The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
An off-the-cuff holiday in Argentina in my wheelchair? Why not?
When Covid scuppered his plans to visit Antarctica, Frank Gardner turned disappointment into opportunity and explored Patagonia instead
It was the call we had all dreaded. For seven months – seven months – my friends Richard, Jon and I had been planning this trip of a lifetime. Ten days cruising through the frozen wonderland of Antarctica, gazing at icebergs, whales and sub-zero sunsets. And now, in the final week before departure, just as we were allowing ourselves a frisson of anticipation, came the news that there was a Covid outbreak on the ship. The whole trip was cancelled.
“What do we do now?” asked Richard, to which I replied, “You know what? We roll with it, we fly to Buenos Aires, and we take it from there.”
Spontaneous travel, it has to be said, has not exactly been my watchword since I was shot, and partly paralysed in the legs, in a 2004 terrorist attack during a BBC assignment in Saudi Arabia. There’s all the faff of booking wheelchair assistance at airports before you even start enquiring whether the hotel room happens to be up a long flight of stairs. Combine that with the lingering restrictions of Covid and our plan might have sounded, well, slightly unhinged. Yet a plan it was.
We left a wintery London to arrive in the Argentinian capital’s high summer. Tree-lined avenues were topped with sprays of pink blossom from trees known as palo borracho (drunken stick). In the upmarket district of Palermo, people were sitting out at sun-dappled tables, laughing and flirting as they sipped glasses of local wine beneath cloudless blue skies, feasting on sizzling plates of garlic-roasted Atlantic sole.
Argentina’s widely accepted black market economy means that the real exchange rate for the dollar on the street – the so-called “blue rate” – is twice the official rate in the banks. This means you can feast on the most sumptuous of Argentine steaks, twinned with a world-class bottle of malbec, for not much more than £10 a head. Or, if like us you stay in the Miravida Soho, for example, your hotel might even lay on an in-house wine-tasting for you, complete with a tapas plate of cheese, olives and chocolate. There is, it seems, more to Argentinian wine than just malbec. From the cool, glacial lands of Patagonia to the arid Andean foothills in the north, there is a rich variety of both reds and whites, enough to tempt the most discerning of palates.
In the northern suburb of Tigre, the weekend market at Puerto de Frutos is a visual festival of colour, with blue and yellow boats riding at anchor on the edge of the River Plate, their painted hulls gleaming in the late afternoon sun while children queue for ice cream or rides on the carousel.
La Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur, the capital’s unusually rich and diverse nature reserve, is criss-crossed with paths and tracks where families pause for picnics beside giant butterflies and hovering hummingbirds. In the marshfringed lake beside the reserve I even watched a wild capybara, the world’s largest rodent, swim gracefully by.
But at 1,073,500 sq miles, Argentina is more than 10 times larger than Great Britain – and with just a few days to explore it, we decided to focus on one area: Patagonia. Occupying much of the south, its challenging peaks and treks were clearly beyond me – but that, we decided, should be no barrier. Our first leg was an internal flight to San Carlos de Bariloche, the capital of Argentina’s Lake District, a winter ski resort and a land of azure lakes, sunlit pine forests and pink skies. There are pumas here, but you rarely see them. Yet last winter, in an exceptionally cold week, locals told me that one wandered into town in search of sheep in the dead of night – discovered only the next morning on CCTV footage.
Bariloche’s name comes from the indigenous Andean Mapuche word for “people from the other side of the mountain” – from across the border in Chile. More recently, Bariloche, with its gentle Alpine scenery and climate, attracted a wave of immigration from Germany in the late 19th century. But then came the Second World War and, in its aftermath, this serene lakeside town became a haven for a number of Nazi war criminals, who got themselves smuggled out of Europe to South America.
Feeling that we should probably
The men were highly groomed, while women in swirling dresses performed acrobatics
know more about this, we joined an impressive but chilling guided tour of Nazi history. “That house over there,” announced the guide, pointing to a wooden, Bavarian-looking chalet, “is where Adolf Eichmann stayed.” Eichmann! The architect of the Holocaust, who was eventually snatched from a Buenos Aires street by Israeli intelligence agents, tried in Israel and executed in 1962. Then there was Erich Priebke, who had overseen the massacre of hundreds of civilians in Italy and ended up running the German school here, posing for years as an upstanding member of the community while secretly holding Nazi-themed evenings before he too was captured, tried in Rome and given a life sentence.
After all that unpalatable history, it was something of a relief to get out of town and explore the lakes and forests that characterise this corner of Patagonia. The famous Ruta Quaranta, Route 40 – South America’s equivalent of the US Route 66 – runs for many miles, like a (well-kept) vertical north-south spine running the length of the country, with a constant vista of shimmering, azure lakes, fringed by wildflowers, where forests hide strange creatures such as the rare and diminutive pudu puda deer, the smallest in the world at just 18in high.
Boat trips across Nahuel Huapi, the largest lake in the region, take you all the way to the idyllic Victoria Island. Here, our guide steered us gently away from the lines of day-tripping Argentinian tourists (we encountered very few foreigners) to trek up through a sweetscented pine forest to a sunlit plateau of orchards, gardens and discarded wooden farmyard implements. Raoul, our guide, had a plan. Knowing my passion for nature photography, he led us to a grove of Cortadera flowers in full bloom. Here, the air was alive with the whizz and trill of a dozen hummingbirds as they hovered and swooped to drink the precious nectar, all lit up by the golden rays of the late afternoon sun.
It was time to head even further south, to glacier country on almost the southernmost tip of South America. Argentina’s Perito Moreno Glacier is simply massive. It spreads across an entire pine-clad valley between lines of Andean foothills, measuring 98 sq miles and stretching back into the distance for 19 miles, where it is fed by the Patagonian ice field in Chile. To put that in perspective, that’s like having a river of ice stretching all the way across London from Heathrow to Greenwich. Gaze at it from viewing platforms on the opposite shore, accompanied by hot snacks and a hundred selfie-snapping tourists; take a guided trek across it, or go by boat and get as close as is possible without being hit by falling ice.
I opted for the latter and, sure enough, every few minutes there would be a roar and a crash as a great shard of ice ruptured from the 197fthigh face of the glacier, sending up fountains of spray as it tumbled into the lake below. The ice was a breathtaking, translucent cobalt. Behind the boat, miniature icebergs floated gracefully past the windswept pines of Los Glaciares National Park. In the sunlit uplands beyond, there were grazing herds of wild rheas: large, flightless birds that looked for all the world like ostriches. The Tehuelches, the original inhabitants of Patagonia, used to pursue them on foot, hunting in two lines and signalling to each other with smoke. All that changed, I was told, when the Spanish conquistadores arrived with their horses and modern weapons.
Argentina’s lakes, mountains and glaciers are beguiling, but it would be something of a cultural crime to come all the way here and not watch tango. Our chosen venue, in Buenos Aires’s San Telmo quarter, had an intriguing air of faded elegance with sweeping staircases and balustrades, low, conspiratorial lighting and a sense we were somehow about to watch something forbidden. Up on stage, the musicians built up the tension, serenading the hundred or so diners before the first couples took to the floor. The men were highly groomed, with enough hair product to start a bonfire, while women in swirling dresses performed extraordinary feats of acrobatics, hooking their legs around the men’s waists. It was, of course, a highly choreographed performance, laid on for fee-paying customers like us – and yet it was somehow evocative of a bygone age.
But is Argentina ready for disabled travellers? Well, yes and no. I never regretted it for a moment, due in no small part to my friends helping out. The airports were smoothly efficient with spotlessly clean disabled toilets. Young and friendly officials would immediately usher us to the front of a queue the moment they saw my wheelchair. In fact, I found travelling around this huge country to be, in some ways, easier than in Europe – that is, aside from its absurdly narrow doorways in hotel bathrooms and showers. Hailing taxis was also a struggle. I lost count of the number of drivers who took one look at my lightweight wheelchair and then pretended not to see me – but there is always Uber.
So, would I return to explore more of this vast and beautiful country? Absolutely, without question.
Outbreak