Get the best of Patagonia by going out into the sticks, says Luke Abrahams
It’s roughly 9am on a blisteringly hot January morning and I find myself in the driest place on earth. My skin is flaking and my lips are so chapped they are bloody painful to touch. The first question I have on my mind is…why the hell do people come here?
I’m visiting The famous Atacama Desert, but there’s no solace in the small sand locked town of San Pedro di Atacama, which is not the isolated and remote hippy nirvana you see splattered all over the glossy magazines. While beautiful, its Mars like craters, geyser valleys and mountain peaks are littered with backpackers and tourists.
I’d always known that Patagonia was going to be busy. The minute you clock a destination on a Lonely Planet guidebook cover at the airport you know you are doomed, so to avoid a repeat of my desert disappointment, I traded in Torres Del Paine (Patagonia’s cover star) for its least known National Park: Parc Nacional Patagonia.
Wildly isolated and cut off from civilisation during the winter months thanks to the razor-sharp glaciers of the Northern Patagonian Ice Sheet, this far-flung stretch of Chilean epidramas gives you what other wildernesses in this part of the world do not: total isolation. You mostly feel this on the drive here. From Balmaceda airport to the park is a seven-hour car transfer along mostly unpaved roads winding through 300km of The Carretera Austral, Chile’s famous Route 7. The mountains are epic and the vistas endless. Four seasons flash by in an hour. Rainbows bounce off the vales; sudden hailstorms slash at the trees; and the sight of godly electric blue lakes and rivers that slither into what looks like the ends of the earth give you the shudders.
The immense grasslands of the Patagonia National Park
I’m in the Chacabuco Valley in the Aysen region of Chile, within the Patagonia National Park. So far, my only company has been a few hikers and baby guanacos. The Explora lodge is a former cattle farm turned chic pad by founder and Chilean entrepreneur Pedro Ibáñez back in 2021. Above giant condors attempt to feast on a half-mutilated guanaco rotting in the distance. Corkscrew hills wind in unison among patches of wildflowers and overgrazed cliffs – a casualty of the cattle farmers who once lived here in the early 1900s.
A seven-hour drive away from civilisation: the Patagonia National Park
The lodge is the only inn you will find in the 752,000 acres of this sequestered parkland. The digs themselves are a little lost in translation for the setting: Minimalist British cottage core split across four main buildings, there are 12 comfy rooms and suites, each with small touches like woodcarvings depicting local flora and fauna. The giant windows spy nothing but soulful views of splendid isolation.
Out in that isolation, once endangered Andean Deer flock. That they still exist is partially thanks to the park’s founders, the late Doug Tompkins and his wife Kristine. in 1994, they set up Conservacion Patagonica (later Tomkins Conservation), a conservation group with a mission to save and restore wildlands across Chile and Argentina. Doug made his fortune with the clothing companies The North Face and Esprit and Kristine was the former CEO of Patagonia. Much of the restoration, rewilding and regeneration projects are their ideas. The couple “saw an incredible opportunity—to recover these immense grasslands for native species, like the guanaco, the Darwin’s rhea, and puma, but also to connect it to existing parklands of lesser status to the north and south, creating one enormous park.”
Despite the park being such a conservation success, it’s still relatively unknown
Depleted forests were rewilded by enriching severely degraded soil and over 500 miles of fencing was removed to create wildlife corridors so animals, including puma, could move between the park and federal lands freely and safely. Despite the park being such a conservation success story, it’s still relatively unknown beyond a few newspaper snippets. The fruits of its success come full circle during all my carefully planned hikes and excursions with Explora. The lodge has a medley on offer, even for hiking novices like me.
There are dozens of options depending on your interests and desires ranging from super technical mountain climbs to slow jaunts around the hotel to spot wildlife. While out on the hunt for Andean deer with my guide Micaela Diaz Rossi we encounter rivers and lakes so clear you could see straight to the bottom, wild strawberries, yarrow and dandelion, liken fungus and old man’s beard, and views of the jagged icy Andes in the distance. But it’s the night sky here that trumps my four days of dizzying walks and overland drives.
It was a cold and crisp night, and the sky turned an electric red. Distant galaxies glowed, ancient stars shone bright, satellites zoomed and Sagittarius A, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole stared me point blank in the face (Patagonia is a big stargazing destination). As I stared in the pitch black, swarned by insects, I felt a sense of total nothingness. Three hours had passed, and all sense of time was lost to the immense beauty of the universe. It was a sight I thought I’d see back in the Atacama, but here it was, in all its glory in the middle of a National Park I hadn’t even heard of before.
Visit Patagonia yourself
Luke was a guest of cazenove+loyd (cazloyd.com) which offers an 11-night trip to the Atacama Desert and Patagonia National Park, Chile, from £9,665 pp (two sharing) including three nights full board at Explora Atacama, three nights full board at Explora Patagonia National Park, and two nights at Four Seasons Buenos Aires, as well as all excursions, transfers, accommodation in Santiago and domestic flights throughout. International flights extra. British Airways fly direct from London to Santiago from around £800.