patagonia dreaming
The bus ride north out of Ushuaia began spectacularly, winding through sky-brushing, snow-crested mountains then skirting a handful of dazzling emerald lakes. A couple of hours into the journey, however, we were well and truly immersed in the famed Patagonian emptiness, a numbing bleakness that spreads for hundreds of miles in every direction. Our experience of Patagonia to date had been only one side of the coin, a taste of her extremities. We were now beginning to appreciate the other defining trait; vast tracts of obliterating nothingness.
It’s a nothingness unlike any other – the small tokens of un-nothing (the odd llama, the rare waterway) serving to highlight just how empty and featureless these endless expanses really are. This isn’t the ‘nothing’ of the trip along the Hume Highway or even the Australian interior, it’s an emptiness more pure, refined yet – perhaps because of this – difficult to define.
Australia’s empty spaces hum with their own discernable rhythm; in the thrall of a still, cicada-soundtracked summer’s day, you can slow your mind and attune your senses bit by bit to unpack what is really there. The drab, interminable golden plains of childhood Sydney-Melbourne road-trips begin to take on their own minutely shifting shapes and tones, an atmosphere that subtly alters as you encounter anew the small noble hills with their rocky outcrops, rust-seized windmills listing yet intact, witch-finger phantoms of rain-starved gums; a muted-palette tableaux cheekily streaked with the sulphurous flash of screeching cockatoos.
In Patagonia there is no sense these rhythms would ever take hold, no matter how patient the wait. The boundless sky overhead is oddly disconnected from the plains below, the atmosphere ungraspably thin. The light is not the bleaching white-light of home, nor the gauzy, pastel-smearing daub of say the French south, where your memory conjures softly swaying fields of lavender you likely never saw. It is lost somewhere in-between, a suspended-reality stage light lacking the brutal honesty of the former and the timeless romantic whimsy of the latter.
Even the road, paved as it left the coast and mountains but giving way to a dusty unsealed thread, seems unsure of itself, quietly doubtful of its own tenuous existence. The Welsh and Scottish farmers who arrived here in the late 1800s with their ragged flocks of sheep and new-life dreams must have been both strangely at home and somewhat ill at ease. The brutal white winters and sense of isolation echo the furthest reaches of the Scottish Highlands, but here at the other extreme of the world there is no real sense of an end to it, you might as well be on the moon. Civilisation is not simply miles away but seems, even in the space of a day-long bus journey, to evaporate as a concept.
Yet bit by bit, mile by imperceptible mile, you do get through and it turns out there is another side after all. But the experience does creep under the skin. The journey makes the eventual arrival in Punta Arenas, a long-faded port town in the deep south of Chile, all the more unsettling. Punta Arenas has that forlorn, wrong side of the tracks feel you find on the outer fringes of certain North American towns. It hadn’t been snowing, yet recalling the town once departed, the mind can’t help but picture pockets of dirty, slushy snow sitting in neglected corners, out of the reach of the sun’s feeble fingers.
punta arenas
punta arenas
We arrived to find everything was closed for the first afternoon and evening due to it being New Year’s Eve. After trailing around for an hour or so trying to find somewhere to eat that wasn’t either closed or already booked out, we finally find a friendly, old-fashioned diner. Cheerfully well fed on seafood and pasta, we headed down to the foreshore for the fireworks display, requisite ooh and aahs accompanying, but it seems we all still had our hearts back in Ushuaia.
Thankfully this didn’t last too long, as the next day we headed off to Seno Otway to see a local colony of pingüinos. Having only encountered fairy penguins until that point, the much larger Magallanic penguins were quite a sight. Fairly oblivious to our presence, they went about their penguin business, waddling across windswept grasslands, diving for fishy snacks and body-surfing on the small breakers purely for the fun of it.
los pingüinos
penny and pedro
polly and pablo
We spent the following day back in Punta Arenas, the town still eerily quiet in this holiday period. It did have a charm in a way. The central plaza, without which no self-respecting South American town with a population greater than three would be seen, was fringed by grand colonial buildings from an era when the town was still an important port. But away from the centre, down towards the jetsam-strewn crushed-shell beaches, the building style was what you would expect of this kind of far-flung, salt-scoured outpost – lots of corrugated iron and worn wooden structures once painted in bold colours, now in various stages of decay. It was a long way from our first taste of Chile, the desert-locked San Pedro de Atacama – now more than 3000km to the north.
punta arenas
punta arenas
punta arenas
punta arenas
