A ten night trip to Chiloe in southern Chile for the December to March window is yours to reserve

Sixteen churches, built by people who built ships

The Jesuits reached the archipelago in 1608 and ran what they called the circular mission. A priest came once a year by sea, stayed a few days, and moved on. Each settlement kept its own chapel and looked after it. That is why these buildings are made the way local people made everything else.

The builders were shipwrights. Look up inside and the ceiling is framed like a hull turned over, curved ribs and planking, no plaster. Walls and towers are clad in shingles cut by hand from alerce, a slow growing native softwood. They are laid in overlapping courses so that rain runs off. The oldest survivor, at Achao, dates from about 1730 and holds together largely with wooden pegs.

Sixteen were listed by UNESCO in 2000, out of roughly sixty in the same tradition. They are painted in flat strong colors and repainted often. Tenaun is blue and white with three towers across its front. Castro is yellow and violet, which people either like or do not.

Castro sits on posts above the mud

Castro is built on an inlet, and part of it stands out over the water on posts. The palafitos are two and three stories high, clad in shingle or painted iron sheet. Their fronts sit on an ordinary street and their backs on stilts. Twice a day the water goes out and leaves the ground beneath them bare and brown.

The posts are local timber driven into that mud, and they need replacing on a cycle. You can usually find one house jacked up with new legs going in. The 1960 earthquake, magnitude 9.5, and the wave behind it took out a great many of these houses. Almost everything standing now is later than that.

They were poor housing and were treated as such for a long time. Several are guesthouses today, which has kept them upright and also changed what they are. Walk the far side of the inlet at low water to see the underside. That is the honest view of them.

How often does it actually rain in January?

About every second day. Castro records roughly two thousand millimeters a year. The summer months are its driest, which still leaves rain on ten to fifteen days in January. The wind comes off open ocean with nothing in front of it. Cucao, on the west side, is wetter again than Castro on the east.

Forecasts more than two days out are close to useless here. A morning of flat grey can turn clear by noon and be grey again by four. Waterproofs are not a precaution on this island, they are daily clothing. Boots matter more than anything else you pack.

The plan allows for it. The churches, the museum at Ancud and the covered market at Dalcahue all work in bad weather. The walking days at Cucao and Punta Pirulil are the ones that move. If a wet week would spoil the trip for you, this is not the island to choose.

Allow whole hours for the ferry and the gravel

The island is reached by a short crossing of the Chacao channel, about thirty minutes on the water. Waiting is the variable part. In January the vehicle line can run an hour or more each way. It runs through the night, because that is when freight moves. A bridge has been under construction across the channel for years, with its opening pushed back again and again.

Inside the island, distances read as small and are not. Ancud to Quellon is a little over two hundred kilometers, which with stops is most of a day. The road to Cucao and the national park is partly gravel, corrugated in dry spells and greasy in the wet. Achao needs a second short crossing, to Quinchao.

None of this is hard. It simply uses hours. The days here carry fewer items in them than you might expect from the map.

Where $3,420 else goes

This departure sits on the $3,420 rung, and it is not alone there. The office keeps every trip at that figure on one page so the number can be seen doing different work in different parts of the world. It does not rank them and will not tell you which is the better buy, because that is not a judgement a figure supports.

• The whole of the $3,420 rung
• All eight figures side by side
• Every departure in one table