Patagonia Part Two — Into the Wind

After crossing the border and enduring the thorough Chilean customs examination — every bag opened, every food item scrutinised, a process the Chileans take very seriously to protect their unique ecosystem — we drove into the Torres del Paine National Park, which was to be our base for the next five days.

Upon entering the park two things assert themselves immediately. 

The first is the sheer dominance of the mountains. Torres del Paine is presided over by two iconic formations: the Torres themselves — three impossibly vertical granite towers that shoot almost 2,500 metres straight out of the earth like the fingers of some buried giant — and the Cuernos del Paine, the Horns, which are perhaps even more dramatic in their strangeness. The Cuernos are a geological oddity: pale silver-grey granite bases topped with dark metamorphic rock caps, giving them a distinctive two-tone appearance that looks almost too theatrical to be natural. These peaks are visible for much of the drive into the park, growing larger and more commanding with every kilometre, and they never quite lose their ability to make you reach for the camera.

The second thing that confronts you is altogether sadder. In December 2011, an Israeli backpacker carelessly burned a piece of toilet paper in dry scrubland, and the resulting fire tore through the park for nearly seven weeks before it was finally brought under control in February 2012. Around 18,000 hectares of native forest were destroyed. What’s left is a landscape of silent devastation — hundreds of thousands of skeletal, blackened trees standing on either side of the road like charred sentinels, stretching as far as you can see in both directions. These are slow-growing Patagonian natives. It is estimated that a century will pass before the damage stops being visible. It’s a sobering thing to drive through, and a reminder of how fragile these wild places are.

We spent three nights at Hostería Pehoé, which is one of those places that makes you feel slightly guilty for existing at such a standard of comfort while surrounded by wilderness. The hotel sits on a small rocky island in Lake Pehoé, connected to the shore by a long narrow footbridge that has a tendency to sway in the wind — which, as you’ll discover, was a near-constant feature of our time here. From almost every window and every inch of the shoreline, the full drama of the Cuernos del Paine fills the horizon in an almost cinematic sweep of rock and sky, reflecting into the lake when the conditions allow.

Those conditions were, naturally, not always cooperative. We were out before dawn on all three mornings chasing the light, and the lake that looks so serene in photographs showed us its other side — grey, choppy and very unwelcoming when the clouds rolled in from the south. 

But fortune favours the persistent, and one morning rewarded us with something I’m still not sure I have the vocabulary to describe properly. The light that fell across the Cuernos was so impossibly saturated — deep amber and rose and gold pouring across those ancient peaks and bleeding into the lake below — that when I processed the RAW files I actually had to reduce the colour. I was genuinely concerned nobody would believe it wasn’t manipulated. The Hasselblad earned its keep that morning.

This was also where the wind introduced itself properly.

The locals had warned us, and we had nodded and smiled the way you do when you don’t quite believe something until you’re actually experiencing it. On several occasions it was physically impossible to stand upright. Not difficult — impossible. A few members of the group found themselves suddenly on their hands and knees, the gusts having made that decision on their behalf. 

The wind comes off the mountains in sudden, vicious blasts, and it doesn’t arrive clean — it carries icy rain and grit ripped up from the trails, and it’s entirely indiscriminate about what it does with that grit. One member of the group had the front element of a camera lens actually scratched by the debris in the air. A reminder that this landscape, for all its beauty, doesn’t particularly care about your equipment. We were told the trail was on the verge of being closed, which I believe would have required sustained gusts of over 90km/h. I’m choosing to believe we were close to that threshold. It makes a better story.

After the Pehoé chapter, we moved to Hotel Rio Serrano for the final two nights in the park. The setting here is different — lower, with the Río Serrano winding through the valley floor and the snow-capped peaks of the Paine Massif floating in the distance beyond. The atmosphere is slightly softer here, more pastoral, which turned out to suit the encounters we had.

It was here that we met the gaucho.

I’ll refer to him as Groucho, as I had christened him by the end of the first encounter, though his actual business is a great deal more serious. The gaucho — the horseman of the Patagonian pampas — is one of South America’s most enduring figures, a working cowboy tradition that stretches back centuries across Argentina and the southern reaches of Chile. This particular specimen needed absolutely no direction from any of us. He read the situation immediately — a group of photographers, mountains, morning light — and proceeded to gallop his horse through a series of shallow ponds at full speed, sending arcs of water into the air on both sides, with the snow-dusted peaks of the Paine Massif filling the background. He then pulled up and posed. Genuinely posed. It was magnificent and we were entirely in his hands. Some things you can’t plan.
 

The final morning nearly got away from us.

The breakfast at Rio Serrano is, in fairness, exceptional — and I will admit that exceptional breakfast has a gravitational pull that competes uncomfortably with the pre-dawn alarm on a cold Patagonian morning. We were a little later than intended. But we found ourselves, in the end, among a stand of ancient lenga beech trees — wind-sculpted, bent and twisted into extraordinary shapes by decades of exactly the kind of punishment we’d been experiencing all week — with a valley mist slowly thickening ahead of us. Over the course of an hour the mist built and settled until the distant mountains were just suggestions, and the gnarled trees were emerging from that soft grey light in the way that makes landscape photographers forget they’re cold and tired.

It was, for me, the most satisfying set of images from the entire trip. There’s something about mist and trees and soft light that bypasses the technical part of the brain entirely. You just react. The Hasselblad was exactly where it needed to be.

And then it was over.

A last breakfast, a final six-hour drive back across the border, and a last night in El Calafate where the group gathered around a long table for an Argentinian asado — slow-roasted Patagonian lamb, fire-cooked in the traditional way, with the kind of wine that tastes better for being earned. Stories were told. Mishaps were revisited with the embellishment they deserved.

Patagonia, in the end, gave me everything it promised — the hikes, the extraordinary autumn colours burning copper and gold across the valley slopes, the mountains doing things with light that I hadn’t quite believed were real until I saw them with my own eyes. What I hadn’t fully anticipated was the wind. I suspect the wind is something you simply cannot prepare for until it’s trying to knock you over while simultaneously trying to steal your hat.

What defined the trip for me, though, wasn’t the light or the mountains or even the puma. It was the group. The particular camaraderie that forms when half a dozen people are simultaneously leaning at a 45-degree angle into a horizontal gale with grit in their teeth, laughing because there is genuinely nothing else to do. The evenings spent with a glass of something warming, comparing images and trading the day’s disasters like badges of honour.

Would I go back? Ask me again when I can’t feel the wind. There are longer trails I haven’t walked, a boat ride to the face of the Grey Glacier I haven’t taken, more pumas I haven’t found, and — most temptingly — the possibility of a still dawn when the lake lies like a mirror and the Cuernos reflect perfectly in the silence. That image exists. I intend to go and get it.

But one thing is certain. For a first encounter with South America, Patagonia has set the bar at a genuinely unfair height. The hospitality, the landscapes, the sheer scale of everything — this continent rewards the curious traveller in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I suspect there are a great many more miles of it to discover.

Watch this space.