Maia's Into The Moonlight

PATAGONIA ON MY MIND

Argentina's Route 40, like US Route 66, drives deep into your imagination.

Patagonia exists almost more in my mind than as a concrete geographic place. The images from a visit in December and January will not go away. Patagonia is a place to be swallowed up by. It has so many sides to it that you can find your own separate reality and live it out. In my case, I found many realities that I continue to live out mentally. Maybe I will choose one and go back.

But how does one get to that memory, that desire? Even Bruce Chatwin, whose "In Patagonia" is one of the great travel books, in the end resorted to recounting stories of others, fantasizing on encounters with unique people and inventing quests. I dogged Chatwin during my journey in Patagonia and talked with people he talked with, went to the places he went to. It would be easy to say he was a phony, but in the end I understood he had arrived at a deeper truth about Patagonia. I appreciated that Chatwin was striving to express a deeper, mystical, truth about the place: That Patagonia exists more solidly as an idea.

We traveled 10 hours by plane around Patagonia and did 3000 kilometers by car, and still only saw a fraction of this immense expanse. So as one of the proverbial blind men defining an elephant, I will let the images below show the flawed glimpses of what I saw of Patagonia.

In 1901 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Miss Etta Price, settled right here in Cholilla, province of Chubut, Argentina. They lived like gentlemen farmers for about 5 years, inviting the local people and the governor of the province for parties, where the Sundance Kid entertained them playing sambas on his guitar. But Etta Price got impatient with so much gracious living and incited them back to the exciting life of robbing banks. With the American and Argentine police after them, they escaped to Bolivia, where it is believed that they died in a shootout.

Sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, one comes across a lonely rider.

The immense Perito Moreno glacier, covering more territory than Buenos Aires.

Breathtaking Torres del Paine, in Chile.

Puerto Natales is known for its "magellanic" architecture, with colorful houses made of wood and corrugated zinc plates. Abandoned dogs are everywhere in Patagonia, it breaks your heart. We gave them food, but it was like a grain of sand.

Wind. There is wind everywhere in Patagonia, and the further south you go, the more wind there is. In Punta Arenas they put ropes at the intersections so people will not be blown out into traffic.

The emptiness of Patagonia prompts the few people who live there to reach out for very personal forms of spirituality. You come upon lovingly cared for shrines in the most desolate spots. These shrines are mainly dedicated to two very popular “saints” in the local folklore.

Gauchito Gil was a young cowhand murdered by the authorities in an atrocious way because he loved the rich widow who owned the estancia. At the place where he was killed, miracles were recounted – good ones for the poor and bad ones for the rich. His red-painted shrines with his painted or sculpted image are filled with bottles of wine and cigarettes.

Difunta Correa was a young woman who had just given birth and died of thirst while walking through Patagonia’s vastness. When her body was found four days later, her baby was still alive and nursing from the dead woman’s breast. Difunta Correa’s shrines, with the image of the miracle, are piled with mountains of bottles of water.

Patagonia's magnificent fauna -- eagles, guanacos, foxes, ñandús, and many others.

A characteristic sight in the windy vastness of Patagonia are "arboles bandera" - flag trees - bent from the constant wind.

We stayed at the estancia in Viamonte, belonging to the descendants of Lucas Bridges who wrote the must-read book on Tierra del Fuego, "The Uttermost Part Of The Earth".

Traveling south in Tierra del Fuego.

The meeting of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans – the Drake Passage – is one of the very roughest seas in the world, where countless ships have sunk over the centuries. The End of The World Museum in Ushuaia is filled with beautiful figureheads and historical memories rescued from the waters.

Leaving Ushuaia for Antarctica.