Sundowner: Autumn/Winter 2019

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