MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Prince William in Patagonia.

As he arrived this week in Southern Chile, 18-year-old Prince William, elder son of Prince Charles, faces a rough and challenging ten weeks in one of the world's remotest regions in company with 110 other young men and women from all over the world working on environmental, community and adventure projects organised by Raleigh International.

Going on the Chilean expedition was his own idea. "I was just talking with friends and they said it was good idea and I just sort of liked the idea," he said. "I wanted to do something constructive in my gap year (before going to university in Scotland). I thought it was a way of trying to help people out and meeting a whole range of people from other countries and at the same time helping people in remote areas of Chile".

It is one of the varied experiences he will undergo in his long preparation to be a future ruling Monarch of the United Kingdom. It is an imaginative choice. Raleigh International runs similar projects in other parts of the world, including Africa and Mongolia, as well as two other Latin American countries, Costa Rica and Belize, where Prince William also spent some time recently on jungle training with the Welsh Guards.

Why choose Chile? It is here that Raleigh International has its longest running programme in any host country. It has taken more than three-thousand young people on its Chilean expeditions since 1985, establishing its headquarters since 1988 in the small capital of Region Eleven, Coyhaique, with fewer than 40-thousand inhabitants. After the two-day bus journey from Santiago to Coyhaique, the expedition takes Prince William and his fellow adventurers into some of the remotest and most beautiful areas of Chilean Patagonia. After medical and survival skills briefings, he will go out into the wilds with fifteen companions, carry out research on rare deer for conservation scientists, take part in community projects improving homes and roads, and carry out map-making.

The Prince will have the opportunity to go trek-king in the snow-capped Andes mountains, paddle canoes in Chile's deep lakes and fjords, explore uninhabited islands, and learn wilderness skills. The young adventurers will be under the surveillance of forty experienced supervisors of various nationalities, skilled in mountaineering and canoe-ing. Prince William and his companions will be digging their own latrines, existing on army type rations, and experiencing bad weather even in the Austral summer. They will keep in touch with civilisation with army-type radios, and Prince William will be able to pick up l