The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Journeys on the edge of gaucho country
Sophie Campbell travels the length of Argentina to discover that the country’s cowboy culture is alive and kicking
Beavers. It had to be. We peered out of the windows of our scaleddown train, chortling along a scaled-down track 10 minutes outside Ushuaia, the frontier town at the southern tip of Argentina. Tussocky meadows stretched into the distance, covered in hundreds of gnawed grey tree stumps.
I’d heard of beaver damage, but this was ridiculous. Then the train guide explained: the trees were felled by convicts. The Train at the End of the World – nifty marketing, that – runs on the rebuilt final section of track that once carried them from Ushuaia’s infamous penal colony to cut and haul timber. It is almost impossible to conceive how hard the life was back then and how tough the people. The classic memoir of the region, The Uttermost Part of the Earth, does a pretty good job: I was reading it nightly, aghast at the sheer grind of eking a living from this punishing land in the past two centuries.
I was also aware that arriving in Tierra del Fuego carrying The Uttermost Part of the Earth is like rolling up in Haworth with a copy of Wuthering Heights. Cheesy. Taking it to Harberton, the estancia (ranch) built by Thomas Bridges, father of its author Lucas, is even worse. I’d heard the family was sick of it.
Harberton was one of the two estancias I had booked in Argentina, the other being in polo country north west of Buenos Aires. It was one way to grasp the scale of the country: Harberton was Tierra del Fuego’s oldest estancia, built in 1877 on a promontory with a 15-mile approach road. It was a child of the South Atlantic, a place of bleached bones and penguin islands and beaver sightings. Estancia La Bamba, 1,500 miles north, was near the “gaucho town” of San Antonio de Areco, on the vast, humid pampas. I got the last room left for the November gaucho spectacular, the Festival de la Tradición.
My Argentine family mobilised to help. One cousin had a friend in Areco. Another told me about the convict train excursion in Ushuaia. A third, Lorna, bought a flight to the far south for the first time in her life and we booked a hostel room at Harberton for $100 (£82) a night. It appeared to be in the house of the estancia’s cook, which might, we thought, be very good or very bad, depending on the cook.
The hire car started rattling before we left Ushuaia’s timber-clad airport. “What’s wrong with it?” asked the guy, coming out to listen. “Oh, they’re all like that here. You’ll be fine.” So after a night at Arakur, a hotel so fabulously retro that it was like staying on a Thunderbirds set high above Ushuaia, and after letting the car battery go flat (Lorna) and losing the car keys on the train excursion (Lorna), we set off to Harberton, worried about loose gravel (me), breaking down (me) and our next meal (Lorna).
The road looped and slung along the coast, out of the ratty edges of Ushuaia beside the cold, cornflower sea and into woods of southern beech, where dinky cabins could be seen between the trees, flashes of expensive blond pine, like ski chalets or dachas.
It took three hours to reach Harberton, 30 minutes of which was the front drive. It had been a dreadful winter: they’d been snowed in for weeks and Rae Natalie Goodall, the respected American naturalist married to Thomas Bridges’s great-grandson Tommy, had died. But there was a warm welcome in the tea room, with its gingham tablecloths, books of press cuttings and cake. Tommy, blue boilersuited and now in his 80s, said a polite hello and slipped away.
Our room was mint-green, straight out of a childhood holiday. The cook was called Ninfa and we loved her from the off. Lorna read out bits of my book, a tale of survival and decline: Thomas Bridges wrote the first English/Yagha dictionary and Lucas spoke Yaghan and Ona, spending much of his working life with Indian companions,