By Michelle Wille for VancouverSun.comMost travellers flocking to Patagonia do so with a copy of In Patagonia, one of the travel classics written on the region.
They follow the tracks of Bruce Chatwin, and have converted back country towns into major tourist destinations. The Patagonia that Chatwin described now only exists in a few places, a little off the beaten track, but the region is still just as vaguely described as in the '70s. According to Chatwin: "Patagonia is not a precise region on a map. It is a vast, vague territory that encompasses 900,000 square kilometres of southern Argentina and Chile."
I am not sure from where my desire to reach Patagonia and the land of Tierra del Fuego stemmed; perhaps Darwin's descriptions of the Yamana people in Voyage of the Beagle, the charting of Port Desire by the privateer Thomas Cavendish, or perhaps because to me it still was a region scarcely advanced from its early maps showing blue unicorns, red centaurs, elephant bearing condors and giants.
I left Canada with a camera, tent, some clothes, a Spanish dictionary and of course a travel book (which I never used). With the exception of long flights, delays and full body scans, my adventure really began when I arrived at the border of northern Patagonia in Chile. I had no itinerary beyond a return ticket for 10 weeks hence and a strong desire to go south, as far south as possible in Patagonia. There is no continuous road through Chilean Patagonia, as the ocean is too close to the peaks of the mountains. The route south is on foot, horseback, or sea, until you reach some of the few travelled roads of the region.
The weekly ferry service requires four days to travel the thousand odd kilometres of channels and fiords. The landscape is eerily similar to...Read full article
