Day I

As dawn broke on her first day in Punta Arenas, Sandy peered out the window of the Pink House, our first domicile, and exclaimed, “Oh my god, it’s Wasilla!”.

But appearances can be deceiving. While Punta Arenas certainly had the tumbledown look of a city that had endured a hundred years of a Palin administration, one has to look deeper. We weren’t so much in the third world as the frontier world—sparsely populated, pragmatic, spartan and prosperous. You can drink right out of the tap or mountain stream, buses run on time, restaurants are all over the place. In fact the Magellanes Region enjoys the highest standard of living per capita in Chile. It seems the ramshackle Patagonian ‘look’ is driven more by practicality than poverty. People work hard and endure the rugged life in an utterly unforgiving climate.