Signature Luxury Travel & Style
CHILE
Discover the otherworldly allure of remote Patagonia, home to condors, glaciers and fjords.
“Dear John, Welcome to the end of the world.” As hotel greetings go, this ominous note is hard to beat, even if tongue-in-cheek. Yet it’s almost true, with the hotel, The Singular Patagonia, located towards the tip of South America and overlooking the equally ominous Last Hope Sound.
I’d like to say that the husky team and I had chopped through ice, snow and drizzling rain to reach here, Puerto Natales, but while that might have been true 300 years ago – OK, forget the huskies – I am in fact slurping a calafate sour (think delicious liquid heartburn) in The Singular’s grand bar. Beyond the windows, we can see a panorama of the Señoret Channel framed by snow-slathered mountain peaks.
This is Patagonia’s smaller, Chilean slice (the greater, 90 per cent lies in adjacent Argentina). Breezy, clear October is a good time to be here, before summer’s crowds and furious winds. Plenty of excursions await us. Author Bruce Chatwin noted that Patagonia is “the farthest place to which man walked from his place of origin” – Africa – and so it is fitting in this landscape of jigsaw channels, islands, pampas and drifting icebergs that walking is still a major activity for visitors.
Beneath the massif
Our launch cruises up the Seno de Última Esperanza (Last Hope Sound), named by Spanish navigator Juan Ladrillero, who spent months here in 1557 seeking a route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans – his sound of last hope. We go ashore and hike to Serrano Glacier, a frozen tsunami seemingly caught in
mid-collapse as it squeezes through a mountain cleft. An Andean condor rises from a nearby ridge, pinioning on its three-metre wings. Subliminal panpipes in my head and a rattling charango lute wing the great bird higher to the tune of ‘El Cóndor Pasa’.
Further up the fjord in Bernardo O’Higgins National Park, we stop for lunch at Estancia La Península, a working sheep ranch that offers kayaking and trail rides. The local gauchos assist our less-than-equestrian selves aboard a fleet of hefty, well-tempered horses — mine is so large and pale that its name is Glacier — and we ride off into an afternoon of grassy plains, jaw-dropping mountains and lakeside beaches.
Whether you’re riding, hiking or driving, Patagonia’s geological superstar is the 2,500-metre Torres del Paine massif. Misplaced in translation, the name might suggest Towers of Pain – an obscure Leonard Cohen album? – or a geotagging explorer called Paine. In fact, ‘paine’ — pronounced pie-nay — means blue in the local Aonikenk language. These snow-slathered ‘blue towers’ are more often brown, grey or black than blue, but are never less than dramatic, an onyx-horned mammoth carved by sabre-toothed winds and tectonic upheavals. The full hike around the Torres’ base takes six to 10 days, but we can see it almost continuously from numerous roadside viewing platforms within the Torres del Paine National Park, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
Cruising with giants
Patagonia covers more than one million square kilometres and we want to see more, especially its fabled Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, South America’s largest island. Leaving The Singular and its luscious piscos, empanadas and Carménère wine, we drive 150 kilometres south to Punta Arenas and board the well-appointed expedition ship Stella Australis for a four-night cruise to Cape Horn.
We’re soon amid a maze of legendary name-checks: the Strait of Magellan, Beagle Channel and Cordillera Darwin. This, I imagine, might be how a thawed Antarctica would be. We take shore excursions to penguin rookeries and enchanted waterfalls, but the visual and emotional highlight for me is the cruise down Glacier Alley, the gauntlet of huge, blue-white icefalls that crumble with rifle-shot roars into the Beagle Channel.
Out on deck in the fangs of a gale, I am reminded that the earliest dwellers here, the Yaghan people, were known as ‘canoe Indians’, extraordinary nomads who lived almost naked, garbed in little more than skins and seal fat. Ferdinand Magellan in 1520 thought of the indigenous Patagonians as giants with huge feet, while his assistant Pigafetta described them as “roaring like bulls”.
We reach Cape Horn, but the swell is too heavy for landing. Instead we circumnavigate the fearsome cape – in fact, an island that’s ‘home’ to over 800 shipwrecks – going literally “Around the Horn”. Next morning we wake within sight of Ushuaia, Argentina, the world’s southernmost city, and within signal range. Four days of digital Eden go extinct within minutes as, across the ship, phones begin roaring like bulls.