The view from the highest point - about 10,000 feet - on the Bishop´s Road in Salta Province, Argentina.
Travelling around South America is unexpectedly harder than travelling around South-East Asia.
I say unexpectedly because Asian cultures and languages seem so much more remote. Religion, food, and customs are all different. You understand what it means to be illiterate when you are surrounded by signs written in Khmer or Thai. Western tourists are awkward and obvious.
In South America we feel much less strange. Buenos Aires is so European that people usually assumed I was a local, until I opened my mouth. We took three days of Spanish lessons in Santiago. I speak a few words of French and we both grew up watching Sesame Street (SA—LI—DA; SA-LI-DA; ¡SALIDA!). Now we can understand about a quarter of what people say to us.
But cultural differences are superficial, and half a dozen muttered words of Spanish in a Chilean accent may as well be Vietnamese. Practically speaking South-East Asia is much easier to get around.
The distances here are much greater. Thailand has four times the population of Chile and twice as many people as Argentina. But Chile, that little ribbon of land on the map, is 50% larger than Thailand and Argentina is the next largest country in the world after Australia. Both are dwarfed by Brazil. The main population centers are hundreds of miles apart, often separated by deserts, rainforests, rivers so wide that you cannot see one bank from the other, and the second highest mountain range in the world.
Both a cause and an effect of these great distances, transportation is pretty poor. Unlike most of the rest of the world, there are no discount airlines. Flying from Salta in north-west Argentina to Buenos Aires costs more than $600 return; not cheap for us, and more than two weeks´ wages for a salteño. (In England it costs about one day´s wages to fly from London to Frankfurt on Ryanair.)
Almost thirty years ago Paul Theroux wrote a book called The Old Patagonian Express about a journey by rail all the way from Boston to Patagonia. It was a crazy journey then; the trains were hot, filthy, and chronically unreliable. But today much of the rail network has been closed down, and the Great Patagonian Express itself hasn’t run for more than ten years.
That leaves road. People in the U.S. often forget that the government not only subsidizes gas prices, it built and continues to maintain the interstate highway system - $80 billion in tax dollars every year. Nobody down here felt the need to move ICBMs around the continent at short notice. Argentina and Chile have decent roads, but only 5% of Bolivia´s roads are even paved, and through much of the interior there are no roads at all.
If you don´t speak any Spanish, language is more of an obstacle here than it is in South-East Asia. As in the U.S. and China, Latin Americans are surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who speak the same language they do, and have no strong incentive to learn another. In South-East Asia - as in Europe - people in neighboring countries speak mutually unintelligible languages, and so many have to learn a second language for trade. And pretty much everyone who works in the tourist industry in South-East Asia speaks English.
To be clear: I am not whining that people in Chile should learn English for my benefit. They speak only Spanish for exactly the same reason that I speak only English. I am just stating that as a consequence, it´s easier for U.S. tourists to visit Vietnam.
So why come? Deserts. Rainforests. Rivers so wide that you cannot see one bank from the other. The second highest mountain range in the world. Colonial cities that rivalled Paris and London when New Yorkers were still trading beaver pelts. A native American culture that hasn´t been extinguished. Ruins to rival Angkor. I´ve been enjoying myself so much that I haven´t updated this blog for three weeks. Sorry.