From Nowhere to Somewhere

Drawing back the curtains, the early morning view from my small bedroom window at the Estancia Menelik is filled with the stunning Andes of the Perito Moreno National Park – Argentina’s remotest national park. Before breakfast I wander around outside taking photos of this unique circumstance and contemplate what happens next. The daily activities at the estancia are already underway as the farm’s gauchos round-up their horses.

Estancia Menelik looking west-ish towards the Andes

Estancia Menelik looking east-ish (apologies for the dog!)

After breakfast and goodbyes, Lisi, Jane and I – still bewildered with the remote new world we have discovered over the past few days – decide to drive the 20 or so miles west to the park on the remaining petrol fumes in our tank, along the dirt road from nowhere to nowhere, before heading off into who knows where for the long drive to El Calafate – our ultimate objective for the day. Early morning rheas, presumably after early morning worms, scatter as we approach the mountains.

The park is a heady, geological cocktail of wild mountains and stunning lakes dominated by the imposing peak of Monte San Lorenzo (also known as Monte Cochrane), which marks the Chile-Argentina border, the north side of which is not too distant from Valle Chacabuco in Chile, where we started this journey; since early morning yesterday we have driven a horse-shoe of a couple of hundred miles. We keep pushing, like surfers promising themselves that the next wave will be their last of the day, for the best view, limited by our time and fuel situation. Eventually we stop for a few minutes on the dirt road, take our obligatory snaps then head back, as the Andes diminish in our rear view mirrors for the second time in two days.

Perito Moreno National Park

We settle into our customary physical and mental states and progress along the empty dirt road, trailing a cloud of dust, towards the Ruta Cuarenta (Ruta 40). Suddenly, a dark-coloured aeroplane swoops low from nowhere immediately in front of us. Closer inspection reveals finger-like terminal wing feathers indicating that this plane is an Andean condor. It glides a few feet above the ground, watching us for a few seconds, before deciding we are too boring to bother with and veers off, skimming over the low mounds of vegetation into the distance.

Alejandre

The fuel situation is now critical and we are over 150 miles from the nearest town, so we have no choice but to pull into the isolated, single-storey white building described in the last blog post. Wary of chainsaw murderers and the rest, it appears more inviting in the late afternoon sun than it did in yesterday evening’s twilight. And the bleeding, butchered cow carcass is now hidden around the back! We park up and wander in, timidly, to be met by an unexpectedly welcoming whirlwind of Argentine humanity – Alejandre. His English is perfect and he invites us in for a coffee and seats us in the lounge area of his establishment – which serves as an impromptu emergency fuel station for people like us and a sort of roadside café, except there is no real road, it is not on the roadside and there are hardly any people. I ask him how many people he services with fuel. Last month (November), apparently, only five cars stopped here for petrol – I guess it’s not quite the height of the season yet! The lounge has views over the top of the river cliff to wild expanses of emptiness and beyond. Alejandre built this place himself and shows us through old photographs of its construction and his family.

Eyes onto nothing, from Alejandre's lounge window

Wary of overstaying our welcome, we gingerly ask for petrol – worth more than its weight in gold in these parts. In the strong, incessant Patagonian wind we pour petrol into the car through a funnel, and some of it even goes into the tank! With our Nissan now fed with 20 litres of fuel, we continue our journey. Alejandre briefed us that we should aim for the distant town of Gobernador Gregores where a new petrol station has new petrol for sale and that is the only (almost) guaranteed fuel supply for over 300 miles. It just means that today’s planned mammoth journey will be extended by an extra 60-mile dog-leg.

Back on the Ruta 40 we head south. Re-assuming our Nissan mental and physical driving positions I, for one, feel that I am becoming desensitized to the spectacular emptiness. By way of alleviation we enter ipod heaven and play Mumford and Sons and Adele’s “spectacular new album” 21 – the sound track of my entire journey to date, with its songs emanating from every bar, shop and car radio from Appalachia to Patagonia, and everywhere in between.

Most of the Ruta 40, save a few kilometres near Gobernador Gregores, is dirt road, although over large distances is at least relatively straight and reasonably graded. It is the subject of a major national economic undertaking, being upgraded over hundreds and hundreds of miles to eventually become a black-top, tarmac road. Lisi and I wonder at the cost, time-scale and necessity of this. Bizarrely, as we trail our cloud of dust ever southwards, we encounter small gatherings of bright yellow earth-moving and road-making machinery in the middle of nowhere wondering how on earth they got here and where are the people who use them? In this land of the real dinosaurs, they appear simultaneously unsettling, but normal. (Or maybe my brain has finally forgone trying to understand normality any more).

We reach Gobernador Gregores - a reasonably-sized, windswept town with one main street and lots of new buildings. Unsurprisingly, the only functional petrol station for hundreds of miles in any direction is rather busy. I ask the station chap, in rubbish Spanish, how we can get back on the Ruta 40 without driving back the way we have come. Even if I understood Spanish properly I doubt his grunted instructions would have made sense. So, we just take off and head in what seems to be the right direction (after cruising up and down the main strip a few times to work out what was what). Eventually we stumbled on the only road going south and, ignoring a road-closed sign, took a 40-mile, half-built, black-top road back to the Ruta 40.



Tantalising black-top, but no way Jose!

For the rest of the day we drive (almost) on the Ruta 40, on the ripio tracks alongside the newly-constructed tarmac strips, but we are not allowed to actually drive on it. Tantalisingly, the ripio route regularly crisscrosses the new tarmac; occasionally feeling brave, we ignore the signs and revel in the pleasure of a few miles of vibration and dust free motoring, singing to Adele.

The landscape changes again - for long distances it is flat and featureless; the Andes to the west test our eyes with their distance before melting back into the horizon. During hours of driving, inevitably nature calls, but there are no bushes, rocks or banks to hide our modesty. However, we work it out, as you do, with our dignity intact!

Landscape and sky combine creatively producing unexpected, freaky effects. On the shimmering horizon we see the inviting turquoise of Lake Viedma, yet the map shows it to be at least 40 miles distant. As we approach, the lake doesn’t get any closer and then it just vanishes! We have just experienced a mirage – another 30 minutes of driving take us to the real thing.

It’s getting late now and we are still no nearer El Calafate, our objective for the day. Getting peckish we decide to explore the food options at the unpromising, small town of Tres Lagos. On entering the quiet, wind-blasted town, we park up at the kerb. Strangely, our innate senses have placed us directly outside the best cake shop and bakery in the southern hemisphere, and it’s open! And, just around the corner, we happen upon a small, but perfectly-formed, grocery store. Fully stocked with sweet things, we continue our journey.

The sun is setting. We are tired. Our bones and heads hurt from rattling roads. And our teeth ache from sweet things. However, the mental drama of yesterday’s journey does not repeat (see last blog post). Some distance from El Calafate we meet a new, smooth section of the Ruta 40, which steers us around the spectacular eastern end of Lake Argentino. We take a right to head west back to the Andes, along the shores of the lake, and enter El Calafate, the largest town we have seen for a week and our home for the next three days.

Evening sun over Lago Argentino, looking west

Patagonia Park

They call it the Future Patagonia National Park. ‘They’ are the workers, volunteers and interns working for Conservacion Patagonica, a charity established by Kris Tompkins, the former CEO of the Patagonia outdoor clothing brand (and wife of Doug); and ‘future’ because they are still creating it from scratch.

According to my map the Chacabuco Valley – a substantial piece of the prospective park – runs from the Carretera Austral in the west to the eastern mouth of the valley on the doorstep to Argentinian Patagonia. A 57 kilometre, single-track dirt road runs the full length of the valley eventually into Argentina (park this knowledge for the next blog!).

We are out for a day’s hike exploring the forests and mountains that overlook the nerve centre of the project – a curious combination of old estancia (farm) buildings currently serving as offices, etc., and brand new, stone-clad, copper-roofed constructions of high specifications, comfort and functionality and radiating, deliberately, an air of permanence. The buildings are sheltered by (introduced) poplar trees – characteristic of estancias in both Chilean and Argentinian Patagonia and planted as arboreal foils against the incessant winds descending from the Campo de Hielo Norte (Northern Ice Cap) to the west.

The impressive, new Chacabuco Lodge

Motley collection of buildings at the nerve centre of the future Patagonia Park, and a guanaco

Valle Chacabuco, view from the south

Some flowers

As we ascend, puffing and perspiring, through southern beech forests to the tree-line, the landscape slowly reveals its narrative. The forest is a mixture of small patches of mature woodland, large areas of young trees re-growing through the silver, horizontal corpses of their progenitors, and bare grassland with thousands and thousands of timber skeletons scattered like a giant’s matches. Looking back, the congregation of new and old buildings from where we have just walked appears miniscule in the broad, grassy valley of the Rio Chacabuco, guarded by impressive snow-capped mountains and contorted volcanic terrain. The valley relates in microcosm man’s misuse of the fragile lands of Patagonia. Just a few years ago the valley was once home to 30,000 sheep and 4,000 cattle, which out-competed the resident guanacos – the main food for the puma. So, the puma turned to eating sheep, and shepherds turned to hunting pumas. The diminishing grass cover laid bare fragile soil to erosion. The forest was cut and burned to provide more grazing – some of the fires burning unchecked or weeks – and 500 kilometres of fencing dissected the land and stymied the movement of wild animals.

Kate among forest remnants

Large-scale forest destruction viewed northwards across the Chacabuco valley

Conservacion Patagonica bought the 200,000 acre ecological disaster of the Estancia Chacabuco in 2004. Further lands have been acquired and accreted onto the Chacabuco empire. But why here?

The valley is at the heart of the transitional zone between the semi-arid Patagonian steppe to the east and temperate southern beech forests to the west, hence it has an important diversity of habitats and creatures in an ecosystem that is under-protected globally. The area is also home to one of the largest remaining populations of the endangered huemul deer. Also, the valley connects two nationally protected reserves. The intention is to combine all three areas and upgrade the overall conservation status from national reserve to national park – the Patagonia National Park – which it is hoped will become as internationally iconic as Yosemite or Torres del Paine. The visitors it will attract will under-pin a new economy based on tourism and more sustainable methods of farming and forest management.

Yours truly at the top

Most of the sheep and cattle have been sold off and Conservacion Patagonica workers are removing fencing, restoring grasslands and building trails for visitors, including the one we are now hiking. We are heading for a small, post-glacial lake for lunch. I am accompanied by Lisi and Jane, my two American Carretera soul-mates, and Kate, Matt and Jordan – interns on the project. (I suddenly realize that I am the only non-American in the group – and here we are in the middle of nowhere half-way up a mountain in southern Chile. Weird!) As the others head down to the lake I entice Jane to accompany me up a nearby peak of black rock off-set by a perfect blue sky and patches of snow. She is reluctant at first, until I promise a surprise at the top! After 20 more minutes of puffing and perspiring we reach the pinnacle of Monte Tamanguito. The 360-degree panorama of mountains, valleys, forests and lakes is jaw-droppingly spectacular. To the east – and Argentina - the dryness is apparent – and this is where I’ll be heading in a couple of days’ time. To the south, the glacier-collared, border straddling, 3,700-metre hulk of Monte San Lorenzo dominates the horizon and magnetically draws my gaze. We sit on a lump of old lava, out of the wind, and I dig into my rucksack to extract a large, unopened Christmas cake, which I bought in Coyhaique a couple of days ago. Jane appreciates the surprise and together we eat almost all of it!

View south to Monte San Lorenzoe or Cochrane on the Chile - Argentina border

The journey down is harder than the way up. My old rugby knee injury doesn’t do downhill, so I fall way behind and lose the trail. I can see where I need to get to though; I just have to fight through a dense thicket of young southern beech trees re-growing through the ankle traps of their fallen parents.

Lunch-time

After our picnic lunch sitting on rock watching wheeling Andean condors, we take a hypothermia-inducing dip in the lake. Post dip, we dress quickly partly to avoid the onset of hypothermia, but mainly to protect ourselves from horse-sized horse flies. But to no avail; the buggers even bite through our clothing – and they appear to love the taste of Yorkshire men!

We gradually descend through a natural adventure playground of unimaginable volcanic rock formations, forests, rivers and lakes. And the sun beams down kindly. Approaching the estancia we are aware that we are being watched. On a rocky outcrop above us, three guanaco sentinels check our progress, chattering urgently amongst themselves.

Guanaco sentinel

Back at the impressive Chacabuco Lodge, we settle in the luxurious dining room - come bar - come library, flooded by the mellow light of the setting sun. We are tired and relaxed and amazed by the story of this place and the lessons it offers. Over the next couple of days we will discover more about the landscape and its restoration and the dedicated people who work here. They generously offer us fantastic hospitality and their precious time to explain their work and their lives. This is a truly uplifting and inspiring place and I, for one, will be sorry to leave.