Sundowner: Autumn/Winter 2019
Published twice a year and complimentary to A&K’s past and future guests, Sundowner is packed with the hottest destinations and insights on what’s trendy in travel. Featuring articles by some of the industry’s most renowned travel writers and our expert staff, it’s guaranteed to give you wanderlust… Sign up to receive your copy here: https://www.abercrombiekent.co.uk/new-newsletter-signup
Published twice a year and complimentary to A&K’s past and future guests, Sundowner is packed with the hottest destinations and insights on what’s trendy in travel. Featuring articles by some of the industry’s most renowned travel writers and our expert staff, it’s guaranteed to give you wanderlust…
Sign up to receive your copy here: https://www.abercrombiekent.co.uk/new-newsletter-signup
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PATAGONIA<br />
AMID PEACE, PUMAS, AND (GLIMPSES OF) THE<br />
PACIFIC, WRITER SARA WHEELER JOURNEYS<br />
ALONG THE FABLED CARRETERA AUSTRAL IN<br />
CHILEAN PATAGONIA ON THE ULTIMATE LAND<br />
AND SEA ADVENTURE<br />
Chilean Patagonia is an isolated region of saffron steppes<br />
and violet mists where trails of pintails break the surface<br />
of dark, deep lakes, and the Andes ripple on the eastern<br />
horizon, condors nesting on lower peaks.<br />
Sandwiched between the Pacific and the Andes, smaller and<br />
less well-known than its Argentinian counterpart, Chilean<br />
Patagonia starts about two-thirds of the way down the world’s<br />
thinnest country. The land splinters at times, obliging ferries to<br />
take over from the road. And it’s empty: the ratio of people to<br />
square kilometre is 1:1. In the UK, it’s 273; in the US, 36.<br />
I travelled on the fabled Carretera Austral (Southern Highway,<br />
though the word ‘highway’ is misleading, as the Carretera is a<br />
dirt track in places). It is the only road, unravelling for 1,200<br />
kilometres from Puerto Montt to Villa O’Higgins. This route is<br />
one of the greatest road trips in the world. I was astonished, over<br />
the course of my 10-day drive – I journeyed south to north – by<br />
the variety of the landscape, from ferny rainforest to snowy onelane<br />
passes to temperate grasslands. Around Puyuhuapi, Chilean<br />
dolphins were fluking in the fjords. Mostly you can’t see the ocean<br />
as the Carretera lies inland, often on a slender precipice above<br />
luminous lakes, but around Chaitén, the Pacific appears – just<br />
when one had almost forgotten it was there. And all of this amid<br />
the uplifting solitude of the open road.<br />
Parque Pumalín, pronounced Pumaleen, consists of almost half<br />
a million hectares of temperate evergreen rainforest studded with<br />
mountains and glaciers. The dark-barked alerce is the Pumalín<br />
star, a rain-absorbing hardwood that is in fact soft, everlasting,<br />
and resistant to fungi. Close to Fandango Bridge (Chileans love<br />
their funky placenames), I inspected a 3,500-year-old specimen.<br />
It was tall, its long, shallow roots spreading out laterally around<br />
it. Alerce only grow in southern Argentina and Chile, and the<br />
species is protected. All around me copihue, Chilean bellflowers,<br />
dangled at knee height like drops of blood.<br />
South of Pumalín, Parque Patagonia begins at the confluence<br />
of the Chacabuco and Baker rivers, extending east to Paso<br />
Roballes and the Argentine border, some of it above the treeline.<br />
A comprehensive and deeply impressive rewilding programme<br />
has already gone a long way to restoring the ecology previously<br />
protected – for centuries – by long-gone tribal peoples such as<br />
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