Family Fortunes: Divergent travels with my separated parents

As the youngest daughter of separated parents, I had the default honour of acting as a travelling companion to two divergent free spirits, each carving out their own unexpectedly solo path with gumption and enthusiasm.

When I was 20, I spent a year studying in Santiago, Chile. That year I took a trip with each parent and the memories from those trips become increasingly precious as the years go by and with them one parent.

My mum announced in her inimitable, matter-of-fact manner: “We are going to the end of the world”. In her 20s she had a romance with a student from Argentina and had, ever since, been enthralled by the idea of Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America.

We rented a car and drove the whole way down to cross the Magellan straights on a ferry with a gaucho on horseback; mother and daughter, with the world at their backs. The memory of it elates me.

Safely across, we pulled in for the night to the captivatingly named Porvenir (literally translated as “what is to come”) and we stayed in an eerie guesthouse with an incongruously friendly proprietor.

Ecstatic whoops

The entire village was summoned, to ecstatic whoops and howls and much curiosity, to see, for the first time, that their little guesthouse appeared in the Lonely Planet guidebook.

Later that year my dad flew into Santiago on a sunny Christmas Eve and we drew up an itinerary of places that had captured his imagination from long ago.

A half-forgotten line of a poem he had learned at school “Tháinig Long ó Valparaiso” beckoned us to the port city of Valparaíso, a once major shipping port, now a crumbling and colourful urban sprawl.

We crawled up the hills that surrounded the city on funiculars and sipped wine on the hilltops.

Next, we drove inland in search of some vineyards, father driving and daughter reading out extracts from the guidebook. Never one to shy away from a bit of excitement, it was “cluster bomb” and “international arrest warrant” that got his attention.

The car screeched to a halt and we trundled down a dirt road eventually crunching across the gravel of an old colonial finca. The guidebook had said that the vineyard belonged to the infamous (and odious) cluster bomb manufacturer Carlos Cardoen.

Dad decided that this would be a perfect place to put our heads down for the evening. We settled in, ordered dinner and spent the evening chatting to a very nice couple at the next table.

It was only when we were checking out of the guesthouse the next morning to continue on our journey that we realised that our dinner companion was Carlos Cardoen jnr who also happened to be in the family business.