I can’t make my mind up about Patagonia. It’s summer so some days it’s bright and colorful and the clouds push overhead and you get a spring in your step.
It’s a vast open space, empty to a degree that leaves you feeling like a speck on an ocean of withered grasses, and it makes famous lonely roads in the US look positively suburban.
The Santa Cruz River, wide rushing past our campground full of energy.
Poplar trees (“Alamos”) are common around here or at least they are if there are any trees at all. They grow tall too and seem unaffected by the endless winds.
Patagonia was named by Ferdinand Magellan when in 1520 he encountered a very tall local whom he called “patagon,” a term that was thought to refer to people with big feet but lately it’s believed there was a giant in a popular story of the time called Patagón, and in any event the name has stuck.
Patagonia is not clearly defined but it is roughly the area of southern Argentina and Chile with a northern boundary where you prefer. Generally in Argentina the northern edge is the Rio Negro though you can pick your own line while in Chile its northern edge is just south of Puerto Montt. It’s a huge area.
We’re still a long way south and that’s why it’s so windy here. We’ve seen 60 mile an hour gusts but it’s famous around here for winds strong enough to knock you to the ground or to rip the door off your car. We know of one overlander blown out of his truck who fell to the ground and broke a bone. Caution is the watchword when the wind howls. This far south winds blow around the southern oceans with no land masses to stop them so they sweep Patagonia uninterrupted. Every iOverlander camp site mentions wind protection ton or lack thereof. We park for the night bearing wind direction in mind. Rooftop tents on top of cars and tents on the ground get blown around routinely. We were looking for this gravel pit to get out of the wind but we couldn’t find it. We figured the grading of the road had covered the exit to this spot but relief from the wind looked nice on paper.
And there you have it: Patagonia the lovely and Patagonia is the awful. Colors and sunshine and gorgeous clouds and then the wind and abrupt weather and harsh conditions. I want to love Patagonia but I can’t. It’s fascinating and bizarre but so repellent.
You drive through country that looks like the Great Plains or the western states and their hills and escarpments. I see buttes and mesas as we drive like we were in Arizona. It’s so bizarre and disorienting. And then you spot a turquoise glacial lake to remind where you are.
Check out these pictures for yourself. There’s nothing here, nothing at all beyond the always irritating fences.
In the photo below is a road maintenance yard. There are no electrical wires or poles, no radio or phone antennae. No workers or signs of life either.
On this drive the vast emptiness continued with no signs of human habitation or work. There are no farmers, no tractors, no work crews, no tracks or farm roads, no herds, no signs, no electrical wires, and no indications anyone lives or works here.
There’s nothing out here. Nothing.
It’s actually quite intimidating. I used to mock America’s loneliest road as we drove highway 50 across Nevada. It was a great drive and I’d recommend it but lonely it’s not. This place really is empty.
Everyone stops at La Leona a hotel and restaurant with mixed reviews. Layne bought a brown paper bag of empanadas, baked meat or cheese pies and they were really good, well filled and flavorful.
Rusty took advantage to stretch his legs and let his tail fly in the endless wind.
And then back into the void.
We arrived at Tres Lagos, a village dying a slow economic death with stores closed and windows papered over. Even the police checkpoint was abandoned for the evening.
There was a gas station but to our surprise they didn’t take credit cards so we cobbled together enough paper to buy five gallons and leave us some cash. In theory we had plenty of gas to get to the next big town a hundred miles away but around here keeping the tank as close to full as possible just feels reassuring.
Later we were glad to leave the village of Tres Lagos with at least three quarters of a tankful. Oh and I had time to be enchanted by some puffy cloud formations.
And then the evening went to shit. Suddenly the asphalt ended and gravel (“ripio”) began. Wasn’t that a lovely surprise putting us in the position of wondering how long the hell this went on. We burn a lot more fuel per mile in low gear skidding across dirt roads. 16 mpg on highway versus 10 mpg in the rough.
It was nicely graded though we didn’t see construction crews making repairs and paving. In a couple of miles we came across the grading crew resting after a days work; they were in a couple of travel trailers with their grader parked outside. We should have stopped to find out how long this went on but looking back I think smoothing the highway is their summer job.
We had no cell signal and we weren’t going to stop to set up Starlink so we just kept driving and hoping the paved road would return soon. What we didn’t know at the time was that this section is notorious and known as the damned (malditos) and it’s 73 kilometers of gravel, 45 miles of 10 to 15 mph bouncing and rumbling in our heavy van. An abandoned farm:
Actually that farm was a potential parking spot for the night even though one entry in iOverlander said the place was creepy with dead cows everywhere. Notwithstanding the poor review we were desperate to get off the road for the night and we had it in consideration. We chickened out at the driveway with Layne worrying we would be trespassing on private property. She wasn’t creeped out by the dead cows you understand. Or so she said. We pressed on towards eight o’clock.
The grading ended, the gravel got thick and the rocky road got bouncy.
Lacking human contact we spotted guanacos doing what they do best which is jumping fences. Sometimes they miss and get hung up and die. You’ll see desiccated corpses hanging off the wire. Another reason to love Patagonia.
We passed a van that was stopped in the road and asked if they were okay, they gave us a thumbs up and we drove on. Ten minutes later they buzzed past us as we are the slowest in the road especially if it’s gravel.
The guanacos were having fun. We’d end we seen the youngsters running around chasing each other. Then they started head butting the older guanacos who started chasing butting and playing with the youngsters. We watched, fascinated for a few minutes.
There are emergency phones every few miles if you get into trouble. And indeed we came across an SUV stopped by the side of the road so we stopped and a small tough looking Asian man got out and started speaking English to us. He said he had had two flat tires x and his friend had got a ride to take his tire and get it repaired. He totally five and thanked us for stopping but he said he was planning on spending the night in his car and he seemed totally okay with that. He told us the gravel lasted a couple more hours and he put his hands together and bowed to us. The gesture reminded me of Dith Pran, the translator in “The Killing Fields” movie so I wondered if he might be Cambodian. His English was excellent and he didn’t even try speaking Spanish to us. I wonder what his story is.
We could not locate any of the iOverlander stopping places. It looked like the road had been graded so often the gravel on the edges obliterated any exits. We saw flat spots but no exits to them which was weird. Eventually we found this:
I got the Starlink out and converted gravel mystery. It turns out the stretch of gravel marked on the highway and I hadn’t noticed it.
We got 19 miles into the gravel with 26 miles to go before we stopped for the night. It’s marked on Google as the Damned 73 North and South referring to the unpaved 73 kilometers between the two points:
For some reason Google could t locate us so our blue dot isn’t on the map but here we were Tuesday night:
The great empty:
A great sunset saw us to bed.
Darkness starts to get too dark for driving around ten pm. Full darkness falls around eleven. The wind never seems to stop and Rusty has gotten so used to the wind it no longer scares him. That’s a plus.
Good night.
