around a bit, then ride the funicular down the hillside - all good and charming. You arrive at the bottom, and there's your vehicle. In you get and off you go. It's comically strange. 

Lunch somewhere will no doubt be good, seafood-based and with a view over the harbour. All good. Then it's time to return to Santiago - with one last 'treat' which is a drive through Viña del Mar. If anyone has found a good reason to like Valpo's adjoining neighbour town, please tell me. It is by the sea. It consists of modern, clean residential apartment blocks. And a 19th-century casino. You'll drive along some streets with tower blocks, do a loop of the casino driveway and then continue back to Santiago, no doubt thinking something along the lines of That's a pleasantly posh place to reside, if I had a gambling habit. I'd definitely consider moving there. 

Classifying this tour as 'crap' is wrong, but read on for our thinking. 

The night skies of northern Chile are incredible. High altitude, near total lack of atmospheric and light pollution makes the whole region from Elqui north into Antofagasta the beating heart of astronomy worldwide. Some of the facilities themselves offer observatory tours, typically at the weekend and typically in the morning. Not dark early morning, but 10am morning. Which is to say that these visits are educational, they're dedicated to the research being done, the engineering of the facilities, the investment in human understanding. They aren't about seeing the stars through the most powerful telescopes. It would be great if they did tours at night as well, but without fail, these pesky sky-scientists insist on finding incredibly remote patches of high land which aren't conducive to easy access for night-time driving. 

That's it really. We sometimes have to have conversations with people who insist on going to a 'real' observatory to stargaze in the day. Stargazing, at night, is amazing. There are loads of tours and experiences which will give you an incredible experience, ideally timed to avoid the bright full moon. To avoid it being crap, make sure you're on the right kind of tour - observation or observatory. 

Another victim of its own success story. There's a dramatic red sand valley just outside San Pedro de Atacama with a rocky balcony from where you can watch the sun setting over the dunes, hills and salt flats beyond. It's really quite beautiful and conveniently close to the town, right next to the road. It's popular, you'll see it on nearly every trip to the Atacama Desert. 

Back in the period just post-Covid, we got a call from Camilo, our man on the ground in the Atacama: They had to close Moon Valley yesterday afternoon because it was full. So many questions immediately popped into my head: How do you close a valley? How does the Atacama Desert fill up anyway? Who has the keys? It turned out that the tipping point was a thousand people - each evening. Buses, cars and crowds. Have a look at pictures of Moon Valley, and you won't find anything but vast emptiness - that's because it's mostly no-access areas, so all thousand or so people are corralled in a single area, not getting in the way of pretty photos. 

It's not that Moon Valley isn't stunning, it is. It's not that we all have a right to find our own mountain top; we don't. However, if the experience you imagine you'll have is of quiet contemplation of nature's grandeur, then you're not likely to enjoy it. 

There's always a secondary question here: if it's so crowded, why does every tour go there? The answer is that it's easier to follow the herd than strike out on your own. 

Heading back south to Patagonia and the drive into Torres del Paine National Park, our final crap day trip isn't actually a day trip in and of itself, but is a feature of seemingly every single day trip to the national park for reasons which truly escape me, and most visitors, I suspect. 

Just north of Puerto Natales, at the point where the landscapes start to rise up into grand glacial forms, and you can feel the approach of the mighty Torres del Paine massif, buses pull over and stop. Off you get, pay your entrance fee, and use the loo if you managed to forget to go 20 minutes back in Puerto Natales. Set off walking along a pristine raised walkway lined with information panels and occasional large fibreglass models of animals - like sabre-tooth tiger - explaining the long-extinct megafauna of Patagonia. The walkway leads you to a huge cave, 200m deep, at the mouth of which is the mother of all fibreglass animals - the giant ground sloth, or milodón. Here in the late 19th century, one of the area's first European settlers, Hermann Eberhard, came across this cave and inside, the pelt of a milodón. You can follow a path around the inside of the cave. 

None of it is uninteresting, it's just not clear why it's worth stopping for a visit when the cave can quite literally be pointed out from the road and any guide can explain the megafauna whilst continuing into the national park - thereby gaining at least an extra hour in the Paine. 

While cursory may equal crap, a non-cursory visit is well worth it. Walk to not just the main cave but the other caves in the hillside as well, where signs of early human habitation have been found. In this same hill are cave paintings, on the far side are condors, there's lots of beauty, some great local characters, and very few visitors.