Next Stop: South America

South America is a continent whose size and complexity tends to collapse, in the European imagination, into a handful of images: the Christ the Redeemer statue, tango, coca leaves at altitude, football, the jungle. None of these are wrong exactly but they share the quality of being surfaces rather than depths, and surfaces are where you start rather than where you end up. The continent’s history is as layered and contested as any on earth: Spanish and Portuguese colonisation that began in the late fifteenth century and lasted, in various forms, until the independence movements of the early nineteenth century; the extraction economies built on silver, sugar, rubber, and oil that shaped the geography of wealth and poverty in ways still visible in every city; the political upheavals of the twentieth century, from the Argentine Dirty War to Pinochet’s Chile to the more recent turns of Venezuela and Bolivia, countries working out what governance and sovereignty mean in places where external interference in those questions has been constant.

The itinerary touches several of the places where these histories are most legible. Santiago, whose presidential palace still carries the marks of the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power and killed the democratically elected Salvador Allende. Quito, the second highest capital in the world, where the equator runs and where the Spanish built their colonial city on the ruins of the Inca settlement they destroyed. The Amazon, where the oil companies are. The Galápagos, which Darwin visited in 1835 and which gave him the observations that became the theory of natural selection, and which are now one of the most carefully managed tourist destinations in the world, which creates its own tensions between access and preservation.

I have packed lighter than last time. Lessons were learned in Asia about what actually gets used and what gets carried. The Columbia trousers are back. The first-aid kit is back. The universal adaptor is essential and non-negotiable. Noy is a considerably more efficient packer than I am and has, with admirable restraint, not commented on the number of times I reorganised the bag before settling on an arrangement that was probably not meaningfully different from the first one.

Twenty-four hours of flying to get here from Sydney. South America in the morning.