Patagonia’s Autumn Colours ~ El Chaltén, Argentina

Buenos dios, fellow travellers!

It is Autumn in the Southern Hemisphere.

I love the colours that mark the changing of the seasons. My corner of Australia never shows much dramatic change, however, and this year we have been battered by winds and rains which have washed away any colours we might have had.

So, to find those magnificent Autumn reds and yellows, I’ve had to turn to the archives, and dig out some old images from Patagonia: that beautiful, sere and windswept landscape in the foothills of the Argentinian Andes.

It is always a risk going back to old photos: it was nine years ago that we were in Patagonia, and I was shooting .jpegs on a small digital camera… Still, hopefully the scenery (and a few tweaks in Lightroom) will make up for photographic short-comings.

We had flown from Buenos Aires to el Calafate – via Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, which had come as a bit of a surprise as it is not exactly on the way – and then spent more than four hours in an over-heated bus, bouncing over bumps and twisting around bends, before reaching the gravel roads of el Chaltén.

Being in el Chaltén is like being in the early American West: dusty roads and prefab houses, in a forbidding, dry landscape surrounded by magnificent mountains. We kept expecting tumbleweed to roll down the main (only?) street. The town was built in 1985 to help secure the disputed mountainous border with Chile, but continues to exist because of tourism: it is within the Los Glaciares National Park, on the banks of the Río de las Vueltas, and at the base of Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy mountains.

We spent four days around el Chaltén, galloping over several of the walks in the area, in the wake of our guide Wanda, a delightful Patagonian woman of French-Italian descent, who understood everything except the meaning of  “slowly”.

Heading back to base, we were blasted by the gale-force winds for which Patagonia is rightly famous. It was surreal trying to push forward through the pelting rain and howling wind, carrying with it the biting cold from the nearby glaciers and stinging sand from the unsealed streets of town. I kept thinking I’d be blown straight back to the mountain, like a tumbleweed in a bad western movie. When I finally reached the hotel, I was so sodden that the receptionist took one look at me and whisked me away from the entry. She was steering me towards the laundry drying-room to strip off – but with my Spanish and her English, at the time I had no idea where she was taking me!

Exhausted over our last dinner, I never-the-less felt exhilarated, and somewhat sorry for those who had stayed safely at home, missing an unrepeatable experience.

After all, who ever had an adventure playing it safe?

Till next time ~

Pictures: 30March2006-01April2006