Real magic: Patagonia on horseback
IWAKE up and, for a moment, have no idea where I am. And then I know – and have to pinch myself at the wonder of it – I am in a place I have dreamed of for years: Patagonia (the Chilean bit). I put my head outside. Seeing is not believing. The Torres del Paine national park makes you feel you are about to meet God.
This landscape of blue, green and silver, of granite spires, glaciers, lakes, mountains and daisy-filled meadows, robs you of words.
We are camped beside Laguna Verde and mountains half-dressed in snow, referred to as cuernos – horns. We – a small group of riders from the US, Germany, France and the UK – are about to set out on a seven-day trail ride.
It is summer in Patagonia, but we have been told to pack for every season. Florence Dixie uses “bracing” to describe the weather’s volatility – an understatement applied to its famous winds. The day before the ride starts, the wind seems strong enough to push us over. The first night, it is like a mad animal trying to get inside the tent; outside, hectic grass and clover gyrate. The agitation in the air says: “Hurry up – get on your horse and go.” And then it stops. Days of calm heat ensue, but with an attendant sense that the effort to mount a perfect summer day cannot last. This is, after all, the wild south.
We are introduced to our horses – stout-hearted, sensible, super-fit Criollos – and given tips on western riding. There is a great deal of rapid, slightly hairraising, downhill riding. Lean back and think of Patagonia.
This trip is described as being for “intermediate” riders – and it is. Our evenings include a comparative study of aches, swellings and saddle sores.
On the third day we desert our horses and visit a glacier via a swing bridge which bounces at the end, making people look progressively drunker as they cross. We take a boat to Grey Glacier, which is 28 kilometres in length and covers a total surface area of 270 kilometres. Its frozen walls are almost 35 metres high. Seeing it is mind-blowing. It is the turquoise compressed ice that thrills me most.
Our second, Glacier Dixon, is not much visited because of its inaccessibility. We glimpse it through mist and rain. Every day we stop for picnics in enchanted spots (looking over the Andes is especially marvellous) and slip into a rhythm of food and sleep – taking post-picnic snoozes in the sun. But on Glacier Dixon day, the weather is too fierce for picnicking. We shelter with the Argentinian carabinieri who control the border. They welcome us into their cabin with kisses as if we were the very people they had been waiting for – even though they didn’t know we were coming.
They brew maté (South America’s much-loved, swampy tea that you suck through a silver straw – with the aura of an illegal drug). This is one of the many times during the week I feel I’m in a magic-realist novel (Isabel Allende is Chilean). What you realise when you are in South America is that the fiction isn’t magical, it is just real.
We marvel at Lake Azzurro, named, with a striking lack of imagination, by the 19thcentury writer Florence Dixie because its “crystal waters were of the most extraordinary blue I have ever beheld”.
All week I have been charmed by the Chileans’ laidback friendliness. But by the end I am almost singing, too, at the prospect of hot showers ahead, courtesy of an estancia – some of our camps have been “wild”, with no showers or loos. I have chapped lips, saddle sores and swollen eyelids that make me look like a condor. And yet – I could not be happier.