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Photo courtesy of Explora
This kind of experience
was common in the days when trains, steamers, sailboats, or horses
were the means of transportation. The slow pace allowed you to be in
touch with your surroundings.” In San Pedro, a hike through
landscapes of sand, salt, and sheer cliffs takes you to a crater that
looks like the Grand Canyon dusted with powdered sugar. In Patagonia,
you can climb around splashing lakes and cross a hanging bridge to
arrive at an icy stretch of rock at the foot of a glacier. By the
time you return to the lodge, you’ve earned a soak in the enormous
bathtub, a scrub with fragrant green-tea-and-lemon soap, and a siesta
in the plush bed. The dining rooms provide fresh, locally produced
cuisine that, although generously served, contains no heavy sauces
that might impede a guest’s next adventure. Meals include wines
from Ibáñez’s own vineyards and are also lubricated
by conversations with the other guests, eager to swap tales of their
day’s exploits. The overall experience—which combines the rough
and the rural with the luxurious and the urbane, the solitary with
the companionable—is exhilarating and unique in the world of
travel. And that, according to Ibáñez, is precisely the
point of Explora.
I caught up with Pedro Ibáñez at his duplex suite of
offices in the cosmopolitan Las Condes section of Santiago. Although
he has six children and has been married to the same woman for more
than 30 years, he wears no wedding ring. When he dresses in the
morning, Ibáñez opts for clothes in which he can travel
through a variety of situations: pressed khakis, a button-up shirt
open at the collar. His elegant blazer might be a bit rumpled,
depending on how long it has been folded in the backseat of his
Lexus. His shoes have enough traction for a construction site but
also the sort of leather uppers that would meet the approval of
Santiago’s most exacting headwaiter.
To attract tourists to
his own country, Ibáñez knew he needed a distinct
product. “When I was young no one liked Chile, and no one was
interested in coming here,” he proclaims. The comment is only
slightly hyperbolic. To this day Chile’s tourism industry is
largely untapped: In 2005, tourism accounted for only 4 percent of
its GDP, compared to 8 percent in both Mexico and Costa Rica. “I
knew Chile was an attractive and special country, but it’s not the
Caribbean. Explora had to be not just a hotel but a series of
activities that would make it make sense to open a hotel.”
There
are 50 rooms in each of the lodges in Atacama and Patagonia, and
there will be only 30 on Easter Island. During my recent stay at the
Explora at Atacama, my room was spacious and silent and had picture
windows with pastoral views of alfalfa fields. Although rustic, with
virtually no decorative details, it felt sumptuous, because the
company had overlooked nothing.
“For us, fresh air is
luxury,” says Ibáñez. “A dark night is luxury
because you can see the stars. There is nothing superfluous in
Explora. You have the necessities: a very good bed, a lot of hot and
cold running water, good horses and the best saddles available,
bicycles that are light and sturdy.” Add details like horsehair
clothes brushes in the closet, moisturizer and lip balm in the
desert, 15-year-old malt whiskey in the bar. Yet, Ibáñez
emphasizes, “we don’t have Persian rugs or paintings on the walls
like you find at a five-star hotel in Europe.”
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