Puerto Natales, Chile

Imagine one mountain - a beautiful mountain - settled in the middle of a beautiful area full of lagoons, glaciers and wildlife. Then imagine to start building roads to connect all the points of this beautiful area, allowing buses, cars and everything else to land to it. Then imagine to make this area National Park, to start charging 30$ just to get into it, and imagine to see tourists flowing there as a river. Imagine that the tourists arrived are only "hikers" (average age 19 to 23) or those of the organized tours (average age 78 to 88). Imagine all these hikers queueing at the entrance of the park, all together squeezed to follow the same trail like diligent students, and imagine they do this in the middle of Patagonia, a region bigger than a European country and one of the less populated areas in the world. Imagine to promote the image of this park with very efficient territorial marketing tools, with the result that it's easier to hear speaking Hebrew more than Spanish; then imagine also, in the nearby town, to start writing signs, building hostels and tour agencies just because of the huge number of tourists from Israel. Imagine that Lonelytraveller didn't plan to go there but then he decided for a one day detour there, but imagine that he found such a shitty rainy day, with an unbelievable cold wind hard to describe and difficult to understand. Imagine that for all the reasons above (plus the fact that one gust of wind blown him away his precious sunglasses and cap...) he ran away that place angry like an ape.
Well, the mountain you have imagined is Torres del Paine, and I'm glad it's in the Chilean side of Patagonia. So, all these "tourists" will continue to come here ignoring the beauty of Italian mountains, and I will continue to enjoy the majesty of those peaks higher than 4000m in total wilderness and solitude.
The best deal for me, isn't it?

San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

Third desert I'm facing during this journey: after Gobi desert and Nevada desert, it's time for Atacama desert in Chile - the driest desert in the world. Two days I'm here and I must admit I had stunning times. Unbelievable has been the first day while crossing the border and passing from the snowy freezing cold of the Bolivian mountains down to the hot desertic sun of Atacama in just 1 hour's bus ride - 45 kilometres only! The feeling I had was the same one I felt passing from China to South Korea: two countries geographically closed but distant many years in reality. Back to civilization, I thought! Even Chilean people is truly different from Bolivians. All the persons from Chile I've met on this journey are really nice and friendly - truly good people - while the Bolivians (but it's better saying the indigenous poupulation of the Andes) are friendly and nice like an early morning kick in the balls... San Pedro de Atacama is a small "tourist resort" in the middle of the Atacama desert, settled at the altitude of 2800m. It's like an oasis for tourists, a Chilean version of Las Vegas without all those stupid casinos and entertainments for adults that the City of Sin has. I like it, even if prices are overcharged and you can see only tourists walking the road. But the nature is really stunning, many interesting sites to visit that I reached renting a bike for both two days: the Moon Valley, the Death Valley, the Pukara, the "Salar de Atacama" which is the third largest salt flat in the world... I loved to cycle into the loud silence of the desert with the warm sun taking care of my skin. One bicycle and one desert, that's all I need to be happy like a kid.