Red Hot Chile Pleasures

What do you call a long, narrow, spaghetti-strand sliver of land wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains? Nobel poet and native son Pablo Neruda called it "the thin country". Everyone else calls it Chile. Within its borders in this south-western corner of South America is a multi-faceted, geographically diverse nation of 18 million that the indigenous Mapuche peoples named for the word chilli, or "where the land ends".

Visitors to the continent typically set their s…