Chileans are the only people I know of who have formalised the process of starting a romantic relationship. They call it ‘pedis polelelo’. It’s basically a proposal to become boyfriend and girlfriend. Of course, they’ve usually kissed or slept together by this point – they’re not freaks – but you’re not technically going out until this event has taken place. Like marriage proposals they can be either simple or elaborate. And like marriage proposals, it’s usually the man who does it.

One one level, this is pure genius. I’ve lost count of the conversations I’ve had with people who are unclear as to whether they’re going out yet. How many coffees or beers have we all had with friends as they ponder whether they’re technically in a relationship with the person they’re dating?

My usual advice takes the form of asking whether it’s OK for them to sleep with someone else. If the answer is no, they’re in a relationship. Sexual exclusivity is the best functioning definition of it. (Unless you’re in an open relationship blah blah blah. I find people in open relationships the most tedious people to talk to about this subject. They love telling you about the rules, they all have a tremor of emotional catastrophe going on just behind the eyes and none of them are half as interesting as they think they are.)

The proposal also clears up that old question pre-married couples love asking each other: Which day shall we pick as our anniversary? Our first kiss, our first shag or something else? Under this system, the day you pidiste polelelo is the official starting date. Job done.

It clears up many things and makes perfect sense. And it’s typical of the way Chileans seems intent on imposing order in the midst of total chaos.

Chileans love comparing themselves favourably to other Latinos, especially now that Argentina’s empty box economy is falling apart in plain sight. Their sense of nationhood seems partly to be defined by an (entirely valid) perception that they are a bastion of order in a continent of chaos. They proudly tell you they work like Europeans, by which they mean hard. Even the Germans are impressed. A German logistics officer told me admiringly that they are very good military shoppers. “They buy their warships from the British and their infantry equipment from the Germans,” he said with a wry smile. It’s all very well organised.

But amidst this order, the landscape is borderline uninhabitable. The northern part of Chile, which I’m passing through now, is gradually turning into desert. There are cacti everywhere. The ground is dry and majestic, with big sweeping mountains waving up on every horizon. A strange red plant – it looks like the kind of thing which would give someone super powers in a Marvel film – covers huge patches of earth. Every mile you go it becomes more and more like Tatooine. And it’ll only become more severe as I approach the Atacama desert, which Nasa uses to trail equipment for use on Mars. It’s as close to an alien landscape as you’ll find on earth.

Nearly all of it is empty. Almost ninety per cent of Chile’s population lives in the greater Santiago area, so there’s hardly anyone left to live here. The journeys between towns are severe affairs, taking days. After all, this is a sliver of continent masquerading as a country. It is just taking the piss with how long it is.

There are hardly any cars on the road or settlements. You look out the window for hours on end without seeing any signs of life, except for the occasional flapping white flags of sweet bun sellers, who board the coaches to sell their wares to the passengers.

But even in this landscape, Chilean order endures. The sweet bun sellers are picked up in one location, then dropped off at the next, where they wait for a coach in the other direction to start the process again. Before I knew how this system operated I asked the conductor whether we would be stopping for food. He looked at me as if I were mad. Nothing is allowed to slow the progress of the vehicle.

The sleepy, dusty towns are full of polite, reserved workers. The buses ferrying us between them are extremely comfortable, even luxurious. They arrive on time, leave on the dot and never take longer than five minutes to disembark passengers, pick up new ones, and set off again. Once you’re aboard, a ticket operator comes on and checks your papers, including your passport or national ID number.

I obviously wasn’t very impressed by the demand for identification on a bus, but then it’s to this country’s great credit that you have to remind yourself how recently they were a military dictatorship. That Chilean sense of order isn’t just a defensive barricade against the landscape, or a bulwark against Latino poverty and chaos. It’s also an underlying current of fascism and fear of fascism.

Take the police, who summarise many of the tensions in Chilean society. On the one hand, they are the only police force I know of in Latin America who don’t take bribes. The people here, who almost all instinctively distrust them, are rightly very proud of this. Women also tell me they can be trusted and that they would seek help from them if they were attacked. Again, that wouldn’t necessarily be the case in many other Latin countries. In Guatemala, for instance, many of them are just heavily armed children – often given shotguns, with their spray of pellets, as a substitute for teaching them how to shoot.

But Chilean police are also brutal. They have a reputation for being incredibly violent during the frequent student demonstrations here.

A couple of days ago I saw two of them take down an aggressive drunk by the beach. At first, all I could see were flying fists, but then I spotted the signature brown uniform. I’ve seen police take people down brutally in England before. But even then their actions are clearly deliberate and trained – pressure points, or responses to orders, or specifics blows to the solar plexus to temporarily incapacitate someone. This was different. It was a brawl. Punches to the face, headlocks, a couple of kicks to the ribs: a pub fight.

Technically the police are called ‘carabineros’. But every Chilean I’ve met refers to them by the vaguely disparaging term ‘pacos’. I’m told there are efforts to make it illegal to call them that. It gives some indication of the undercurrents of authoritarianism which Chilean orderliness can contain.

Santiago at night

A little while back, a series of photos showing couples playing with their smartphones went viral. The artist had removed the smartphone from the image, instantly making them look ghostly and empty. It was all terribly clever and it dominated Facebook and Twitter for a week or so.

Of course, you could remove books from images of couples reading them and that too would look ghostly and empty. But no matter. The image clearly spoke to people and was shared widely. Much of this sharing would have taken place on smartphones, but it’s not worth getting bogged down in such obvious cynicism. It’s perfectly valid to be wary of something you partake in. That’s pretty much how I get through Grand Theft Auto.

Look around at any public scene, anywhere in the world, and you will likely see a lot of people with their faces buried in their smartphones. The growing consensus is that we are not as present as we used to be, that we are ignoring real relationships for virtual ones with vague acquaintances on screen.

Valparaiso. An extraordinary city in which almost every inch of wall space is covered in graffiti.

It can look weird. It’s always strange when technology introduces a major change in the way people behave, especially physically. And indeed a lot of online interactions are odd. Relationships which used to be fleeting – someone you had a fling with ten years ago, or that you played with when you were ten – are now often silent satellites of your current social interactions, connected to you well past the point when it should have ended.

And all this comes as social media and bespoke information feeds divide us into political ghettos – tiny self-sufficient echo chambers of thought which are making us ever more intolerant of our differences.

So it’s worth remembering every so often that these tiny devices in our pockets are actually marvellous bits of magic, which generally help develop connections between people rather than rupture them.

This is first time I’ve done proper travelling since I’ve had a smart phone and it is a completely different experience. Back in the day, it was a struggle to meet people from the country you were staying in. It was like a movie. You drifted through these places, watching people but not really interacting with them. You rarely spoke to them, you rarely entered their homes. If you did it was often as some sort of vaguely unethical ‘experience life in the slums’ tourism package, or even a volunteering mission which gap year students paid absurd amounts of money for. Most of your time socialising was with other people roughly your age, from countries roughly like your own, in a hostel patio.

Valparaiso, Valpa to the locals, is like a mix of Rio de Janeiro, Montreal and Portsmouth

Air BnB changed all that. There’s no reason to a hostel anymore. For less money you can stay with people themselves in their spare rooms. It might not be an exact replica of life in the country you’re visiting. They’re more likely to be young and internationally-minded than the rest of the population, for instance. But it is a chance to socialise with the people who you would otherwise just have looked at from a café. You get to ask them questions about their lives  and learn about them beyond the crude generalisations you had before. And you actually end up with a pretty workable idea of what life in the country you’re travelling in is like.

It also means, in this case, that I’m speaking Spanish all the time. It’s exhausting. Every conversation is an intellectual exercise of fitting my meaning into the limited words I know. It’s particular odd for me, because I never really learned those words as a foreign language. Spanish was my first language, but I lost it all when I went to live in the UK at the age of four and learned English (off Andy Peters and Phillip Schofield on CBBC – cheers lads). So I’m constantly surprised to discover that certain words have been dug up and are now available to me again, or, more commonly, that they’re not. Alarmingly, it sometimes feels like I’m in a protracted negotiation with the filing cabinet of my own brain.

Valparaiso at night

There’s a kind of social exasperation to being plunged into using a language you have not mastered. I’ve noticed that when I break off from unsuccessfully trying to formulate a Spanish sentence and mutter something irritably in English, people look visibly happy and relieved, as if it’s proof that I’m not simple. We know that people who are struggling with language are not idiots, but sometimes we forget.

There is a definite loneliness to not being able to make yourself properly understood, as if you walk around in a membrane through which only half the information gets in. Bar situations are particularly difficult. Large groups are basically incomprehensible, as is any conversation where there’s loud music. In both cases I pretty much have to check out.

So WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook are a life saver. It allows you to dip into conversations with friends where you can make yourself perfectly well understood, or political arguments where you are no longer suspected of being simple-minded (stop laughing at the back). It’s like lots of mini holidays from the stresses and strains of struggling in a foreign language.

It’s also terribly nice, when you are constantly starting relationships large and small on the road, to be able to chat to people who’ve known you for a long time, and know you well, without having to go to an internet café or pour coins into a pay phone.

More Valpa, reflecting Chile’s commitment to colour.

At any moment that I’m on my phone doing these things I am disconnected from my immediate environment. While I organise the place I’m staying next, or having a much needed chat with an old friend, I am that ghoul staring blankly at the smart phone. But it’s not disconnection that’s taking place, it’s simply a temporarily non-visible connection. To look at this device – which is creating face-to-face and virtual relationships where previously none existed – and conclude that it is separating us off from one another is superficial.

Once the shock of the iPhone came out, the changes smart phones introduced mostly came through apps. That slow pace of change has arguably made us complacent about how positively this device is changing the world around us. But take a step back and it’s a plainly a supremely human bit of technology. We hardly use the phone function of these devices anymore. But the fact this revolutionary bit of technology developed through a phone handset tells you everything you need to know about its positive implications. It brings people together more than it isolates them.

And anyway, think back to before smart phones were invented. Were you constantly starting up conversations with people on the street? Were you fuck.

In Pinochet’s Londres 38 detention centre, an estimated two thousand people – mostly leftists in their twenties – were detained and tortured. They were blindfolded the entire time they were there, apart from when they used the toilet. They were burned and disfigured, mutilated. Ninety eight of them, including two pregnant women, were never heard of again.

I walked around Londres 38 the other day and felt nothing. It’s not the first time it’s happened. When I was in school, we went on a trip to Rome. I remember my history teacher at the time saying that you could feel the evil emanating off the Colosseum, but when I got there I didn’t feel anything.

I didn’t feel anything in the S21 centre in Cambodia, where 20,000 people were tortured and killed in the Kyhmer Rouge’s wave of insanity and terror. I didn’t feel it in My Lai, the Vietnamese village preserved as it was when American soldiers gang-raped and mutilated the women who lived there and killed up to 504 unarmed civilians.

And I didn’t feel it in Auschwitz either. I visited the concentration camp on a blisteringly warm day, alongside hundreds of tourists and school groups. Certain sights shocked me – the piles of hair and glasses, for instance – but I stood in the ruins of the gas chambers and I just couldn’t access the emotional place the location demanded of me.

I really liked our tour guide that day. When one visitor suggested that this is what happens when extremism goes unchecked, she replied: “This wasn’t about extremism. Only conformity can explain what happened here.” I thought it was very beautiful and true. But later, just before we broke up, she said that visiting the camp shouldn’t be about feeling sad, that it should instead reconfirm our love of life. She advised us to go out that night, eat well, drink wine, and savour it. I spend much of my life doing precisely those things, so I thought honestly that it might be more appropriate to allow the sadness and horror of that place to sink in, to try to give it some of the recognition it deserved. But honestly I didn’t feel that horror or even that sadness. My feelings about the holocaust, like everyone else’s, were well developed by the time I visited. Being in one of the places where it happened to take place did not add or subtract from them.

This is not some protracted admission that I’m dead inside (I’ll write that later). Show me a film about the holocaust and I’ll start crying pretty much the exact second the director intends me to. But locations themselves don’t seem to have any impact on me.

Our culture presumes that some things are so terrible they soak into the walls of the places where they happen. It is what almost all horror films are based on. And why not? Rooms take on all sorts of aspects for us, positive as well as negative. They are bigger than the sum of their part. My teenage bedroom, where so many of my formative experiences took place, has an almost mystical presence in mind.

A few months ago I watched workers demolish the house next door. One man with a hammer took about an hour to completely destroy a room, breaking down the walls with each swing. And I thought: is that all it takes to destroy a room? For someone, that room he just ended has the same significance as my teenage bedroom. Rooms take on this grand meaning for us, but they are no more resilient than anything made of material. They are as meaningful as school chairs or drain pipes. They are like god: Everything we imagine they contain is in fact an expression of ourselves.

So I walked around Londres 38, in the pebble-stoned, sun-kissed heart of Santiago, and I felt nothing. The rooms could quite easily be converted into a normal house and someone would sit and watch telly in them and eat popcorn and they would be none the wiser that this was a place of despair and injustice and death.

There’s something even more disturbing about that. Evil of that sort is not this great spiritual darkness which taints the physical world in which it is expressed. It is more chaotic and meaningless. It happens and no-one is any the wiser. The place is not haunted. The darkness does not lurk in corridors. It is as if it never happened. I kept on thinking of a Grant Morrison quote, which ran something along the lines of: “Every room can be the worst room in the world.”

It’s that banal. I wish Londres 38 was more upsetting. It would ultimately be reassuring if it was.