My Aussie friend and I had walked about a half mile from the van when a sweet scent filled the air like the smell of an overpowering tropical bloom.

We crested a hill and found four dead guanacos -- llama-like creatures that travel in herds across the pampas -- in the lee of some thorn bushes.

"That's not the smell you'd normally associate with rotting flesh," Mark Wilson said brightly. His Adelaide accent was so thick that for the first few hours I knew him, I thought his name was Mac.

"Maybe they huddled here during a blizzard but ended up freezing to death anyway," I said.

The desert-dry air had preserved them. They looked as if they'd just lain down to rest side-by-side, their sinuous necks relaxed on the sandy ground.

We were in the southern-most triangle of South America, a jumble of landscapes that goes from continental ice cap to ragged mountains to open grasslands. As one goes south in Argentina, the population dwindles until there's just one road along the mountain-front, and it is gravel, and from where Wilson and I stood, we could see that dusty line stretching across the plain to infinity.

The van and our five travel companions were tiny specks beside it; behind them, a bright turquoise lake spread under the sharp peaks of the Andes. The stiff summer wind tossed our hair, the tufts of coiron grass on the ground and the tan, downy fur of the dead guanacos.

The old saying is, one picture is worth a thousand words. A year after being there, I can think of one word that is worth a thousand pictures: Patagonia.

Long before I became a journalist writing about travel, I read a book called "In Patagonia" by Bruce Chatwin; it's a brilliant piece of travel writing, and although some have criticized parts of it as fictional, I can report there's nothing in it stranger or less likely than the place itself.

Chatwin, fascinated by a scrap of giant sloth fur that his grandmother's cousin Charlie allegedly found on a glacier in Chilean Patagonia, sets off to see if he can find evidence of the ice-age animal.

Since reading the book, I had always wanted to see the place and to come back with my own piece of sloth fur -- or something equally baffling -- to leave to some nephew or niece who might be inspired by the puzzle.

I signed on with a group specializing in budget hiking tours for a two-week trip through Patagonia last February. We met in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

There were five travelers. Two were from Australia -- a chemist and an engineer. Two were from London -- a software engineer and a business executive. With our guide, we flew to the coastal town of Comodoro Rividavia, then met our driver and headed south, into Patagonia.

The mate

As we set off into the grasslands, we got our first lesson on Argentinian culture. Like many Argentinians, Florencia Ferrari, our guide, and Marcos Paz, our driver, drink mate several times a day.

The bitter herbal-like infusion is the country's national drink. Ferrari, an athletic woman with big green eyes and a huge bundle of blond hair, stuck a silver straw with a sieve at the end into a leather-covered gourd the size of a tennis ball. She then packed the gourd with yerba mate, the cured leaves of a kind of holly tree. It looked like lawn clippings.

Using scalding water from a giant pump thermos, she saturated the mate. She was the cebadora -- the maestro of the mate ritual, she said.

Refilling the same pot of leaves with hot water, she passed the gourd to each of us in turn. The mate was nose-scrunchingly bitter but left a pleasing, clean aftertaste and, after a few minutes, an energy boost equivalent to a cup of espresso, without that buzzed-out feeling coffee can give you.