Postcards from Patagonia 1996

On Islas Magdalenas these two penguins live together with about 9.000 of their friends, along with thousands of seagulls. The island, which is a nature reserve as big as half the South Bank in Stockholm, is in the middle of the Magellan Straits, at the very tip of South America. Punta Arenas is the town in Chile which is the southernmost harbour on the South American continent. From here you can travel out to the island on M/S Antarctica.

The boat trip to Islas Magdalenas in the middle of the Magellan Straits can be pretty rough. The penguins that live there are small, but not much scare them. The island is guarded all the time, but the guard can find things pretty lonely – during the winter it can be so rough the boats have to stay in port. If you arrive at the harbour town of Punta Arenas you should stay at the hotel Jose Nogueira and order a red Errazuriz 1989 Reserva Don Maximiliano with your dinner. That’s what we did on New Year’s Eve in 1996. Officially it’s summer at that time of the year in Chile, but down here in Patagonia it was bitterly cold. At least the penguins, whales and rheas (a smaller cousin to the African ostrich) like it.

There’s something special about life down here on the rugged southern tip of South America. Rheas graze peacefully alongside the roads. Fairly close to Punta Arenas is the largest open-cast mine in South America. They mine coal there. At one time, the town was the home of the richest family on the South American continent, the Menendez family. Their flocks of sheep grazed on a million hectares of land! Now this land is being bought up by North American speculators – media giant Ted Turner and various Hollywood stars are among the celebrities who have invested in land here. But Punta Arenas is far from fashionable. It remains a blustery coastal town perched on the very edge of civilisation.

Alongside a shabby square in Punta Arenas is an old Norwegian consulate. And when we were last here there was a Norwegian polar research vessel moored in the harbour. The cobblestones and gravel on the streets of the town bear witness to a long history. Fernao de Magalhaes discovered the passage that we call the Magellan Straits as long ago as 1520, and by doing so made the dangerous passage around Cape Horn no longer necessary. His discovery was only part of the first documented round-the-world voyage as described by Antonio Pigafetta, who was on the only ship that managed to get back to Spain. Today there are easier ways of making the journey.

Aconcagua is an ancient extinct volcano on the border between Argentina and Chile in the Andes. With an altitude of 6.960 metres above sea level, it is the highest mountain in America (North and South). We took the bus from Mendoza, which lies at the foot of the Andes on the Argentinean side. The town was packed with Tibetan monks, all dressed in red. A film team was busy filming “Seven Years in Tibet” with Brad Pitt, who had to be kept hidden in a luxury hotel to protect him from over-enthusiastic fans. There were two bus drivers, both of whom spent the whole journey knocking back maté, and they took it in turns to drive. High up in the mountains, at an altitude of 3.300 metres, there was a 3 km-long tunnel. The security checks on the Chilean border were really thorough. A breathtaking hair-pin road led us down through the Valle Verde on the Chilean side before the bus came to a halt at the terminus in the cauldron that holds the capital city of Santiago. We travelled by air to Punta Arenas, a beautiful trip along the Andes that took almost four hours. Otherwise, practically all travel in South America is by bus. And the roads are better than in Vietnam.