Even so, with their sharp eyes, extra jackets and gloves and little stools, our guides made us feel they would pamper away our most unreasonable anxiety. When a middle-aged German insurance agent suddenly panicked at climbing down a steep, 5-foot-high rock path, for instance, during a long walk through the Valley of the Moon, one of the two guides assigned to our six-person group led him and his wife back to our starting point, two hours away, so that the van could later swing back and take them home.

Such treatment only stoked my own fear that a lightning bolt would hit me any minute for so completely renouncing the hardy travel codes of my youth. All I could do was remind myself of the bright side of ecotourism, which at its best meets the definition of the the Ecotourism Society in Vermont -- "responsible travel ...which conserves the environment and sustains the well-being of local people."

Most mainstream environmentalists today are indeed convinced that "responsible" travel is the best hope of protecting remote areas. And there's no question the pursuit has imported hope to corners of Africa, Asia and Latin America that have little to offer besides natural beauty.

Del Sol emphasizes his own responsibility when he discusses the design of the exploras, especially the one in Torres del Paine. That hotel, long and narrow, resembling a beached ship on its mountainside, was designed with its own unique waste-treatment system so as to avoid dumping into the lake. It processes the sewage not with chemicals but with a complex system of chambers, filters, ultraviolet light and two kinds of beneficial bacteria.

The relatively small hotel also uses some solar power, burns dead wood bought outside the park and, in general, avoids the overall impact of your average Sheraton.

Del Sol insists he also hired as many locals as possible in both hotels, although all his guides are well-educated young urban Chileans and Europeans. And in San Pedro de Atacama, the promise of gentrification has clearly raised the spirits of local merchants, depressed by the stream of penny-pinching backpackers -- mostly U.S. and European kids with more free time than cash -- who have made up the standard tourist fare for decades. Local and national archaeologists also hope the trend may help help them win protection for the area's many important ancient sites, long neglected by government officials who have yet to recognize them as significant tourist attractions.

Still, the backpackers, who haven't yet been priced out of the Atacama market, continue to enjoy it. They hang out in the numerous pizza and pancake joints or art shops in San Pedro de Atacama's center. I chatted with one of them, a blond young woman from Denver wearing a bandana and blissful look, in the late afternoon shade of the town plaza's pepper trees. She told me that she and her friends had pooled their funds to take a couple of van trips to see the geysers and the Valley of the Moon. "But the best thing I've done here," she added, "is just walk out in the desert with my boyfriend and listen to the silence."

I tried that the next day, during a rare childless moment at the rim of a salt lake. Beneath a deep blue, cloudless sky, the peace was uninterrupted but for the sudden babble of a flamingo and loud buzz of a fly.

Yet as the explora's air-conditioned bus led us gently out of the desert two days later, I thought again of the backpacker -- and realized that, between the explora's scheduled meals and tours, lectures, films and happy hours, I really hadn't gotten quite enough of that silence.

Which was too bad. It would have been priceless.

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