PATAGONIA
From where I sit, in a Parisian-style sidewalk cafe in a chic neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, Patagonia is a few hundred miles and few weeks behind us. Not that far considering where it was when we began our journey, nearly two years and 45,226 kilometres ago. But it may as well be as far as it’s ever been. We are once again amidst “civilization”, or where people cluster and compete while being hemmed in on all sides by concrete, where mustard-yellow and platform boots seem to be the fashion de jour. Not that Patagonia will soon fade from mind, no way — its images are more firmly lodged there than the mud on our boots. It is a place so beautiful that it doesn’t just surpass expectation but uproots it, sling-shots it into the stratosphere and blows it up in the most spectacular display un-imaginable.
Maybe that’s why Patagonia remains ineffable — hard to pin-down and shifty. As a word, it evokes a gamut of free associations: boutique outdoor-gear-wearing yuppy and bedraggled sojourner (both are true yet simultaneously serve to cancel each other out). It even conjures mythic human history as the last place we are said to have settled on our migratory turn-about the planet, and where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid opted to lay low after their notorious turn-about U.S. banks. Defined on the map, its northern edge makes a funny, sideways-scribbled “v”. Its geography ranges from the dense alpine forests and lakes and jagged granite ridges of the Andean Cordillera, to the barren wind-swept Argentinian plains of the Patagonian steppe, and puzzle-like fjords of the west. Or maybe it reaches so far south as to be the veritable “ends of the earth”, that words, too, drop off into the abyss. For one reason or another — or for many — the place that has ever been the distant goal of our itinerant journey still stretches beyond grasp.
A bit about our route:
After some weeks of unexpected delay awaiting a car part in Puerto Montt, Chile, we were eager to get south before winter, cooler temperatures and truncated hiking days. So we boarded a ferry with Babo and cut through Chile’s incredible spliced-up southern fjords to disembark in Puerto Natales, of southern Patagonia. We were glad we arrived when we did. In late March the trees were doing their magnificent rainbow-spectrum thing and tourists were far fewer than earlier in the season. We kicked off our Patagonia tour with a week in Torres del Paine National Park, a trekker’s paradise; here we saw everything from sunshine and snow to avalanches and a cougar with cubs. Then we crossed into Argentina for the first time on our trip, finding Route 40 (the Argentine equivalent of U.S. Route 66) and Perito Moreno, one of the most dramatic glacier specimens on Planet Earth, probably anywhere. We stood and witnessed glacial epochs shave off, plunge beneath the waterline with a thunderous roar, then hurtle upward to produce a mammoth eddy. From here we drove to El Chalten, the now quasi-Jackson Hole-ish village at the base of the Fitzroy Massif (of Patagonia ™ fame); if you don’t already know, these peaks have lured ambitious climbers for decades. But even for the less zealous outdoorswoman, Los Glaciers National Park offers the best reward-to-energy-output hiking ratio I’ve experienced. After nearly a week, we broke from the well-trod Patagonia route and headed north-west to the lesser known, Perito Moreno National Park, where we encountered a blizzard on our first night (and seriously sub-zero temperatures) and the most perfect tiny wooden cottages with wood burning stoves. Not only were they ideally located along hiking routes, they were free of charge and stocked with firewood. We crossed back into Chile at Chile Chico, intending to discover what we’d missed by ferrying past, and spent an idyllic birthday week in Patagonia National Park. There we hiked and enjoyed the unparalleled facilities that were part of the vision and now the legacy of big-time environmental philanthropist (and founder of The North Face ™), Doug Tompkins. Pumalin National Park, with volcanoes and craters, epic vistas, glaciers, autumn colours, and again, singular camping facilities and park personnel (who bailed us out of hairy spot on a steep gravel hill with the help of a manual winch and not a hint of irritation). These were just some of the highlights.
Thanks to Tim, the photos we took in Patagonia have been whittled down from an enormous stock. We tried to do justice to the beauty and diversity of this place but words and pictures are even more insufficient than they usually are. Sigh. We loved Patagonia, and suppose can be grateful it defies explanation — reason to circle back again in the future and tease out a definition.
