The Queen of Patagonia

The king is long dead.

Patagonia is a vast region that occupies the southern part of South America. It covers over a million square kilometers, about the size of France, United Kingdom and Germany, or California and Texas combined. Most of Patagonia is in Argentina; Chilean Patagonia forms a 2000 kilometer-long belt along the Andes Cordillera. To the chagrin of the British government, the Falklands Islands are also geographically part of Patagonia in Argentina.

There is something mythical about this cold, windy, harsh and remote land where sheep outnumber humans ten to one. In pre-Columbian times the region was inhabited by bands of hunter-gatherers. It might not have been the land of giants, the Patagones as imagined by the 16^th century navigator Ferdinand Magellan and by other early explorers, but Patagonia’s fierce inhabitants made the region inhospitable for the Spanish colonizers.

                                           Patagonian landscape

Among the indigenous people, the Araucanians/Mapuche tribes were particularly bellicose and refused to relinquish their land to their colonial masters. This lack of co-operation delayed the economic development of Patagonia well until the end of the 19^th century. As in the North American Wild West, the colonization of Patagonia took place at the expense of its native population. Argentina launched successive military campaigns with the objective of removing the Indians manu militari to make room for European settlers considered more productive. The Conquest of the Desert (1870) as the principal military expedition is known, is an increasingly controversial subject that is now labeled genocide. However, for its apologists, the Indians were violent parasites whose main business was to ransack new settlements.

Chilean Patagonia is a narrow ribbon of land that had to be both colonized and expanded at the expense of its Argentine neighbor. The Chileans were shrewd and took a different approach. They used their fierce Mapuche Indians as proxy fighters and dispatched them well-armed over the ill-defined border to raid Argentine territory. In the end, their fate was not much better than that of their brethren on the Argentine side. These wild times provided opportunities for the adventurous and the eccentric, and this is when the king of Patagonia appeared on the scene.

Orélie-Antoine de Tounens was a French lawyer who had moved to Chile around 1850. On the pretense of improving their chances of independence, he convinced the restless Mapuche chiefs to elect him as their leader with the assumption that a European would be taken more seriously. Subsequently, in 1862, he self-proclaimed himself King Orélie-Antoine I of Araucania and Patagonia. With a stroke, he further extended his fictional kingdom all the way to the Magellan Strait. Two years later, he was jailed and shipped back to France by the Chilean government. Needless to say his kingdom was never recognized as sovereign. Tounens tried unsuccessfully three times to regain his throne. His French heirs haven’t relinquished their claim and the current pretender is actually a champagne dealer.

If the king of Patagonia was a 19^th century con artist, Queen Cristina is a very hands-on 21^st century entrepreneur who along with her late husband Nestor, built an empire in Patagonia. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, casually known as CFK is the current president of Argentina. Her political career as well as her wealth sprung from a backwater place called El Calafate located near several spectacular Andean glaciers. Paradoxically, El Calafate grows while the glaciers recede! Benefitting from glacier tourism economy, Nestor who was nicknamed the Emperor Penguin and Cristina amassed land and business deals. Cristina fits the Ice Queen definition: good looking and charming outside and cold-blooded and heartless inside.

                     

                             Cristina                                                Florence

This is how many of her enemies think of her. For her fans (she has 1.6 million followers on Facebook) she is the reincarnation of Evita Perón. Although as president she took many pages from Evita’s populist book, CFK resents the comparison. Evita owed her popularity to her husband Juan, but CFK is a politician in her own right. She ranks 19 on Forbes list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women (2014). Under fire from many quarters, with a mixed bag of successes and failures her second term is not ending as smoothly as expected. Until the end, she will be defending her record, but she probably won’t be able to add an emblematic piece of real estate to her Patagonian kingdom. In spite of her brash diplomatic offensive, the Falkland Islands or Islas Malvinas islands are still firmly in British hands.

For this blogger, the true queen of Patagonia is a 19^th century British traveler, writer, political activist, war correspondent and feminist. Lady Florence Caroline Dixie was the daughter of a Scottish marquis.  Although born into wealth and privilege, at a very young age she rebelled against social conventions, such as maternal domesticity. At 21, having fulfilled her Victorian family contract, she left her brood in England and travelled with her husband to Patagonia. She had selected Patagonia because it was an “outlandish place”. An excellent horsewoman and a good shot she enjoyed game hunting and eating. In 1879, her party reached Punta Arenas and in Puerto Natales a hotel is named after her. After spending six months in Patagonia, she returned to Britain where she wrote Riding across Patagonia, an account of her adventure. She brought back with her a puma pet (she had killed his aggressive mother). The puma took an immoderate liking for British deer, and had to be sent to a zoo. She routinely shared her Patagonia observations with Charles Darwin and was not always in agreement with him.

She became a war correspondent in South Africa and later wrote a feminist novel. She founded the British Ladies’ Football Club. She supported women’s rights and animal welfare, as well as the right of self-determination for Irish and native South African people. Familiar with the moors of Scotland, free-spirited Florence may not have found the Patagonian pampas so outlandish after all, except for the puma. Florence and Cristina are miles apart but both are tough and are their own women.

 

Travel Digests

Thursday, February 12. At 2.40 am this morning, I left the shabby Rio de Janeiro Galeão airport to fly to Santiago where I arrived at 9 am after a stop-over at the swank Buenos Aires airport. Compared to Rio, all other airports seem swank!  Aerolinea Argentinas flights were on time and my suitcase arrived with me.  A happy start for someone who has a limited trust in state-owned airlines! I recollect that AA was re-nationalized by Nestor Kirchner the former president of Argentina. 

The airline returned the favor, its inflight magazine Alta dedicated several pages to Cristina's populist social programs.  In the magazine, the Falkland Islands or Islas Malvinas are also included with the Argentina territory along with its slice of Antartica.  May-be the French should re-claim les Malouines (their original name) as the islands were French until 1766!

Santiago is provincial compared to Rio.  I visited a few museums near the hotel and had an early night.  More city investigation tomorrow. It is my forth visit. My tour starts tomorrow night with a welcome cocktail and dinner.  Some fellow tour participants have already arrived, mostly senior couples from the U.S.

Friday, February 13. After a hearty breakfast, I walked towards the Santiago Zoo.  Unlike Rio but like Paris, Santiago streets are littered with dog poos.  Santiago is known for its stray dogs, who are fat and lazy.  Do-gooders feed them but goodwill stops at the bowl...So walk carefully.

I boarded the funicular San Cristobal towards the Metropolitan Park on a hillside.  My first stop was the zoo where I wanted to see up-close animals I probably won't be able to spot in their Patagonian habitat.  This zoo is not a sad place, its residents were either frolicking or napping.  I saw many guanacos, a kind of vicuña on steroids.  They are big and look at you with aplomb.  Nearly wiped out in the wild, they are making a come-back, and the vicuñas are no longer endangered.  

I watched a bunch of Humboldt penguins who strut their stuff in front of the cheering kids. Also in residence are ñandus or rhea, a smallish emu.  Rhea are vain, always grooming themselves.  The emus don't seem to take much care of their look, a scruffy looking lot!

The highlight of my wildlife adventure was a group of Patagonian maras.  I never saw them before.  They look like a composite: a dog body with a head of a hare (see pic).  In fact they are rodents, a smaller and skinner version of our Brazilian capybara. 

                         

                                            Patagonian maras

My favorite was a couple of zorros gris, the Chilean grey fox.  Cute and curious, they came to sniff their admirers.  They are fox/dog hybrids and roam the Andes. After so many exotics, I had ceviche for lunch.

Saturday, February 14. A travel day: Punta Arenas (latitude 53 degrees) a 4 hr. flight from Santiago . Already penguin territory. Fifty shades of yellow...the color of the grass and the earth. The city is located on the margin of the Magellan Strait, (53th parallel S).  Although close to the northern tip of Antartica (66 degrees) P.A. has the same latitude as Brussels except that it is much colder and windy.  Patagonia is notorious for its summer wind during the tourist season.  Wind is the key annoying factor. From Punta Arenas we rode a bus to Puerto Natales some 200 kms to the northwest, near Torres del Paine National Park.  The ride could have been really boring except for the abundant wildlife we spotted on both sides of the road: Guanacos, rheas and water fowls competing for pasture with sheep and cows. In Patagonia, sheep continue to outnumber people by a 10 to one ratio.

                                 Torres del Paine: Guanacos

It is a water fowl paradise. There are three different species of swans, several types of geese and ducks, etc.  And I can spot them all from my bedroom window! We are accommodated in a spectacular hotel named The Singular.

Sunday, February 15. This morning we had to abort our cruise to the Balmaceda Glacier.  Pity because it is receding, so we should rush to see it.  Our speed boats were too small to fight the high surf of the fiord.  Plan B was a shorter cruise in quieter waters with a long trek on a windy hillside.

So far, the highlight of this trip is neither the scenery nor the attractions but our 5- star- hotel The Singular Patagonia, in Puerto Natales.  It was built four years ago inside a national historic monument, the Frigorificos Bories, a cold storage plant built in 1906.  It started as a slaughter house for sheep at the end of the 19^th century.  In the early days, the sheep were processed into canned food until boilers and compressors were imported from Scotland.  Coincidentally, this Scottish company manufactured the boilers of HSM Titanic. The produced steam was used to generate cold air for the freezers. The cold storage chambers have been replaced by 57 luxurious guest rooms.  The hotel is also a museum.  For a non-meat eater like me, it hard to reconcile the pampering and the gruesome: Between 150.000 and 250.000 sheep were slaughtered annually.

                                   Hotel The Singular Puerto Natales

Monday, February 16. So far the weather has collaborated, mostly sunny, temperature above average: 12-15 degrees, and wind within seasonal range. Torres del Paine National Park, UNESCO Heritage Site is the high point of Chilean Patagonia.  The park deserves more than our one-day bus tour: that is the drawback of organized tours for senior travelers! As expected the notorious Patagonian wind didn't let up and a 100 km/hr. gust often made our walking hazardous. The torres (towers) and cuernos (horns) are strikingly beautiful and change color during the day.  The mountains are surrounded by lagoons of various shades of blue and green.

                                               Torres del Paine

n addition to its scenic appeal, the park is a sanctuary for endangered species. Its "Big Five" are puma (mountain lion), grey fox, guanaco, condor and lesser rhea (South American ostrich).  If we didn't spot the first two, we saw plenty of the other animals. The guanaco as already described in my first digest is a vicuña on steroids.  On a picture it is hard to tell them apart.  Guanacos and rheas have odd sexual habits. I very much pity madam guanaco who spends most of her adult life (up to 20 yrs.) pregnant.  Pregnancy lasts for nearly 12 months and one month after delivering the tiny chulengo, the female is in heat and subjected to male attention and copulation. These baby machines live in large herds under the protection of an alpha male.  His lot is not very enviable either.  When he doesn't service his ladies, he has to fight marauding horny males.  So he spends much of his life in hot pursuit of his females' potential suitors. He also has to watch for puma, the top predator.

Rhea's sexual life is even odder. The male is more serial lover than polygamist, and his ladies are promiscuous. He likes rough sex and jumps on the female during copulation. He builds a simple nest on the ground where his females lay their eggs.  The job done, the girls move away in search of new adventures.  The poor guys incubates the eggs (up to six). To ensure that his eggs are not all eaten by Mister Fox, he builds a decoy nest with the help of a subordinate male.  Some eggs are sacrificed.  After hatching, daddy takes care of the chicks. 

Condors are like petit bourgeois, they mate for life and share domestic chores.

   

                                 Torres del Paine Los Cuernos.

Tuesday, February 16. We had a quiet day, visited the Mylodon cave, and I went horse-back riding. The Mylodon is a 30 m high Pleistocene ground sloth which has been extinct for thousands of years. Anyway, its discovery generated a scientific stampede, so frantic that not a single bone remains in Chile.  Bruce Chatwin mentioned the pre-historic beast in his book In Patagonia.  Some imaginative individuals are still looking for the Mylodon in Patagonia.

During my ride, I didn't bump into the Mylodon, but spotted a couple of Patagonian parakeets, odd to find cold climate parrots, and several condors flying over us.  We were in puma territory, but cats, big and small usually nap during the day.

Wednesday, February 17. We crossed the border between Argentina and Chile in a desolate spot: Rio Don Guillermo, north of Puerto Natales. Once again, the Chilean professionalism was on display: In no time, immigration officers electronically checked our passports, whereas their Argentine counterpart processed them the old fashioned way literally in the dark, as there is no electricity in the morning!  Our guide said that the lack of technology was a blessing in disguise because the clearance was faster!

Tonight, we are staying in Casa Los Sauces, a 5 star resort in El Calafate, Santa Cruz Province (pic below).  It belongs to Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the current Argentine president. The resort is a modest token of her wealth.  Nestor Kirchner, her late husband and former president ruled the province for several years.  Both made a fortune and went on a land grab.  My room is old fashioned with many touches of feminine kitsch, not surprising, since one of Cristina's hobbies is interior decoration.  I miss The Singular even knowing that, in its previous life, it was a former slaughterhouse. 

In El Calafate, we visited the well documented museum of Glaciers and drank vodka in an ice bar with the futile hope of stopping the shrinking of the Patagonian glaciers.  Except for Perito Moreno and another glacier, they are all receding up to 150 meters per year.  Perito Moreno Glacier doesn't recede because its accumulation area (from snow fall) is far larger than its front where it breaks into the lake.

Patagonia is a desolate and inhospitable land where people got easily lost.  Geographic names such as Dead End Road, Last Hope Pass, Desolate Island, etc., coined by those who survived left evidence of their resilience.

Thursday, February 18. Sunny days, little wind and daylight temperatures around 15 degrees C. We will sail up country to check the receding Upsala Glacier.  We had our Titanic experience.  We sailed upstream to the front of the Upsala Glacier.  Since it recedes appr. 200 m per year, before melting many icebergs are floating downstream over a 5 km long distance.  Our captain knew the routine and being a more skillful version of Costa Concordia Capitan Schettino, he let us touch the biggest iceberg without sinking.

      

                                             Upsala Glacier

When on land, we trekked to a look-out to see the whole glacier network.  Awesome scenery. (Above pic)

Friday, February 19. This is my last Patagonia digest. "Ice Escapades" ended our trip to Patagonia. We were bussed to Perito Moreno Glacier, the poster boy of global warming deniers. Contrary to the majority of Patagonia glaciers, Perito Moreno is in equilibrium.  Its snow accumulation area exceeds the loses from ablation (melting, evaporation etc.).  The glacier also enjoys a unique micro-climate.

                                           Perito Moreno Glacier

El Calafate is a boom town thanks to glacier tourism. The city has grown so much that it has now opened an Evita Peron museum like in bigger cities. Evita's cult has reached Patagonia!  Actually, she is everywhere, posters and even banknotes.  She now graces the 100 pesos note (value: $US 11.60 at official exchange rate and $ 7.70 at black market).  She is taking the place of the 19th  century General Julio Argentino Roca, the previous face on the note.  Roca led the Conquest of the Desert; in the process he killed thousands of native Patagonian people.  The choice of Evita can be interpreted as an ethical improvement.

            

                            !00 Pesos Note with Evita Peron

Argentina is badly managed by Cristina Fernandez the current president of Argentina, and a somehow reincarnation of Evita. Inflation is estimated at 40 % year, so the parallel exchange rate is available everywhere, except in Cristina’s hotels.  Shops, restaurants and hotels invite you to pay in US dollars, and each offers a different exchange rate. 

Cristina does a much better job as a hotelière, she is the owner of the hotel where we are staying.  To keep the guests safe, she didn't hire security guards. Instead, she employs, at no cost, a flock of birds, not geese like the Romans did, although geese are plentiful in El Calafate, but southern lapwings. These birds live in large groups and do not sleep at night; when disturbed by intruders they fly-off making very loud noises.  Legend has it that General San Martin, the Argentine hero of Independence kept a patrol of clipped winged southern lapwings as sentinels when fighting the Spanish forces. 

A closing quote: Patagonia is famous for its fierce winds.  In his book In Patagonia, Chatwin wrote that wind was "striping men to the raw, and made Antoine de Saint-Exupery's plane fly backward instead of forward."