Travel: Patagonia/Awe at the ends of the earth

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.

"The indigenous people took mate," Ferrari explained. "But in the 1600s, the Jesuits prohibited it. The Indians drank alcohol, which caused more problems, then the Jesuits let them drink mate again.

"I can spend the whole day drinking mate with friends, sisters, brothers and talking, talking, talking," she said.

When we were in the van, that's how we spent our days.

Ferrari, 30, is a native of Buenos Aires, Argentina's biggest city. But she made it clear that her soul belonged to Patagonia and that she wanted us to love it as much as she did.

"The population of Argentina is about 33 million," she said. "Twelve million live in Buenos Aires. In Patagonia -- one-third of the whole country -- maybe 1 million people live." She said Patagonia, which straddles Chile and Argentina, occupies about 1 million square kilometers. That's roughly five times the size of Minnesota.

"In 1880, the president of the country sent troops to Patagonia and killed the last of the Indians. The government offered incentives to get people to move south, to consolidate the country. And in Tierra del Fuego [the island at the tip of South America], they made a penal colony.

"Imagine, where we are going to vacation, they sent people to suffer."

Geared up

That was food for thought on our first hike, on desert trails in the Petrified Forest near Sarmiento. The day started out warm and calm.

We marveled at the red, orange and yellow buttes and cliffs and at the utter lack of plant life. The remains of an ancient forest lay scattered in the dust. We peered through hollowed-out stone trunks, 3 feet across, that had toppled thousands of years before. We found a fresh puma track; what it could have been hunting, I don't know.

In the afternoon, the gentle breeze turned into a 60 mile per hour gale, and suddenly we understood how being in Patagonia might lead to suffering.

The wind carried sand, grit and large pieces of gravel, which stung exposed skin like tiny whip cracks. Wilson and Antony Alexander were wearing shorts, and their yelps of pain could be heard rising above the howl of gale-force winds, which are normal there, Ferrari said. "They come up every day."

Two days later, when we were halfway through a hike into the Andean foothills outside the one-bar town of Lago Posadas, I was still digging sand out of my ears.

We had stopped for our first break in a daylong hike that would lead us to some cliff tops where we hoped to see the endangered Andean condor. Bigger than a lot of dogs, it's the largest flying bird on the planet, with a wingspan of more than 10 feet and weight of up to 25 pounds.

I looked at the group. We cut an odd spectacle. Sunglasses covered our eyes, white sunblock covered our noses, a rainbow of colorful nylon and polar fleece covered everything else. Even though it was Patagonian summer, at the higher altitudes, the wind was chilly and highs only reached the 60s.

Hands and wings

The first Patagonians had fewer, and less complicated, utensils than we did to make life comfortable.

On that same hike, we stopped under a cliff where a massive overhang had provided shelter to the Indians.

The ground was covered with glassy flakes of black obsidian, which the Indians would have used for knives and arrowheads. Evidence of the staple items in their diet was also readily apparent; the ground was littered with fragments of guanaco bones and broken shells from rhea eggs. Rheas are ostrich-like, flightless birds that stand about 5 feet tall. Both rheas and guanacos are common sights in Patagonia; we saw them by the side of the road every day.

The cliff wall was painted with pictographs: guanacos and rheas with hopefully exaggerated torsos, as well as a variety of handprints and abstract shapes. The ceiling of the cliff overhang was covered with Rorschach-test-like blotches in red and black.

The Indians would make balls of guanaco fur, douse them in paint made from mineral dust and blood and heave them onto the ceiling. "Perhaps as a way to tell the future," our guide said. "But nobody really knows."

We left the art gallery and continued up into the hills, following a narrow trail to the cliff tops, then along the lip of a horseshoe-shaped gorge.

There were no people around for miles. The view extended for 50 miles; the fields around us were full of wildflowers. The path was smooth and clear.

We walked about 7 miles, gaining 1,000 feet in altitude, until we reached the back of the horseshoe canyon where a waterfall dropped off the precipice and kept falling for hundreds of feet.

We drank from the pristine stream and ate our lunch, which had been prepared in the kitchen of the family-run hostel where we stayed.

About halfway back, at 6 p.m., we rested our shaky legs, sitting on the edge of the trail in purple wildflowers. Suddenly Ferrari screamed: "Condors!"

There were three of them floating silently above us. Slowly they circled and wheeled, their giant box-like wings making them look like small planes.

They flew as close as 100 feet, dipping below our altitude on the valley wall. I could see the white bands on their backs, the white ruffs around their naked necks, and the individual feathers at the tips of their wings, splayed like fingers playing the scales in the wind.

A day on ice

We stayed in budget lodgings -- sometimes cabins, sometimes roadside inns, and we slept three or four to a room. We quickly established a camaraderie that kept it from being claustrophobic.

For every day walking, we spent another in the van, bumping over the gravel surface of lonely Hwy. 40. We used bidets to wash our socks, we ate massive meals of Argentinian beef, and we slept the kind of deep sleep that only hard physical labor can induce.

Some of the hikes -- like the one in Lago Posadas -- were in places seldom seen by anyone. Others were on well-traveled hiking routes in national parks.

The Perito Moreno Glacier is a national landmark in Argentina, like the Grand Canyon here. I took an optional side trip one day where I (and about 2,000 other tourists) took a ferry across Lago Argentino to a beach beside the glacier, which, as it dumps into the lake, is several miles across and 200 feet above the water (another 700 feet of it is below the surface.)

A guide told us that what we were seeing was part of an ice age that was still happening.

The cap of ice that straddles the Andes in Patagonia is more than 100 miles long and 30 wide; it's the biggest ice field outside of Antarctica and Greenland.

"This is part of Hielo Sur -- the southern ice cap," he said, pointing at the luminous blue wall. "It is the remains of the last great glaciation, which is still ending here."

Teams of scruffy ice guides strapped crampons (a frame with metal spikes in it) to our boots and led us in long snaking lines up the side of the glacier and onto the top. From a distance, the lines of people looked like penguins, waddling carefully into the dreamscape.

The metal spikes made going up and down the angled slopes easy, and soon we were immersed in a surreal world of blue: The melting ice formed fantasy castles and turrets. Rivers of cold, clean water ran down the sides and into holes that twisted into wormhole tunnels.

In a bowl-shaped depression in the ice, a picnic table awaited us. Guides used axes to break up buckets of ice. For imbibers, there was a complimentary scotch on the rocks. For the rest of us, there was the ice cold, pristine water of the glacier itself, which -- even without the whiskey -- left me euphoric.

End of the world

Tierra del Fuego -- Land of Fire -- was the last stop on our journey -- 2,000 miles from Buenos Aires, where we had started. Ferdinand Magellan gave the place the name; when he sailed through the channel that divides the island from the mainland in 1520, the Indians lit bonfires along the way.

We only had two days in Ushuaia, a fishing port and military outpost that is the southernmost city on the planet. About 44,000 people live there.

Part of one day we toured the Presidio, the grim prison complex where Argentina's worst criminals were sent until it was closed in the 1940s.

The rest of that day we had free to roam the T-shirt stalls and souvenir shops of the town, which, as remote as it is, gets enough tourists to support a lot of T-shirt stalls and souvenir shops.

The second day we spent in Tierra del Fuego National Park, with a maniacally animated tour guide named Marcelo de Cruz. He picked us up in his van, in which he was blasting Mozart's "The Magic Flute" and bouncing up and down in his seat to the music.

The national park is a mix of mountains and deep, old-growth forest, populated with plants and birds found nowhere else on earth.

Bearlike with an open, expressive face, Cruz had the gift of turning whatever we saw into an epic tale of life struggles. We sat on a fallen log, and it turned into the protagonist in his story.

"This dead tree you sit on, it is critical -- critical! -- to the life cycle. When cellulose weakens, the tree falls, creating an opening in the forest."

He held up his hands and cradled the light that came streaming down from where the tree's leaves had once made shade.

"Fungus feeds on the wood, creating humus. The opening brings light for young trees. In fall, 1 million seeds fall on a hectare [about 2.5 acres] -- but only 200 trees will survive."

Suddenly, he heard something. "He's coming!" he hissed. "He's coming!" and he crashed off into the woods, waving us to follow.

We couldn't keep up with him, but because he had picked up two sticks and was banging them together, we could follow his progress. In a few minutes, we found him, pointing up into a tree.

"There! There! The Magellanic woodpecker!" he said in a stage whisper.

It was bigger than a mallard, and looked remarkably like Woody Woodpecker, with an anvil-shaped red head and a gleaming black body. We got within about 40 feet of it, high up in a beech tree, and it rewarded us with a snare drum roll as it repeatedly smashed its skull into the tree, hunting for grubs.

De Cruz had the all-absorbed look of a kid at play.

Human scale

On one of the last hikes, we made a five-hour, steep trek to the foot of the Torres del Paine -- 3 1/2 utterly vertical towers of stone that rise nearly a mile from the base in a glacial lake.

The last hour of the hike was a near vertical scramble up scree -- giant boulders that had been carved from bedrock by the glacier.

At the top, the towers suddenly came into view. They bore a necklace of ice. We joined several hundred other mesmerized hikers who stared at the towers straining into the cerulean blue sky. The proportion of the scene defied understanding. They could have been 300 feet high and two city blocks away, or miles away and a mile high; my eyes wouldn't tell me the truth. I could only take Ferrari's word for it.

Even though nothing was moving, the magnitude of the scene was reason enough to sit in silence.

On the way back, I fell into step with Ferrari, who seemed lost in thought. I told her that seeing Torres del Paine had been a spiritual experience.

"I love these places because they make me feel small," she said. "The rock, the mountains are huge. The wind -- everything -- makes me feel tiny."

"I think that thought scares a lot of people," I said. "We don't want to think how small we are."

"I love it," she said. "I like to feel a part of what is here, like that bush, connected to the ground."

The souvenir

When Bruce Chatwin traveled in Patagonia in the early '70s, tourists were scarce. They're pretty common now.

Evidence that Chatwin's book changed life in Patagonia is not that hard to find. At the Chilean border crossing, the gift shop sold plastic figurines of the mylodon -- that moose-sized sloth creature that so fascinated Chatwin -- reared up on its hind legs.

I didn't buy one.

But I always had my eye out for some scrap of Patagonia to have as a keepsake, along with the thousands of photos I took home with me.

Every day that we drove, the van scared up flocks of rheas -- those ostrich-like birds -- by the side of the road. They lifted up their bustles of tailfeathers and ran like frightened Victorian women across the plain, disappearing in clouds of dust.

On one of our breaks, as I was walking across the grassland, I found a rhea feather in a calafate bush. It was 18 inches long, tan, white and magenta, as billowy with filaments as the plume in the hat of a musketeer.

Perhaps years from now, someone else will look at it and see what I see: the siren song of a strange and wonderful land.

-- Chris Welsch is at welsch@startribune.com .