On the road to Nowhere in wild Patagonia |
Nowhere is a place. That’s how author Paul Theroux described the windswept wilderness of Patagonia, the sparsely populated region straddling Chile and Argentina at the bottom of South America.
Other literary visitors—from Charles Darwin to 19th-century diarist W.H. Hudson—have marvelled at this isolated region’s appeal to our romantic sense of the remote. “The word ‘Patagonia’, like Mandalay or Timbuktu, lodged itself in the Western imagination as a metaphor for The Ultimate, the point beyond which one could not go,” wrote British writer-explorer Bruce Chatwin.
To the Eurocentric residents of Buenos Aires—the Porteños—Patagonia has always been synonymous with emptiness. Buenos Aires–born writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges summed up their attitude when he said, “You will find nothing there. There is nothing in Patagonia.”
What is this mystical Nowhere, containing nothing, like? This land that Hudson described as so enormous and empty as to “leave the mind open and free to receive an impression of nature as a whole”? To find out, I set out to the uttermost ends of the earth—finis terrae—the furthest human migration reached from its evolutionary cradle of East Africa. In true antipodean spirit, I started at the bottom and worked my way up.
Tierra del Fuego (“Land of Fire”) is the largest island in South America. It got its name in 1520, when Ferdinand Magellan saw Tehuelche Indian campfires onshore as his ships navigated the strait that now bears his name. Its capital, Ushuaia, is the southernmost city on the planet. This former penal colony is now a bustling naval base and duty-free port. Freighterloads of wealthy tourists embark from here on cruises to the Antarctic peninsula, a thousand kilometres due south.
My flight from Buenos Aires landed at dusk in Ushuaia’s harbour, framed by the black peaks of the Fuegian Andean mountain chain. I spent my first hours at the bottom of the world sifting through Merrell and North Face gear in the duty-free stores that line Ushuaia’s main street, a perfect location for a Mountain Equipment Co-op outlet. I later dined at a tenedor, the ubiquitous Argentine all-you-can-eat steak-and-fries house, where spread-eagled beef and lamb carcasses sizzle over open fire pits. Patagonia is a vegetable-free zone.
Surprisingly, the edge of the known world felt a lot like B.C. This was especially true in Tierra del Fuego National Park, 63,000 hectares of mountainous glacial terrain dotted with emerald lakes and forests, and on El Martial Glacier, home to the world’s southernmost ski resort, overlooking Ushuaia. Who knew the Joffre Lakes had a Patagonian doppelgänger?
Beavers, evidently. In 1946, the Argentine government, hoping to develop a fur trade with Europe, imported 25 breeding pairs of Canadian beavers. But European beaver-fur couture was already passé, and the project failed. The beavers were released into the forests of Tierra del Fuego, where they thrived in the absence of any natural predators. Today, more than 100,000 of their descendants are chewing and damming their way through Tierra del Fuego’s fragile ecosystem. Tourists now take beaver-dam tours. Charbroiled cuts of our national critter are on some tenedor menus. I tried not to take it personally.
Prevented by blustery weather from visiting Magellanic penguins on nearby Beagle Channel, I flew north to El Calafate. Southbound travellers had assured me it had more of a Nowhere feel to it. I would be blown away, they said.
There is a scene in the movie The English Patient where Ralph Fiennes describes a Saharan wind so terrible that a nation declared war on it. The relentless Patagonian winds howling off the Helio Sur and sweeping down onto the dusty pampas at speeds of up to 240 kilometres per hour felt equally hostile. Their forces converge on El Calafate, a chronically dusty town on the shore of Lago Argentino in Santa Cruz province. In this corner of Patagonia, every day is a bad-hair day.
El Calafate felt like the set of a spaghetti Western or a Potemkin village with its lone paved avenue lined with upscale souvenir shops, travel agencies, hotels, and tenedors hiding shabby back streets. Nearby is Los Glaciares National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to Patagonia’s most famous icons: enormous Perito Moreno Glacier and the saw-toothed granite spires of Cerro FitzRoy, southern Patagonia’s tallest peak at 3,405 metres.
Los Glaciares is an area of exceptional natural beauty. Its rugged, towering mountains and numerous glacial lakes dot the largest ice field outside of Antarctica. Abundant wildlife, including the pudú (miniature deer), the guanaco (cousin to the Peruvian llama), and the elusive puma, also call Los Glaciares home.
I spent a damp, chilly day admiring Perito Moreno glacier along with about 500 video camera–toting Italian tourists. Named after the 19th-century missionary-explorer who founded Argentina’s National Park system, this five-kilometre-wide, 60-metre-high mass of groaning, crackling menace continually expands and contracts as huge chunks of bluish ice snap off and plunge into the lake below, creating instant icebergs.
That afternoon, I headed north along parched, desolate Ruta 40 (Argentina’s answer to Route 66) to the village of El Chaltén (population 371), trekking capital of southern Patagonia. Towering over El Chaltén’s assortment of cheap hostels, luxury lodges, and pizzerias is FitzRoy massif, named after Robert FitzRoy, the captain of the HMS Beagle, the ship that took Charles Darwin on his famous voyage of discovery. Although FitzRoy is not high by Himalayan standards, summitting its near-vertical granite spire is considered a world-class technical achievement.
The trekking here is as superb as the Andean alpine panoramas are sublime. I spent several days happily tramping along well-marked trails through wind-eroded plains and century-old lenga forests to reach the spectacular viewpoints of FitzRoy and nearby peaks, their bases ringed by emerald glacial lakes. If this was in fact Nowhere, I often mused happily, I could think of worse places.
It is said that if you stand still in Patagonia, all four seasons will blow past you in a day—sometimes in an hour. In El Chaltén, that hour could include blazing-hot sun, blistering desert winds, and chilling mountain fog. Little wonder that one of the world’s premier adventure-clothing manufacturers took its name from this volatile land.
Hudson once described Patagonia as the ultimate mental pot-scrubber. “I had become incapable of reflection,” he wrote of his time there. “To think was like setting in motion a noisy engine in my brain; there was something there which bade me still, and I was forced to obey.’’
My brain, too, began to feel blissfully cleansed of reflection en route from El Chaltén to Chile to catch a ferry sailing up the Patagonian channels. I had begun the day despairing of ever finding this ephemeral middle of Nowhere. Everywhere I had been in Patagonia felt viscerally like somewhere: somewhere either too familiar or too beautiful to be just anywhere, or Nowhere.
Then, just as a particularly gaunt stretch of Patagonian plateau rolled by my bus seat window, I had a sudden Zen-like realization. My quixotic search was futile, because here, amid such magnificent desolation, there was only the miniature and the massive—nothing in between was possible. No middle, nowhere.
ACCESS: Air Canada flies nonstop to Buenos Aires and Santiago via Toronto several times a week. Several domestic airlines serve Patagonia, including national carriers Aerolíneas Argentinas and LAN Chile, Southern Winds, and the Argentine air-force airline, Lade. Flying between destinations in Patagonia is relatively economical, and advisable due to the huge distances. Aerolíneas Argentinas flight passes can be good value, but you must buy them before entering the country. Comfortable long-distance buses also service all the major routes, if you have the endurance for extremely long trips.
Accommodation ranges from backpacker hostels to five-star hotels. A popular and economical option is to stay at family-run guesthouses called pensiones. Local tourist offices often keep up-to-date accommodation lists.
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