30-Day Chile Itinerary for Digital Nomads, Vegans, & Mindful Travelers

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30 Days in Chile

nomads plant-based slow travel non-luxe

We visited Chile for 30 days during our 2-month trip stopping in Costa Rica, Bolivia, and Chile in early 2024.

We are Ella & Ryan, digital nomads, exploring the world mindfully. Between getting married, becoming nomads, and starting our own businesses, we’re sharing everything we learn along the way.

Highlights

Digital nomads travelling the world in Patagonia. Working remotely, slow travel, vegan travel, and budget travel. Hiking Mont Fitz Roy from El Chalten. Incredible experience.

Visiting Patagonia

No where else have we felt the magnitude and scale of the Earth. It's the most humbling experience.

Atacama Desert

Chile's unique longitudinal shape allows it to have a desert in the North and glaciers in the South.

Digital nomads travelling through Chile. Couple travel, slow travel, working remotely, vegan travel, budget travel. Vista of Andes and Santiago skyline.

Santiago skyline

Living in Santiago for a full month, we soaked up the beautiful Andes backdrop every day.

2 days in the Atacama Desert

Visiting the Atacama Desert was a highlight of our 2-month trip. The typography, culture, energy, and food were all incredible.

After a 12 hour bus ride from Uyuni, Bolivia, we arrived in Calama, a small town about an hour north of San Pedro de Atacama. We took another smaller taxi bus with about 10 people from Calama to San Pedro de Atacama.

San Pedro de Atacama is a bustling backpackers haven where most Atacama visitors reside. We found a simple converted shipping container Airbnb on the outskirts of town about 15 minutes from the action.

The pubs and restaurants throughout the town were all packed and rowdy making it a fun place to unwind, meet other travellers, and grab a pint.

We were only stopping in San Pedro de Atacama for 2-days before heading down to Santiago. Each day we took an organized tour to see the Valley of the Moon and Laguna Baltinache respectively.

📍 Valle de la Luna or Valley of the Moon (sharing it's name with a similar excursion in La Paz, Bolivia) is a large area with magnificent moon-like rock formations. However, the tour we took was underwhelming with massive crowds all flocking to the same lookout points. We had a better view of the region the following day on an unrelated tour that stopped for breakfast at a similar but less crowded lookout.

🌱 Where we ate: Estrella Negra was the place of our dreams. It was so good we went twice in 2 days. One of the days we had a delicious spin on loaded fries with TVP on a mountain of fries.

📍 Laguna Baltinache was the focus of our second tour in the Atacama Desert which consisted of a 60 minute drive out to the Salt Baths. We briefly walked around the small ponds before floating in one of them for about 20 minutes. Such an incredible experience.

1-month in Santiago

🌱 Where we ate: 3 spots grabbed our attention during our few weeks in Santiago. Sapiens had delicious and vibrant food with a fully-vegan menu and some nice boutique shops in the shared building. SweetFran was close to our apartment and offered perfect vegan lunch specials and snacks. Katako was discovered too late! It had some delicious dishes like fresh and packed salads and pad thai but we left before being able to sample additional plates.

Our trip was centred around spending a month in Santiago, Chile. We wanted to find a modest apartment to rent and attempt to live like a local in a completely different part of the world.

Santiago was a beautiful city with a lot to do. Living in an unfamiliar place forced us to do things we didn't expect making the experience that much more memorable. We took Spanish lessons, went to Salsa class, signed up at a local pilates studio, went to local markets on a weekly basis, and truly started to feel as one with the city near the end of our stay.

Santiago has an amazing vista that is perfectly observable from Cerro San Cristóbal which is a short Teleferico ride up the hill or a longer hike if you're keen.

📍 Museum of Memory & Human Rights offered a profound emotional and educational experience for us. It commemorates the victims of human rights violations during the military dictatorship from 1973 to 1990 led by Augusto Pinochet.

4 days in Patagonia

We'll start by saying we did not spend enough time in Patagonia. This part of the world deserves your time and patience. You will regret it otherwise.

We flew from Santiago into Punta Arenas, rented a car, and drove up to El Chalten (in Argentina) where we stayed in a simple rental and got ready to hike to Mont Fitz Roy.

Getting to Mont Fitz Roy, the mountain range that makes up the iconic Patagonia apparel logo, is a tough ~24km roundtrip hike with a decent amount of elevation (+1,800m). We were faced with a blizzard at the lookout point and didn't get a great view in the end but had a memorable experience nonetheless.

👀 Big lesson learned: While crossing the border into Argentina, we had to get our car rental custom forms approved by a border agent. We thought we were finished at the border because there was no one else there.

When returning back into Chile a couple of days later, the border agents were quite upset to see that we didn't have passport stamps for our entry into the country (We're still convinced there was no one there to stamp them). After about 30 minutes of standing around while our passports were aprehended, we were allowed to leave with $100 fine assigned to each of us if we ever wanted to re-enter Argentina.

Keep in mind, there was no cell service, no one spoke any english, and our fines were written entirely in Spanish. It wasn't until about an hour later that we got cell service back where we could translate the documents.

After our brief 48 hours in El Chalten and our adventure at the Argentinian border, we arrived in Puerto Natales, the town closest to Torres del Paine National Park, and stayed in a quiet hotel in the central part of town.

We drove into the National Park and did a few shorter hikes throughout the day to make the most of it before driving back to Punta Arenas for our flight home.

Digital nomads travelling through Patagonia. Couple travel, slow travel, working remotely, vegan travel, budget travel. Glaciers, rivers, and waterfalls, and beautiful flowers in Torres del Paine near Puerto Natales.

Digital nomads travelling through Patagonia. Couple travel, slow travel, working remotely, vegan travel, budget travel. Glaciers and beautiful flowers in Torres del Paine near Puerto Natales.

Digital nomads travelling through Patagonia. Couple travel, slow travel, working remotely, vegan travel, budget travel. Hiking to Mont Fitz Roy near El Chalten, Argentina.

Digital nomads travelling through Patagonia. Couple travel, slow travel, working remotely, vegan travel, budget travel. Water purification water bottle drinking glacier water. Grayl waterbottle. Mont Fitz Roy near El Chalten, Argentina.

Digital nomads travelling through Patagonia. Couple travel, slow travel, working remotely, vegan travel, budget travel. Rock formations, glaciers and beautiful flowers in Torres del Paine near Puerto Natales.

Digital nomads travelling through Patagonia. Couple travel, slow travel, working remotely, vegan travel, budget travel. Glaciers, blue rivers, and beautiful flowers in Torres del Paine near Puerto Natales.

2 days in Valparaiso

We decided at the last minute to do a spontaneous weekend trip to Valparaiso on the Pacific coast about a 2-hour bus ride from Santiago.

We stayed quite a nice hotel, relative to the options in Valparaiso. The city is quite trendy with lots of street art, boutique shops, and urban vibe. We did find this unique Valparaiso energy to be confined to a small part of the city whereas the vast majority of the city felt a bit rundown.

Overall, we were quite underwhelmed by Valparaiso and recalled that it was not massively impressive.

Digital nomads travelling through Valparaiso, Chile. Couple travel, slow travel, working remotely, vegan travel, budget travel. Street art and beautiful red flowers.

Digital nomads travelling through Valparaiso, Chile. Couple travel, slow travel, working remotely, vegan travel, budget travel. Street art bathtub.

Digital nomads travelling through Valparaiso, Chile. Couple travel, slow travel, working remotely, vegan travel, budget travel. Street art.

Digital nomads travelling through Valparaiso, Chile. Couple travel, slow travel, working remotely, vegan travel, budget travel. Iconic Street art of we are not hippies, we are happies.

Where we stayed in Chile.

After a quick stay in a converted shipping container in San Pedro de Atacama we shifted to Santiago where we had an urban Airbnb for the majority of our trip.

Capitalizing on affordable rentals and long-term stay discounts in Santiago we were able to justify leaving our Airbnb on 2 separate occasions for our trips to Patagonia and Valparaiso while leaving the majority of our clothes behind.

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Travelling to and from Chile

💰 Budget tip: Use the local airline websites (i.e., browse LATAM flights from the Chilean site) to save on flight costs. We found arbitrage opportunities from the price listed in Canada vs. Chile.

Arriving in Calama, Chile:

🛬 Coming from Uyuni, Bolivia, we took a 8-hour (ended up being 12-hours) bus across the border into Calama, Chile. Calama is the nearest town (1-hour) to San Pedro de Atacama where we stayed.

Getting around in Chile:

✈️ Flight from Calama to Santiago
✈️ Return flight to Punta Arenas
🚍 Return bus to Valparaiso

Departing from Santiago, Chile:

🛫 Heading back to Toronto, Canada as this concluded our South American adventures. We were flying to Toronto through Miami. We ended up missing our 2nd flight in Miami due to long lines at customs and had to stay the night but that's another long story.