Hotel Awa

Mrs Smith is sunbathing in a plunge swimsuit with a duo of jetties at her feet and a lavish speedboat just behind her. A paparazzi of sunlight bounces across the lake, and she has a snowcapped volcano as her backdrop. Welcome to the set of the new film franchise streamed direct from my fantasies: 008. Yes, the next Bond will be a woman, and yes, I’ve decided, it will be my girlfriend.

It is true we have only been here an hour. It’s true things have escalated quickly. But there’s something about Awa that has made me feel a little giddy. That’s the beauty of hotels. Like love, there is something out there for everyone. Some like silk, some like Starck, some like a submarine on site. Me? I like this. I like every single thing about this.

The site of architect-owner Mauricio Fuentes’s summer house, Awa sits on the best spot of the black-sand-beached Lake Llanquihue. (Bring sunglasses: I have never in my life seen water that sparkled more). The hotel itself is a graceful Jenga block of glass and steel, wood and concrete. Inside, the sun toasts the floorboards through the glass, leaving the air warm with the smell of alerce, a kind of magical Andean cypress. There is a sea of art books on low wide tables, there’s a fisherman’s boat suspended above the bar (which doubles up as informal earthquake detection). A swimming pool defies gravity to cantilever out towards the lake. Balletic waiters use copper cocktail cups to swoop up dragonflies that zoom in through open windows. It’s brutalism with a heart of gold, and from the first sip of my pisco sour, I’m smitten. 

Second base on a hotel date is when you are taken to your room. Sometimes this can be an odd moment – not unlike opening a present in front of the person who gave it to you. What if it's underground? What if it has no windows? What if you have to say through gritted teeth, ‘I love it, thank you, exactly what I wanted’. 

The key does its magic swipe, we step inside. A different feeling fills us: How to look appropriate and sane and like this isn’t our first ever time in a hotel, when we step into the room and it’s one of the greatest things we’ve ever seen.

This – investors, producers, ladies and gentlemen of the Oscar jury – was when we realized we’d stepped into a spy film. Honestly? It required little imagination. Our room is clearly Bond’s volcano hideaway – sky-wide windows, tan leather woven chairs, a wood stove framed in jet-black igneous rock. A four-person jacuzzi, a crisp white bed big enough for all manner of MI6 duties, a TV hidden in a trunk that Q would be proud of. A view you could look at until you died. We walk around slightly stunned.

British people may see the words ‘Lake District' and think ‘Yorkshire’. The reality is, this is the British lake district’s wild and caddish cousin – you can vaguely see the family resemblance, but he’s never at any of the reunions because he’s off mountaineering in Bhutan. The Chilean Lake District is pasture meets pyrotechnics – on the one hand, friesian cows, meadows and a slew of quaint German cake shops; on the other, black sand volcanoes, towering eucalyptus trees, prehistoric leaves and delightfully lethal-looking waterfalls.

I don’t know if I have mentioned this, but there is a volcano. There is a volcano and it has snow on it. Go there. It is one of the principal dramatic climaxes of our film. ‘TIMELAPSE,’ Mrs Smith keeps shouting at me as she drives, ‘TIMELAPSE!’. I lean forward with my arms out as if I were about to dive and hold my phone on the dashboard. She is right – it's the only way to capture the Viennetta-like curves in the road.

I should mention that Mrs Smith has only just got her driving license, and I, her sole companion and navigator, cannot, do not, and will never know the difference between left and right. The film teeters on the brink of Carry On Up The Volcano, but when we get to the top, it becomes sheer Wes Anderson. It’s a dreamscape. It’s a moonscape. It’s entirely bizarre, and entirely makes sense. We ride a series of vertiginous 1970s ski lifts to the top, plot our evacuation route were the volcano to blow, and cup our hands to drink water straight from a glacier. 

The day is miraculously clear. There’s something about the circle of mountains around us that make it look like the sky has been ripped. I am a terrible photographer, and even I am still jealous of the photos I took. 

How do you top that? Well, you follow the baby-got-back curves of the lakeshore to return to your dream hotel, and you jump in the water at sunset of course. I will be honest: the water is not warm. But it’s the kind of clean, clear cold that makes you cry out. You skin gets tight as a drum, your nipples beg for forgiveness, and you feel like an absolute badass. 

You also feel a little bit virtuous. Just the right dose of wellness threads through Awa – celery-laced water at reception, kombucha at breakfast – but just like the Scandi-chic option of plunging into the icy lake, it’s a pickleback chaser to the main event: delicious, unadulterated hedonism. 

Cue: dinner. Purple Chiloé potatoes fried golden, served with salsa verde. Cutaway to towers of pancakes dusted with snow like the volcano. Cutaway to Mrs Smith in the hot tub crowned by a heat haze. Cutaway to the poems and chocolates that arrive on our pillow. Cutaway to the ultimate Sean Connery move: a fire lit in your room while you’re having dinner. An actual fire. Lit in your room. Which you can…yes. You’ll have to buy the director’s cut to see that part. 

The villain, it turned out, was having to leave. Not quite the petrol-doused car chase, but by the end we’d shifted genre: something slower, softer and without too much of a plot; something which could easily open at Sundance.