In Patagonia

Bruce Chatwin (1940 – 1989) was a legendary author and travel writer. He went from a porter at Sotheby’s to a journalist at The Sunday Times in the UK, where he began to explore his passion for travel. One day he sent the newspaper a telegram: “Gone to Patagonia for six months.” The newspaper’s loss was the world’s gain. Chatwin’s unusual and personal journey to a remote part of the world led to the publication of his first book, In Patagonia. The book won numerous awards and put Chatwin’s writing career on a whole new trajectory. Several other books followed, including The Songlines and Utz, and today Chatwin remains one of the most perplexing and respected travel writers of the modern era. I recently stumbled upon a later edition of In Patagonia in a second-hand bookstore in Johannesburg, this one published by Vintage. ( The first edition was published by Jonathan Cape Ltd in 1977.) Chatwin’s premise might seem a little absurd: He travelled all the way to the southern tail of South America in search of a piece of brontosaurus skin! However, what set the book apart from most other travelogues at the time was the experimental form: 97 short chapters that chronicle his personal history, strange encounters, bits of dialogue and anecdotes. Here’s an example of his incredible observational skills:

The Spaniard’s wife packed me a lunch of cold chops and I walked north through a country broken by gulches and mesas, where the most unlikely colours had been spat to the surface. In one place the rocks were alternately lilac, rose-pink and lime-green. There was a bright-yellow gorge bristling with the bones of extinct mammals. It led into a dried lake bed, ringed with purple rocks where cow skulls stuck out of a crust of flaky orange mud. The unnatural colours gave me a headache, but I cheered upon seeing a green tree – a Lombardy poplar, the punctuation mark of man. Beside an adobe cabin a wizened old couple were sunning themselves. The woman had covered the walls of her room with collage. Her surroundings had enflamed her imagination. The showpiece was a painted plaster head of a Japanese geisha, haloed, like a madonna, with the hairy thighs of Argentine footballers. Above this was a pottery dove, emblem of the Holy Ghost, now converted to a bird of paradise with blue plastic ribbons and dyed ostrich plumes. She had placed a photo of the Patagonian fox next to a crayon drawing of General Rosas.

In Patagonia is a gripping read that will make you a Chatwin fan for life.