Solitary Refinement: Patagonia, Argentina

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In his introduction to Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, novelist Nicholas Shakespeare warns, "In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are: the drinker drinks; the devout prays; the lonely grows lonelier, sometimes fatally."

I am a cliché of a writer, prone to both drinking and loneliness. I am already an exaggerated version of the person I am. In anticipation of an eight-day tour of Argentina from Buenos Aires to Bariloche to El Calafate, I read the standard literature on Patagonia — the remote otherworldliness, as described by Chatwin; the aloneness of the visitor to the region, as captured by Paul Theroux; Pico Iyer's portrayal of the breathtakingly desolate landscape — and then I spent a great deal of energy worrying about what Patagonia might do to me.

I don't like to be alone. I live in Los Angeles, where no one is ever alone; helicopters are always overhead, the streets are pulsing arteries of cars packed fender to fender, and the phone rings unceasingly with an onslaught of invitations and trivial conversations. In the weeks leading up to my trip, the friends I had enlisted to join me dropped out, one by one. I was certain the Patagonian solitude would do me in. Solitude is fine, as long as I have other people with me.

In Patagonia, from the lush, rugged hills and steep valleys and green rivers of Bariloche to the dry wind-battered steppe and red rock and miles of vast glaciers outside El Calafate, the solitude is amplified by everyone who makes the tourist's Patagonia possible: by guides, a whole army of them; by hotel owners and managers and waiters and shopgirls and the rare other tourist. No one is alone in Patagonia anymore, but the loneliness is everywhere still.

Patagonia is the austral region of South America, more than a quarter million square miles of southern Argentina and a small area in Chile, incorporating the Andes mountains to the west and south. The region contains the globe's southernmost cities, the last gasp of civilization before Antarctica. In a letter to his agent, Chatwin explained, "Patagonia is the farthest place to which man walked from his place of origins. It is therefore a symbol of his restlessness." Patagonia, then, is a paradox: in this silent, expansive land, you'll find only the most restless and anxious of us; you'll find only those who come all the way to the end of the world to discover a semblance of peace.

When I arrived in Argentina, last April, just outside the dilapidated log-cabin architecture and somewhat seedy tourist shops that make up the rustic village of Villa La Angostura, I shared a quiet drink with Alex Laurence in the sophisticated cypress-paneled bar of his Correntoso Lake and River Hotel. Alex wears soft gray sweaters and informally tailored shirts and is tall, elegant and remarkably handsome. He speaks like a posh English schoolboy. He employs the words "quite" and "lovely," and he frequently, frequently references "my wife."

"My wife does not allow models in the hotel."

"My wife is quite distressed by celebrities."

"My wife does not mind the people who work for the Saks Fifth Avenue catalogue."

Alex is Patagonia personified: dignified, casual, solitary. The renovation of the Correntoso, a 1917 structure set near nothing else on a hill at the intersection of the Correntoso River and Lake Nahuel Huapí, famously brought gas to the entire village of Villa La Angostura. "While everyone was getting their money out of Argentina," Alex says proudly, "I brought my dollars back in." That he said "dollars" led me to believe he'd taken his money out of the country before everything went wrong economically.

In 2002, Argentina suffered what the locals I met called the crash: in very basic terms, a dramatic devaluation of the currency from one Argentine peso for every U.S. dollar to nearly four pesos for a dollar. The country's economy has been on a slow, steady climb since, but the peso-dollar ratio still hovers around three to one. Nowhere are the effects of Argentina's economic disaster more apparent than in Patagonia, where the country's newly impoverished relocated.

"At the time," one of my guides told me, "people who lived in the city moved to the country for a cheaper life. Three to four families a day moved to Bariloche." Any Patagonian will tell you that the rural population has grown exponentially in the past six years; new construction is everywhere, though how the locals feel about the development is unclear.

Alex is a wonderful storyteller. Most every person I met in Patagonia was a wonderful storyteller. I imagine all that Patagonians have to do ten months out of the year is construct the stories they'll tell when the tourists come, in January and February. I stayed at the Correntoso only two nights, but I asked Alex at least six times to repeat the story of how he came to own the hotel.

"I have already told you this," he would say, betraying only the slightest bit of exasperation. "I met the friar while fly-fishing. He was sitting on the bank of the river. He said he wanted to sell the hotel." I liked hearing about how everything changed in one moment, when Alex cast his fly over the river and spotted the monk on the bank. I liked hearing that this hotel, so glamorous in its plainness, a spot of civility in the middle of nowhere, had taken upwards of twenty years to restore. I liked hearing that Alex had been miserable in prep school. I hated prep school too. When I visit places, I imagine living there and envision who would be my friends. It's extravagantly easy to imagine Alex — his gentle voice, his easy manner — as your friend.

The silence of the Patagonian night is unnerving. There is no traffic, no conversation in the surrounding hotel rooms, no buzz of electricity or life. There is nothing in the middle of Argentina but air and water and land. On my first night in Patagonia, the team at Blue Parallel, the luxury outfitter that planned my trip, left a plate of butter cookies and a bottle of Champagne with one glass in my room at the Correntoso (the honeymoon suite, by the way, with a tub for two right in the bedroom). Something about a bottle of Champagne with one glass in a lush hotel room overlooking thousands of acres of a still lake and an ancient nowhere makes a girl feel much more alone than she already is.

"Is that a waterfall?" I asked a woman on staff.

"It's the wind," she said. "The sound of Patagonia."

on a chilly autumn morning, a guide named Nahuel Alonso took me by boat to the 9,300-acre Isla Victoria, on Lake Nahuel Huapí, in Nahuel Huapí National Park. Nahuel was born on Ibiza. When he was five, his recently divorced mother brought him from Spain on a five-day excursion to discover his namesake. Over lunch she fell in love with the forest ranger. Mother and son never left.

"Nahuel," he says. "It's my name and my destiny."

Nahuel's childhood home is now the forest ranger's office. The three-room house is turquoise, a fact that somehow endeared me both to Nahuel and to this small island full of parrots and berries and trees carved with the initials of lovers. We got off our motorboat at Puerto Anchorena, the "new" dock. It's a small (fifty-foot) municipal quay similar to the ones used by private sailboats in every summer town in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States. Next to the Puerto Anchorena is a line of sticks poking out of the water, as if this new dock had been built next to a primeval underwater forest.

But it's hardly the docks, old or new, that most tourists are interested in. Apparently, all the Americans want to see the penguins. My countrymen have looked at too many pictures of Ushuaia, 1,000 miles to the south and the southernmost city in the world, and they think the whole of Patagonia is icebergs and penguins. American tourists have a tendency to combine the Chatwin and Theroux narratives with the photographs they see in travel guides they order from Amazon.

There are no penguins on Isla Victoria. That's no forest poking up from the water; it's the old dock.

On the trail into the heart of the island, a few yards past the dock, Nahuel climbed a thirty-foot apple tree laden with fruit and shook it until crisp apples rained down on us. They were bright yellow, about the size of plums, with the sweet, slightly tart taste of Fuji apples crossed with lemonade. In Los Angeles, there are no apple trees to eat from. In fact, there are no apple trees, period. My heart started racing with delight at having done something for the first time.

A while on, past a trail of pristine white eucalyptus and a pocket of this park's famous orange-bark Arrayanes trees, our foraging began in earnest. We came across dense patches of mushrooms as succulent as butter and picked fistfuls of blackberries gorged with juice. Then Nahuel taught me that pine nuts come from pinecones. I won't hesitate to admit that until I visited Patagonia, I didn't know that pine nuts came from pinecones. I like to consider myself a farm girl — I grew up in central California — but I had never eaten a nut directly from the cone. Now I know how to rummage in the forest for pastry fillings and salad toppings.

"What are you going to do with the mushrooms?" I asked Nahuel, who was stuffing vast quantities into his backpack.

"A pasta," he said. "With a little garlic and hot pepper and toasted mustard."

The guides at Blue Parallel can make anything happen, and it was some last vestige of decency that prevented me from demanding they take me to Nahuel's house for dinner. Had I asked, I have no doubt they would have complied.

The other paradox of traveling to Patagonia is that you are moved too quickly through the region to grasp the quiet and isolation you've come for. The tourist's Patagonia is, against all reason and contrary to the place experienced by Chatwin and Iyer, alarmingly fast paced. If you aren't rushed from activity to activity, how can you take part in the river rafting, the fly-fishing, the kayaking, the horseback riding, the rock climbing and the mushroom foraging and still have time for the massages and the salt scrubs and the wine drinking and the steak eating?

One day my guide and I raced from the Correntoso in the morning to a quick tour of the Alpine-chalet-style architecture of Bariloche to a leisurely Sauvignon Blanc-fueled lunch at Bariloche's El Casco Art Hotel. After all that drinking, I would have liked to take a short nap at El Casco. But we had no time for naps! We had to be at the Estancia Peuma Hue before sundown to hike to the top of the mountain, where we traversed a series of Tibetan bridges and single logs over steep canyons before speeding ninety yards along a zip line, rappelling down a wall of pointy moss-covered rock and meeting a fleet of horses that would take us along the beach and back to the lodge.

The next morning, guides fetched me early for white-water rafting on what travel books call the emerald green (it really is) Manso, a river with Class III and IV rapids. I had never rafted in my life, and as a child I consistently finished last the one season I belonged to the local swim team, but I was confident that my friends at Blue Parallel wouldn't put me in a situation where I was likely to suffer death by drowning.

In a ramshackle barn on a small farm an hour from the nearest paved road, past a one-room log-cabin church and a friendly nun walking along the edge of the dirt road who waved to us as we drove by, past an assemblage of gauchos in ponchos and berets herding nearly two hundred cows and not ten yards from the excruciating squeal of a pig being slaughtered for the afternoon's asado, the guides fitted fifty of us tourists with wet suits and life jackets and helmets and shoes.

We broke into six groups, one for each of the boats. When the guides asked, "How many people are in your groups?" and the inevitable follow-up, "Is anyone alone?" I was the only person who raised her hand. "I'm alone!" I said. I looked around. The guides chuckled at me. For the first time, I felt proud of my solitude. There on the bank of the rollicking, crystalline river, having come so far from home with no one as a shield against isolation, I discovered that the depth and unabating sweep of the wild land comforted me. I felt more attached to the landscape than to any person in it.

We rushed through the safety demonstration and rushed into our little boats and rushed to sit in the front of the boats or the back, and we paddled frantically down the river from rapid to rapid. Our guide, Martín, who had a sweet button nose and tattoos circling both his biceps and a long, aggressive mullet pulled into a rubber band, got a real kick out of flipping us over on purpose. He flipped us in the river's calm pool at the beginning, and he flipped us in a dangerous swirling funnel, and he flipped us on a long, bumpy stretch of rapids named Scrambled Eggs. Underneath the water, looking up through the vitreous green at my boat mates flapping and grasping and kicking on top of me, pile-driving me farther and terrifyingly farther beneath the river's surface, I wasn't in a hurry. I figured my life vest would float me to the top eventually and that panic would only guarantee drowning. As best I could, I swam away from the group, as alone as possible. I couldn't hear any rush underwater. I could hear only bubbles.

I kayaked the following morning on Lago Gutierrez, a transparent lake full of leaping trout, then flew to El Calafate, a town almost entirely under construction, including dozens and dozens of beige stucco motels being built to house tourists pausing on their way to the glaciers. El Calafate has no charm, thus emphasizing the beauty of the natural emptiness around it. I stayed at the Eolo, a haven plopped down a half-hour from town in the arid hills and plains of a windy 10,000-acre estancia. The Eolo's exterior is corrugated sheet metal, because any other material might not stand up to the battering of the wind.

When I arrived, the hotel had its horses saddled and waiting for a twilight ride. But I was famished, so the kind hotel manager laid out an elaborate high tea served with a brew so fragrant and delicate, it needed no cream or sugar. I had to remind myself repeatedly to slow down, nervous that if I didn't hurry up, I'd be forced to ride an unpredictable Patagonian mare on a rocky, steep mountain in the dark. "No need to rush," the manager said. "Enjoy the tea. Horses will wait."

The myth of Patagonia, both Bruce Chatwin's myth and the tourist's contemporary one, includes the Perito Moreno Glacier as its highlight. The glacier lives up to the myth in the most extravagant way: the colors really are blues like sapphire and aquamarine. It is made of cliffs and peaks and valleys, shards of ice rising side by side two hundred feet above milky Lago Argentino. The glacier is exactly as it looks in the photographs, as if nature worked for Disney.

It's possible there are other parts of the world as stunning as Patagonia at sunrise, but I am never awake to see them. I had to be up at an obnoxiously early hour to make the boat to the opposite shore of the lake so we could hike to the center of the glacier and back by evening. In Los Angeles, where everyone is running everywhere all the time, where people occasionally kill one another over traffic offenses, I never feel in a dire hurry to get anywhere. On the way to the boat, amid the empty Patagonian tundra, I thought I might have a breakdown if I didn't get to the glacier faster. Then I saw a busload of tourists photographing a gray eagle eating a bunny, and we stopped the car at the side of the road to join them and get a closer look. Cottony bunny fur and bright red guts were strewn all over the field beside the road, and a bit farther on, a wide, vertical rainbow shot up from the Andes. The rainbow dwarfed the mountains. It took up half the autumn sky at dawn.

I needn't have worried about being late. The boat had only two other passengers. They waited for me. We would still be able to motor to the opposite shore, hike to the glacier's center and be back by evening.

On the glacier, every cliché comes to life. There really are miles and miles of icy silence. You carry a small bottle for water and fill it from ponds and streams. The glacier calves, and the ice breaking from the wall and falling into the water sounds more violent than an earthquake, like something far beyond thunder.

I strapped on crampons and hiked three and a half hours into the center, deep into where the ice becomes striated and the hues even more varied and distinct: indigo, turquoise, cerulean. The hotel staff had packed my lunch of salmon and truffled cream-cheese tea sandwiches, potato-leek quiche, apple crumble, coffee and twist-cap bottles of Sauvignon Blanc. We all sat on our day packs beside a teal blue pond, and though getting a little drunk on a vast glacier with three hours of crevasses still left to dodge was perhaps not the best idea I've had in my life, ice trekking frightened me somewhat, and the wine provided relief.

In the United States or Europe, an attraction like an easily accessible glacier would be seething with tourists. And the tourists would be roped together for safety. And there would be no Sauvignon Blanc drinking on the ice mid-hike. There were five of us and two guides on the glacier that day, and when I asked one guide why we weren't roped for the trek, he said, "You can see where the crevasses are. Probably you will not fall in."

Probably not. But, the implication is, you're on your own. Try not to drown. Contrary to anything I'd ever felt, that loneliness gave me a thrill and a sense of strength, of triumph at being utterly self-reliant.

In the middle of that blue glacier, just as it does underwater in a Class IV rapids on a green river, the beauty itself reminds you of how small you are. The people around you are there primarily to assure you that you are, in fact — whether in L.A. or Patagonia, whether having a trivial conversation while caught in traffic or silent on a miles-long field of ice — always entirely alone.

Click here for our insider advice on traveling to Patagonia.