Ten days in Chile: the desert that has never seen rain, and the port that never recovered

Long-haul flights land at Santiago in the early morning, which is either a gift or a problem depending on how you sleep on a plane. The colonial grid is nine blocks by nine and everything today is inside it.

Plaza de Armas has been the middle of Chile since Pedro de Valdivia paced it out in 1541, and it is a working square rather than a monument: chess games, preachers, shoe shiners, and a cathedral on one side.

The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino is a block away and is the single best thing in the capital. It is organised by culture rather than chronology, beautifully lit, and it makes one point that reframes the whole trip north: the Chinchorro people on the coast of the Atacama were deliberately mummifying their dead thousands of years before anyone in Egypt.

Eat somewhere on the way back and go to bed early. The altitude comes later in the week.

On 11 September 1973 the Chilean air force bombed its own presidential palace with Salvador Allende inside it. He died there, the building burned, and Augusto Pinochet ran the country for the next seventeen years. La Moneda was repaired and is back in use, and there is a modern cultural centre dug in under the square in front of it.

The afternoon belongs to the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, four metro stops west. It covers 1973 to 1990 through testimony, court records, letters and film, with English throughout. It is calm, exact and hard, and it is the most important building in the city.

Finish somewhere green and ordinary. Santa Lucia in the late afternoon is five minutes from the centre and free, and the light off the terraces at the top is the best of the day.

North of the Mapocho is a different city. The Vega Central is where Santiago buys its fruit and vegetables, five hundred stalls under one roof, and there are cheap kitchens upstairs where the traders eat. Go early and eat there.

In Bellavista, ten minutes east, is La Chascona. Pablo Neruda built it in the 1950s for Matilde Urrutia, who was not yet his wife and was supposed to be a secret, and he built it in separate pieces up a hillside so that guests had to go outside between courses. It was ransacked after the coup and she held his wake in the wreckage.

Then go up. Cerro San Cristobal rises straight out of Bellavista, with a funicular from the bottom and a white Virgin on the summit, and the terrace at the top takes in the whole basin and, when the air is clean, the Andes behind it. Late afternoon.

Pack tonight and buy nothing perishable. Tomorrow is a flight.

Two hours in the air to Calama and then an hour and a half across country with nothing on it at all, which is a fair introduction. Buy the national park ticket at the airport before you leave the terminal.

Drop your bags, walk the length of Caracoles, the one pedestrian street, and book the next two days at any of the agencies on it. Drink water constantly from now on.

The small archaeological museum in the middle of town is the right first stop, both because it is fifty metres from everything and because it explains what you are about to be driven through: twelve thousand years of people living in a basin with no rain.

Then Valle de la Luna. Every agency runs it as an afternoon trip ending at sunset and nobody should do it at any other hour. It is a salt range eroded into ridges, craters and caves with no plant or animal in any of it, and the last hour of light takes it through orange into violet. There is a knocking sound in the salt as the temperature drops, and it is harmless.

The two archaeological sites near town are the ones you can reach without an agency, and a bicycle is the way to do it. Pukara de Quitor is four kilometres up the valley: a fortified hillside of stone terraces built around the tenth century, held by the Atacameno until the Spanish came up the same valley in 1540 and took it. Climb to the top for the view down the oasis.

Tulor, out across the sand, is stranger. Round mud walls joined into a honeycomb, about three thousand years old and mostly still buried, with a couple of chambers dug out so you can see how they were made.

Back for lunch and a rest, because the lagoon trips leave in mid afternoon.

The Atacama salt flat is a grey crust the size of a small country, and there are lagoons in it dense enough with brine that a person floats on top without effort. Which one is open to swimmers changes with conservation rules, so the operator will tell you where you are getting in. Rinse afterwards; the salt dries as a white crust. The trips finish with sunset and a pisco sour over the flat.

The alarm goes at half past three, the minibuses leave at four, and after two hours climbing in the dark you arrive at El Tatio at first light. The geysers are at their most dramatic in the cold, because the colder the air the higher the steam, and in winter the ground is frozen and the temperature is regularly below minus five.

There are over eighty active geysers up here at around 4,300 metres, on the third largest geyser field on earth. They are not tall. What makes it worth the alarm is the scale of the basin and the low sun coming through eighty columns of steam at once. Keep to the marked paths, because the crust is thin and people have been badly burned.

Most trips include the thermal pool at the field and a stop at Machuca, a village of about thirty people, a church and a woman selling llama skewers, on the way back down.

The afternoon is for doing very little, or for the Puritama: a warm river, around thirty three degrees, running through a narrow canyon in country with no other water in it. Privately run, genuinely expensive, and worth it.

The morning flight from Calama lands at Santiago around midday. Rather than going into the capital, take the shuttle to the Pajaritos terminal and pick up a coach straight to Valparaiso, which is an hour and a half and runs every twenty minutes or so. You will be on the coast by mid afternoon.

Start at the bottom, because you will spend the rest of the visit above it. Plaza Sotomayor is the square the port opens onto, with the navy's headquarters on the far side and a monument in the middle to the 1879 naval battle at Iquique that Chile lost and turned into its founding story anyway.

Then ride up. Ascensor Concepcion has been hauling people up the same slope since 1883, in a wooden car counterbalanced by another one coming down, and it puts you out on a cliff-edge walkway with the whole bay in front of you.

Spend what is left of the day walking Cerro Concepcion into Cerro Alegre with no route in mind. That is the correct way to see Valparaiso and it is free.

Ascensor El Peral is the short lift from near Plaza Sotomayor up to Cerro Alegre, and it lands almost at the door of the best building in the city. Palacio Baburizza was built for a Croatian who made a fortune in Chilean nitrate, in full art nouveau, and it holds the municipal art collection.

The rest of the morning is the paseos, the balcony walkways along the cliff edge that the German and British merchant communities built to get the view. They are the best free thing in Valparaiso.

In the afternoon go up to Cerro Bellavista. Neruda bought La Sebastiana unfinished in 1961, kept the top floors and filled them with ships in bottles, carousel horses and a bar he would not let anyone else work. Every window looks at the bay, and of his three houses it is the one with the best view and the smallest crowd.

Walk down through the Museo a Cielo Abierto afterwards, a set of murals painted on the walls and stairs of the hill in the 1970s, which is where the city's street art habit began.

Mercado El Cardonal is where the city buys its food: two floors of fish, fruit and vegetables at prices that make the supermarket look absurd, with cheap kitchens on the upper level serving the stallholders from early morning. Have breakfast there.

Then west, to the hill the navy sits on. Ascensor Artilleria climbs from the port to Paseo 21 de Mayo, a terrace looking straight down onto the container cranes, the dry docks and the whole curve of the bay. It is the best view in the city.

The naval and maritime museum is at the top, in the old naval academy. Chile takes the 1879 war against Peru and Bolivia extremely seriously and this is where that is explained, at length. It is a national shrine as much as a museum, and it tells you a great deal about the country.

Come down for a last seafood lunch in El Plan, where the old restaurants near the market do the same fish the hills charge double for.

Avenida Alemana runs along the crest above the centre, curving in and out of the ravines, and it is lined with viewpoints looking down over the roofs to the bay. An hour on it is the best possible last morning here and costs nothing.

Coaches to Santiago airport run frequently and take about an hour and forty minutes door to door, so an evening flight home is comfortable and a lunchtime one is not. If you are flying late, leave the bags at the hotel and take the morning slowly.

Buy something before you go. The craft stalls on the paseos sell copper, lapis lazuli, which is only mined in Chile and Afghanistan, and a great deal of painted tin.