The mist had now become so thick that I couldn’t even see two metres ahead. I stopped climbing as I knew that the edge of the mountain was close-by and beyond that lay a sheer drop over the valley. As the mist enveloped me in its cottony softness, I was caught unawares by a black creature emerging from the whiteness and swooping right towards me. I froze, terrified, as the Andean condor glided soundlessly over my head with mighty large wings. It was the most magnificent flying thing that I had ever seen. I watched spellbound as it vanished into the mist in a matter of seconds, leaving my heart beating faster for quite a while afterwards.
Part Argentinean and part Chilean, Patagonia is a land of mixed parentage and contains the attractive genes of both countries. We began our journey into Patagonia from El Calafate, the little town in Argentina that provides access by road to the South Patagonian ice field. At the approachable end of this ice field lies the inexplicably terrifying Perito Moreno Glacier. It is a mammoth, slow-moving creature that extends as far and wide as your eyes can see, and glints in a million hues of blue under the afternoon sun. Just looking at that massive never-ending stretch of startling blue is a moving experience, like reading a thought-provoking book or listening to an exceptional piece of music. “If you listen carefully, you can hear the glacier speak,” said a fellow slack-jawed admirer. I smiled politely, wondering if this was some form of glacier worship. And then I heard the front of the glacier hiss and sizzle before expelling a large chunk of ice into the water with a deafening crash. Ah! I smiled knowingly.
From El Calafate, we went to El Chalten, a small hostel town, developed purely due to the need for a base point for those hiking into the Los Glaciares National Park. We travelled by road most of the time from one place to another, through the dust-covered steppes. The monotonous scenery was broken by lush green interludes just around the rivers. The weather was extremely unpredictable – it is so far South that it snows in the mainland during summer and it can even get windy enough to throw buses off the road. But the good thing about hiking here is that you don’t have to be a hardcore mountaineer to reach its glacial depths. You walk for hours at a stretch and slowly gain elevation, without even knowing how it crept up on you. You do need the endurance for it, but the rewards of the views compared to the effort taken are enormous.
We crossed the border to Chile by road and reached Torres del Paine, the celebrated national park in Chile. The words Torres del Paine literally translate to ‘The Blue Towers’, named after the massif that rises high and pierces the blue sky. For four days, we trekked inside the belly of this national park, in order to explore its wild interiors. The first day was spent playing hide-and-seek with green trees and red fire-bushes, looking for waterfalls. The place was teeming with wildlife, and we spotted rabbits, guanacos (wild llamas), red-headed woodpeckers and Darwin’s rheas (that look like less-frightening ostriches). But, just as there was beauty, there were glimpses of negative human influence. There were large stretches of the charred remains of a forest fire caused by a careless trekker, and it would apparently take Nature a hundred years to recover from that. On the last day, after a tough climb of four hours, we reached the three granite pillars, only to find them shrouded in white cloud. We waited for a few hours in the bracing cold for the mist to clear, but as is the irony with most things, the sky cleared just after we returned to base camp.
From this national park, we got on the road again to Punta Arenas, a town situated at the southernmost edge of South America. It is surprisingly well-developed, buzzing with pizza parlours and shopping malls that accept credit cards. The chatty receptionist at our hostel said that everyone who visited Punta Arenas made a trip to see the penguins nearby. Getting the details from him, we reached Otway Sound by road. When we reached the penguin colony, there was not a single penguin around. After walking a little, we found one tiny white head poking out from a green bush, eyeing us warily. However, as we reached the beach, it was cluttered with groups of small and sprightly Magellanic penguins. It was incredibly entertaining to watch them go about their daily business – waddling in and out of the water, sunning their backs, pecking each other’s beaks and generally acting like kids on a beach vacation. I sat on the beach and watched them for a while. My glance fell on the swirling icy ocean and the seeming nothingness beyond. The feeling of being away from it all, at the far edge of the world has never been more pronounced than in the desolate beauty of Patagonia.
