My advice to anyone who wants to see some of the most polite people around is to get to Chile soon—before we declare war on it or the media level it into the likeness of a London suburb, with a bust of Lenin in every town hall, tax-funded homes for lesbians, and a veto on golliwog dolls.

My wife, Colleen, and I were all but put off from going recently by inflammatory headlines, chiefly in the New York Times and Washington Post, to the effect that the country was in total turmoil, demonstrations in the capital constant, power stations blown up nightly, and the like. In eight days in and around Santiago and Vina, and weeks in the lake district to the south, we saw none of this. We also had the pleasure of not hearing a word of politics there, despite meeting several ministers and their wives and once attending a fairly high-level governmental party at the Bellas Artes museum, hostessed by the lovely doyenne of the establishment, Nena Ossa. Frankly, the first impression any traveler must get in Chile is of the really high-grade nature of everyone around. Baggage handlers at the airport could well double for doctors on our sit-com TV.

At a time when the wallpaper journalism of the West was mounting a fairly hysterical hate campaign to claw down Pinochet, who has said he will step down for fair elections, Santiago was thinly, extremely politely, policed by the Carabinieri, though I suspect they don’t take kindly to having Molotov cocktails chucked at them. A 1:00-5:00 a.m. curfew created a quiet night for which everyone seemed grateful, barring a few nightclub owners. During a changing of the guard outside the Moneda, or palace barracks, I saw U.S. television crews (by their beards shall ye know them), obviously hostile to the regime, permitted to poke their snouts in everywhere. As for freedom of the press I can only say that Hustler was on sale in my hotel (though it is banned in the Caribbean island where I have a home), while a block away Mariel Hemingway was showing—and showing quite a bit, too—in Star 80. There was some mild fuss over the expulsion of an American journalist who had filed an account of the police killing of three civilians, because his story was found to be a total fabrication.

However, except for some handsome outlying architecture and the bosky side-streets off Leones, where a registered girl-watcher can go crazy, Santiago cannot be called a graceful city, though it is certainly not a sad one like Lima. What it possesses for both European and norteamericano alike is an astonishing, forgotten courtesy, while its French-built Metro has to blow the mind of anyone fated to travel the New York City subway. No graffiti or litter in the comfortable cars where schoolgirls in navy tunics cheerfully yield their seats to the old. It is also incredibly cheap, though not so cheap as Mexico City’s underground, state subsidized to the point where a ticket sells for less than the cost of printing it. Santiago struck me as a provincial capital, without the shopping or gastronomy of Buenos Aires. Its wines are, of course, another matter, Chile being virtually the vineyard of South America. A bottle of the ubiquitous Undurrago white, a Rheinwein approximation, costs less than one American dollar on the restaurant table. You can buy it for postage stamps in stores. Chilenos take baths in the stuff. No, southwards lies the glory.

In 90 comfortable minutes Ladeco will fly you down to Temuco, where you may rent a yanqui car to be turned in later at Puerto Montt, lower down. The roads here are superlative and, interestingly, such is local courtesy that, if hitchhikers are few, they expect to be picked up. This Andean lake area is not only glorious but unexploited, barring spots of some of the finest powder-base skiing in the world. Around November there seem to be almost no tourists at all—liberalism has done its work—and the ice-blue lakes are fringed with snow-capped volcanoes, their lower slopes heavy with fir and southern beach. This sparsely populated countryside is Scandinavian in feel and the motels are timbered, ski-lodge affairs, with log fires blazing in your bedroom.

At Pucon we were, apart from one peripatetic Englishman, the only guests at the Antumalal lodge perched over the long Villarrica lake. The manager was genuinely puzzled by our request for a key to our room; there was none. We had entered the almost forgotten world of total trust.

The excursions around Pucon could be delightfully Swiss or Bavarian at will, with the nearby national park presided over by an active volcano (high drama at night). Twenty-five kilometers down a country track, Lake Caburga was lovely, the returning motorist rewarded by a glorious open-air steep in a steaming mountainside thermal bath at Huife. No one about but for the concierge of the simple establishment and her two chubby, rosecheeked children.

From Pucon it is a day’s drive down to Nilque on the south shore of Lake Puyehue, another lake fisherman’s paradise. More rustic stone thermal baths here and a more ambitious lakeside motel, popular in season with skiers making for the justly celebrated Antillanca slopes. After visiting a few invigorating waterfalls, or saltos, and generally hiking the mountainsides, we struck further south to find the gem of the district at the end of the line, that is unless you intend to investigate Antarctica.

From pretty lakeside Ensenada a cinder or volcanic-lava track runs a gritty 30 kilometers down the Reloncavi estuary to Ralun, ostensibly no more than a scatter of farmers’ and fishermen’s shacks. The tidal lake, on which excursions may be taken, is ringed by the ice-cream cone of the Osorno volcano, the spiky Mount Calbuco, and the great grave Argentinian Tronador, or thunderer, in the distance. The untouched wooded slopes and lakeside walks under the snowline are idyllic. We spent one crisp morning alone by the lovely falls of Petrohue, with acres of broom in golden bloom, plus butterflies that would have sent Nabokov crazy, until a busload of giggling uniformed schoolgirls debouched from a bus and cascaded all over my wife with questions about America. How boring it must be to travel by the liberal Baedeker, and miss scenes like these.