bOlSóN dIgItAl

By Brienne Walsh
Source: The New York Times

The boat slid across the teal waters of Lago Argentino, and soon we were 900 feet from the Perito Moreno Glacier. Through the morning rain, the glacier loomed above us — a jagged wonder glowing with colors: aquamarine, pure white, pale gray and an otherworldly, nearly fluorescent blue. Every few seconds there was a thunderous crack, and a chunk of ice, distant and unseen, went crashing into the ice field.

This was the end of a journey that had begun four days earlier in northwest Argentina. My friend Michael and I had arrived in the ski resort town of Bariloche laden with dreams of driving down Route 40 — the near-mythical highway that had been an escape route for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid more than 100 years ago — to the Perito Moreno Glacier, 50 miles west of the town of El Calafate.

I had just spent nearly two months in Buenos Aires and was tired of urban life, of nonstop human interaction. I wanted solitude and a dose of adventure before returning to my home in New York. Then it occurred to me: I would call Michael and we would go to Patagonia, the windswept frontier bequeathed with the earth’s few remaining glaciers. Adventure and solitude would surely be found there, I figured.

The agents at Hertz, where we rented our car, assured us the route hadn’t changed much since the days it was traversed by outlaws. Especially in winter, they said, it is covered with black ice and riddled with potholes. Hertz would rent us a car only if we promised not to take Route 40 the entire way.

So we mapped a new route, a 1,180-mile cruise along the paved highways that slashed across the lonely landscape of Argentinian Patagonia. It would take us east, to the coastline, and then south along the water, and then back west, to El Calafate, near the border of Chile.

We enlisted the help of our hotel porter the night before our departure. “The first afternoon, you’ll drive south to Esquel,” he told us, making notes on a piece of paper. Soon the page filled up with the names of sights: national parks, caves full of prehistoric paintings, estancias. He circled Sarmiento, the town where Bruce Chatwin, the travel writer, encountered amateur archaeologists collecting dinosaur bones from the banks of the Lake Colhué Huapi. He made a star next to Puerto San Julián, the harbor where Charles Darwin had gathered scientific data in 1834 as a member of Robert FitzRoy’s Beagle survey. If we made good time, the porter said, by the evening of the third day we would be in Río Gallegos, a hair’s breadth away from Tierra del Fuego. From there, we would make our way northwest to El Calafate.

Early the next afternoon Bariloche, with its tidal wave of tourists, slid behind us, and the Andes, black and speckled with snow, filled the horizon.

Patagonia is famous for being a magnet for wanderers. In 1977, Chatwin described the region as having “an effect on the imagination something like the Moon.” Occupying roughly 490,000 square miles, it extends from the Colorado River in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south. On the western side, it is bordered by Chile; in the east, it meets the Argentine Sea, which feeds into the Atlantic.

But Patagonia today is a different land from the one that Chatwin explored 30 years ago. Stretches of emptiness still exist, but it’s impossible to drive more than a few hours without coming upon a town ripe with three-star hotels, satellite TV and restaurants that accept credit cards.

If anything about Patagonia is still otherworldly, it’s the colors embedded in the landscape — teal, mauve, mahogany, jonquil, periwinkle, azure, lavender.

We arrived in Esquel, 120 miles south of our starting point, as the sun was setting over the mountains. The town is the home of La Trochita, a steam train line relegated to the tourist trail with hourlong journeys through the Andean foothills. But we were in Esquel only to sleep, and left early the next morning.

As we drove, the thermometer on the dashboard dropped to the freezing point. Ahead lay the low, tiered steppes that cover most of southern Patagonia. By noon, we were at Gobernador Costa, a town that looked like a John Wayne movie set, sleepy and seething with boredom. It was here that Route 40 intersected with Route 20, which we took east toward the coast.

Occasionally, we’d be startled by something unexpected — the viridian and turquoise of Lake Musters, framed by ocher reeds; the stratified rock formations of Bosque Petrificado Sarmiento, which presided over an abandoned realm of petrified wood chips deposited by a river that had carved out the valley 65 million years ago.

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