Nowhere Man: Argentine Patagonia

Mount Fitz Roy beckons from above the cloud cover as we arc into El Calafate airport, granting permission to land. We left Buenos Aires for this Southern outpost in Argentina on a plane ultimately bound for Ushuaia, the end of the world. Although we're not heading quite that far, already from the air it's clear that these are borderlands, between the land and the sea, the mountains and the plains, the land of men and the land of gods. 

In the evening light of our arrival, Lago Argentino stretches to the horizon and looks like it's illuminated from within. The plains turn into copper in the twilight. These Elysian fields stretch to the horizon in three directions, and end abruptly with the Andes to the West. From here, the mountains look like Asgard, soberly cloaked in clouds, brooding and covered in snow. I'm reminded of a line from a book on the Himalaya, the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods. Looking at them from the warmth of the plain onto their snowy heights, you can only think this must be where they dwell. 

I've been dreaming of visiting Patagonia since I was 14, when I first saw photos of the Torres del Paine massif in an Italian climbing magazine. What and where is this place with the mysterious name Patagonia, that's not a country I've ever heard of, nor a city? Peaks in the Nepal? The Alps? That solo climber against the peaks in the distance first kindled a spark of inspiration to climb. And ever since I've dreamt of coming to this place, that's not even in a single country, that's not a mountain range or geological feature. It's a destination all its own, the anchor of this trip for me. A Terra Incognita that's been beckoning for decades, the landscape of countless daydreams. 

"Nowhere is a place", wrote Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux. Enchanted and dazzled by the expanse, the intensity of the colours in this fading light, we drive off into the sunset, towards the Mountain Gods, to the Estancia at the end of the road...