In Patagonia – another journey to the end of the world
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
I didn’t deliberately plan to arrive in Buenos Aires 50 years to the day after Bruce Chatwin announced his intention to “run away to South America”. But it was a handy coincidence. The Sunday Times journalist abandoned a job in New York in November 1974 with a wallet of expenses to research a piece about the Guggenheim family. And a plan to do something else. “I intend to spend Christmas in the middle of Patagonia,” he wrote to his editor in London. “I am doing a story there for myself.”
In Patagonia, the “peculiar, dotty book” that subsequently emerged, was published in 1977, transforming Chatwin’s reputation. In a haphazard collection of essays, he careers through a series of fabulous encounters while on the trail of a mythic brontosaurus whose existence he has been obsessed with since a child. In Patagonia established him as the embodiment of the restless adventurer, ever alert to fresh experience and exchange. And in his wake have followed generations of aspirants, all in search of stimulation, entertainment and derring-do.
I have not arrived in Buenos Aires with a scheme to abscond with company expenses. Nor do I care much for the brontosaurus. I do share a fascination with the vast wilderness that straddles Argentina and Chile and its strange constituencies of guanacos, gauchos and Welsh émigrés, but I do not have much time. To put more shape on the adventure, I have turned to Harry Hastings, founder and director of travel specialists Plan South America, to devise an itinerary: I seek a moderate amount of exploration (preferably in an automatic vehicle), geological landmarks, hikes, comfortable lodgings and otherworldly views. Hastings has therefore delivered me to Franco Cingolani, having designed a bespoke 13-day road trip that begins at Futaleufú, in northern Patagonia, and ends in Patagonia National Park, 753km further south. Franco is based in Buenos Aires, and much of Patagonia has long been a communications black hole. Thanks to Elon Musk’s Starlink, however, occasional WiFi hotspots have become a welcome change. Like a modern-day Jeeves using WhatsApp, Franco acts like a virtual butler, keeping tabs on progress, sending on any relevant bits of paper and – just once, I promise – organising room service to bring me some herbal tea.
The journey begins at Esquel airport in Argentina, and a two-hour drive along a ragged dirt road, across the Chilean border to the town of Futaleufú in Los Lagos. Perhaps the charm of Patagonia is that its boundaries are still so bleary. The writer Nicholas Shakespeare describes it as a “vast, vague territory that encompasses 900,000 square kilometres... most effectively defined by its soil”. But no one quite knows where it begins and ends. Futaleufú sits in one of its less-known quarters. Most visitors head straight to Torres del Paine National Park and its spiky granite towers. Millions of others have only heard of Patagonia via the clothing label, whose brand logo is emblazoned with a depiction of the Andes and the famous Mount Fitz Roy.
If Chatwin was one of the first people to encourage modern Pata-tourism, his influence has since been eclipsed by Douglas Tompkins, the late eco-activist and co-founder of The North Face and Esprit clothing lines. An enthusiastic outdoorsman, Tompkins visited Chile with his second wife Kristine in the early 1990s, fell in love with the landscape and subsequently purchased more than two million acres of Patagonia to become one of the largest private landowners in the world. The couple’s passion was rewilding, and in particular creating wildlife corridors for the safe migration of native species such as the puma and the huemul, an adorable-looking and rarely spotted deer. When Douglas died in a kayaking accident in 2015, the couple had created more than seven national parks and expanded three more, linking a third of Chile. These were subsequently regifted to the government in a donation that helped to add about 10 million acres of land to national parks. Suffice it to say, the name Tompkins is still whispered in hushed reverence by most everyone you meet in Chile. Even if you are not a massive puma fan.
Certainly the quartet of Brazilians who run the Pata Lodge in Futaleufú have taken Tompkins’ teachings to heart with their own eco-experiment. Like the Tompkins family, they discovered their new utopia when stopping for a picnic while on holiday some 13 years ago. Its American former owner hadn’t visited the property for years and the land had fallen into disrepair.
Today, the lodge sits like a fairytale encampment on a meander in the river, furnished with a verdant kitchen garden and cradled on either side by a jagged mountain gorge. It operates as an eco-retreat dedicated to sustainable living: all the meals are served in the communal quinta (farm-to-table, naturally) and the place hums with an environmental zeal. Inevitably, for a group of people who opted out of their creative fields to found an alternative way of living, there’s a smoke of evangelism in the air. On a trip to visit another landholding in development, the co-owner Marcelo Schaffer expounds on the big bang theory, the evolution of man and the connectivity of our cosmic selves. For some 90 minutes. It’s a long trip, needless to say.
The Futaleufú boasts some of the finest white-water rafting in the world. Reluctantly, I join a group of about 40 river virgins to ride a string of class IV and V rapids with the Bochinche rafting company. The guides are an itinerant band of nomads who pitch up every season before dispersing around the world. They have a hippie nonchalance and the charismatic machismo of being leaders in their quite small field. My guide comes from Bahía Félix, in Tierra del Fuego, which competes to be the wettest place in Chile with around 4,000mm of rain each year. He spends the summers in the Dolomites: his colleagues come from Chile, France and the US, among others: one of the safety guards is on the Norwegian Olympic team. We hit giant walls of water and spin around in angry swirls. It’s exhilarating. And terrifying. But none of us capsizes. And the water is astonishing, a seemingly AI-manufactured shade of aquamarine so pure we can scoop it straight into our mouths.
Melimoyu Lodge is a four-hour drive from Pata Lodge, through lonely mountain passes and past acres of trees that stand spectral and charred from bygone forest fires. Tree clearance was typical in Chile in the early 1900s, where land was granted on condition that it would be farmed. Some fires are said to have blazed for decades: it is estimated that the Aysén region lost almost all its ancient forest cover in the first half of the 20th century. The area around Melimoyu offers an insight into what that ancient habitat might have looked like. Based in the commune of Cisnes, in the shadow of its namesake volcano, the national park here was also in part assembled from land donated by Tompkins, and its dark Valdivian temperate rainforests, wide lazy rivers and remoteness lend the region a spooky, prehistoric feel. The lodging has been conceived for groups of fly-fishers, and a team of staff is stationed ready to activate every requirement –hiking, horse-trekking, hot-tub warming – for the duration of our stay. Some find the foggy wilderness romantic; I find it all a bit claustrophobic. “In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are,” writes Shakespeare. “The drinker drinks, the devout prays, the lonely grows lonelier, sometimes fatally.” I just feel a bit homesick. It’s a long, long way away from a corner shop or a cinema.
And so it’s on to Coyhaique, the biggest town in the region, and the Dreams hotel, which offers the promise of live music and an on-site casino. Most of the route follows the Carretera Austral, a highway of some 1,200km that runs from Puerto Montt to Villa O’Higgins in the south. Its construction began under Pinochet in 1976 and it was completed in 2003, linking up hundreds of remote communities for the first time. A revolution for the population, the road has provided a massive tourist boon.
That said, it’s far from easy driving. Long sections are still unpaved. “How do you feel about punctures?” bellowed Hastings, when first planning our Patagonia itinerary. “Not good at all,” I replied.
Actually, the incipient danger of roadside catastrophe turns out to be a non-issue. We’re pulling out of the tourist town of Puerto Río Tranquilo when I discover the inevitable flat. Almost immediately, a local man from Chile Chico (and by local, I mean a 3.5-hour drive away) appears beside the car with an air pump and a jack. The puncture is sorted and my roadside hero spurns an offer of payment with an insistence that borders on disgust: apparently, it is custom never to drive past a car stuck by the side of the road in Chile without checking to see if everyone’s alright.
General Carrera Lake is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever clapped eyes on, so vivid and crisp in its technicolour hues that it seems almost unreal. The lake lies in both Chile and Argentina, and has gone by many names. From its shore you can see the glaciers perched over its edge, a giant shelf of ice squashed in between the jagged peaks but vanishing rather more quickly now thanks to global warming. Chatwin’s Patagonia was thickly peopled with eccentrics, visitors and exiles, but I’m continually struck by the absence of human life. At El Mirador De Guadal, our lodge on the south side of General Carrera Lake, I admire a horizon that goes on ad infinitum without a pylon, road or cable to be seen. The total lack of electrical lighting sees the landscape vanish behind a cloak of black at night. The stars are a constant wonder, as is the thrill of seeing the moon all upside down. This is God’s own country, at least superficially still unspoilt.
Like the Pata lodgers and the Tompkinses, Stefan Veringa and his Chilean wife Carolina Fernandez were seized by the desire to build their lodgings while on a trip to General Carrera Lake in 1997. A former pharmaceutical executive from Holland, he painstakingly planned the position of each lodge to best enjoy the landscape and then whacked them up by hand. A lot of his visitors are Swiss and German. I wonder why they would fly halfway across the world to look at vistas that basically recall a steroidal version of the Alps? Stefan explains that, for them, Patagonia offers a chocolate-box nostalgia for the lost European landscapes their grandparents enjoyed as youths. Stefan is delighted that so much of the Austral remains unpaved. If the region were any more developed infrastructurally, he says, it would all be five-star hotels and Aman spas.
I cannot tell you about the fabled marble caves of General Carrera Lake, having had to cancel my outing to witness them via kayak because my stomach misbehaved. Instead, I walk the lake’s shoreline and get sunburnt on a vast, empty shingle beach. I see remote homesteads of varying degrees of luxury and find the mouth of a river that dumps pristine glacial water into the lake. I examine stones washed smooth by water for millennia, and lumps of what I’m pretty sure are petrified wood.
The water is clear and icy, the lake is mirror-still. I think about Douglas Tompkins, who died of hypothermia in this very lake when his boat capsized in an unexpected storm. The 72-year-old was a grizzled stalwart of the off-road tally-ho that so much of Patagonian travel is about, and many continue to honour his legacy today. Gaucho wannabes clip-clop over stream and mountain, and walkers undertake gruelling hiking trips, bivouacking in natural caves and wookey holes. In Patagonia National Park, the epicentre of the Tompkins project and the site of the Lago Chico lookout spot that set the couple on their rewilding journey, I walk 20 miles with a guide who goes solo mountaineering without a route map because the mountains he climbs are not yet mapped. I meet a woman who fell off a mountain in her native Mexico and broke more than 100 bones. She has come to Patagonia to re-immerse herself in nature and find her climbing legs again.
Patagonia National Park is by far my favourite spot on this trip, and mostly because of the food. The centre founded by the Tompkinses is now run by Explora, a “leading expedition company” that manages luxury lodges including operations in Torres del Paine National Park, Atacama and Easter Island, devising daily itineraries for affluent visitors that range from fly-fishing, rafting and hiking to a world-beating deep tissue massage. If that all sounds a bit White Lotus, it isn’t: Patagonia National Park is designed in the spirit of a scout camp and operated largely by Chileans, some of whom are local (and more so since the pandemic, which precipitated something of a reckoning about the lack of local staff). Best of all, while admiring the grazing guanacos over breakfast, I spot a puma padding by.
It is here also that I do some proper hiking – albeit on a highly curated trail marked with pathfinders at 1km intervals. It makes no odds, however, when the landscapes are so majestic and the company so diverse. Guests are generally paired with other visitors – “date trips”, as someone observes about the slightly awkward couplings that ensue. Nevertheless, when you’ve spent so much time in so much empty, it’s nice to have someone else to talk to. And the stories are outlandishly weird.
What brings people to Patagonia? Certainly, the region arouses a different kind of wanderlust. Maybe it’s that bucket-list energy: people are determined to see it, if only once. Many visitors are on a journey: a nagging search for some kind of fulfilment, enlightenment or serenity. As one guide tells me, choosing to spend months in a remote outpost must mean you are trying to escape someone or something; most often, a broken heart.
But does Patagonia clear the mind or set it whirring once again? Out on the mountains, one’s inner thoughts only become more amplified. There are few distractions – although the fairly regular sighting of an Andean condor, the national bird of Chile, with its giant sweeping wingspan, never fails to stir the soul.
On a last walk, I keep pace with a 21-year-old American football hero whose future has been thwarted by a botched operation following a shoulder injury. An avid hunter in his native Tennessee, he describes himself as a redneck but his prodigious knowledge of the natural world exposes in him an unusual sensitivity. Over lunch, he produces from his backpack a condor feather, perfect but for a slice along its tip where it has been gouged by another claw. He found it on the trail the other morning, and picked it up as a souvenir.
Just as Chatwin was possessed by a longing for the scrap of brontosaurus, “never in my life have I wanted anything as I wanted that piece of”... bird. I covet the giant feather from this majestic creature, the largest bird of prey in the world. But then my companion returns it to his backpack; and my only commemoration is the picture on my phone.
Jo Ellison travelled as a guest of Plan South America. From $16,695 per person (based on two sharing), including accommodation, internal flights and car hire
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