Road to Nowhere
I have mixed feelings about Patagonia. On the one hand, it has loads of really cool stuff:
majestic mountains, glistening glaciers, fabulous fjords and wonderful
wildlife. In every single one of these categories it is like New Zealand, just better (sorry Kiwis) and on a
continental scale. However, New Zealand has the decency to pack most of its
natural splendor into the bite sized South Island; Patagonia’s numerous and wondrous attractions are strewn
across an area the size of India. And, in between these fabulous things
is a desert of unremitting flatness and dullness. Patagonia is Marlboro country – as in the fag ads
[cigarette, for any Norte Americanos out there ] writ large.
That said, it’s not all bad. I mean a million square kilometers of
steppe-like nothingness does have a certain bleak beauty about it. But it’s
pretty difficult to maintain your interest in bleak beauty for more than
about half an hour. Mainly it’s just insanely monotonous and we are talking
about most of the lower half of Argentina here, from the Andes to the Atlantic. Driving across this blandscape, you
soon readjust your interest threshold. A bend in the road is noteworthy; a
power line is an event; and, if you were ever lucky enough to spot a tree
growing on the side of the road, well, you’d probably pull over to check it
out and take photos.
We were on a bus and the woman next to me, a pleasant lady in her early
fifties had taken something of a shine to me. Jane was sensibly feigning
sleep and had left me to practice my Spanish with someone who was intent on
telling me about the local petroleum industry. Initially, I was bored. But
boredom is a relative thing and I soon adjusted. After a few hours, I’d be
grabbing her arm and saying: ‘Look – there’s a gas storage facility and how
extraordinary, it has four tanks when the last one only had three. Do you
think if we keep our eyes peeled for the next 100km, we’ll see something even
more interesting?’
Almost all of Patagonia has less than one person per square
kilometer. But even this is a deceptive statistic. Because almost all of
these not very many people live in the towns, meaning for the most part,
there is nobody. On the buses we took, we saw no tourists or travelers, just
people going from one nowhere town to the next, possibly hoping for a change
of scene. I suppose this is hardly surprising as most of the region’s
noteworthy attractions lie around the periphery. Though it did occur to me
that there could be a market for some sort of lonesome tourism. I imagine
citizens of the world’s most densely populated areas – places like Singapore,
Hong Kong and the Tokyo-Osaka conurbation – might be prepared handsomely to
hang around somewhere as utterly depopulated as this.
Latino Rednecks
But eventually we arrived at Peurto Madryn on the Atlantic coast. PM may just
be the most southerly resort in the world and it’s actually a rather pleasant
and surprising place. Located on a broad calm gulf off the southern Atlantic, with its vast beach, flat landscape
and rather windswept look, it feels like somewhere on the Norfolk coast, minus the tat. In the summer it
is probably hotter, but the sea is noticeably colder; although beautiful and
clear, there is absolutely no doubt that what you are swimming in was an
iceberg not so very long ago.
Inexplicably, PM is also the home of some of the worst translation work on
the planet. Everywhere I saw there were English translations and most of them
looked like they had used free software available on the internet. One, at a
seal sanctuary read: ‘This place is not a hospital, but the sense of need for
quietness is the same’; menus were littered with chucklesome nuggets like ‘a
meat filling for the pleasure of the user’; and, my personal favourite was a
brochure which read ‘Peurto Madryn’s casino – where YOU are the protagonist!’
What made this all the more touching was that, as far as I could see, the
English speaking tourists in the town numbered no more than a dozen.
It is not a typically Argentine place either. The Argentines are, by and
large a foxy and stylish people. But Peurto Madryn is one of the few places
in Latin America where I have seen rednecks, in this
case, in a very literal sense. Here there were actually fat people on the
beach – and many of them were bright pink. There was the odd mullet and even
a bubble perm or two, one sported by a topless chap who really should have
known better: the world was not ready for his pendulous man breasts. In all
fairness, you would probably see far worse in any English seaside town, but
there, at least you expect it. Looking back, I’m sure this white trashery was
probably only a few people, but, in chi-chi Argentina, you really notice these things. Then
you remember, this part of the country was settled by the Welsh, which is
probably why not everyone looks like a Latin love God.
Penguins Seals and Wales
Though the beach is nice enough don’t really come to these ozone depleted
parts to sun themselves though: they come for the wildlife. So we hired
ourselves a nice little VW and headed south to spot some penguins. I have to
stress that, although I make this sound like something one just does, you
have to really want to see the penguins: it is a 400km round trip (500 if you
take a wrong turn), most of which is off road. Luckily Jane had enough
penguin love for the both of us.
On the way down, we stopped at Trelew, a green smudge on the buff landscape.
Trelew is famous for being ‘The Welsh settlement’. All the guidebooks say
that this is a place that has lost its Welshness. But I disagree. Inasmuch as
Trelew has an OK centre, suburbs that look like a gulag and isn’t worth more
than half an hour of your time, I would say that it closely resembles any
modern Welsh city.
Driving 220 kilometres off road in a ‘WV Gol’ (which, I think is Polo) isn’t
much fun. But once you get there, ‘los penguinos’ are well worth it. The only
penguin colony I had been to before was in New Zealand where I saw two very
rare penguins and, as I am not a true penguin spotter, I was somewhat
disappointed by this poor turnout, endangered as the birds in question may
have been. But here, there was thousands of the things: in fact they were a
traffic hazard.
So we hung around with the penguins for an hour, just generally digging their
cuteness, with a fair few tourists as well and four American college students
for company. I only mention the latter as we haven’t seen many travelers of
late and I’d forgotten how good dreadlocks look on white people. The penguins
themselves seemed to know they were protected and would happily waddle up to
you, making a strange braying penguin sounds. Occasionally you’d even see a
penguin chick, which is like a regular penguin, but fluffier (and is this
possible??) cuter. In fact, only one thing sullied this wonderful spectacle
of fluffiness and Hallmark card imagery. Penguins stink: they hum, they honk,
they smell absolutely awful - a sort of fishy BO, and the result of eating
nothing but anchovies. You really wouldn’t want to cuddle a penguin. Still,
on the plus side, I don’t suppose many penguins die of heart attacks.
The following day we drove another 400km, this time to see sea lions and
elephant seals. This was up onto the Valdes peninsula itself, which, although
it covers 15,000 sq km (not far off the size of Wales) has nothing except a few salt pans and
sheep. In all honesty, the seals weren’t that great, but the sea lions were
pretty casual. Huge and noisy, the sea lion is the gangster rapper of the
animal kingdom. At any given time, a successful male has around 40 wives and
drives around in a big red Jeep with blacked out windows and gold bull bars.
Porn Again
Then it was back to Peurto Madryn (three hours of utter tedium, mostly on
gravel) in time to catch a strange ritual on the beach. This turned out to be
a full immersion baptism. As the people who do these things tend to be fairly
hard core religious types, I have to salute their way of getting around the
strict antiporn rules their faith stipulates. As in the movies, those who are
about to be reborn, always walk into the water wearing pristine white robes.
And, when the newly baptised women emerge from the water, reborn in soaked
white cotton, you get to see absolutely everything. Casual.
