Patagonia: More Than A Clothing Company

Team Pea recently traveled to Patagonia, a part of the world so remote that we couldn’t publish blog posts along the way. It’s not like we we were roughing it in tents, going unbathed for days, and, God forbid, having no access to beer or wine. We knew that we would have poor wifi (or for four days, none at all) and less than adequate cellular connections, so we left our laptops and iPads at home and captured the highlights of each day in a well worn, non-digital, travel journal. Consequently, this is the first in a series of posts that will be written with a little more reflection and the benefit of hindsight.

First, a brief primer on Patagonia. Most people know it as the inspiration for the famous outdoor clothing company and their logo. The company was founded in 1973 and its logo is the outline of Mount Fitz Roy in the border between Chile and Argentina. You may recognize it from one of our photos.

Patagonia is a region at the southern end of South America, shared by Argentina and Chile and bounded by the Pacific Ocean on the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east.  It includes the southern section of the Andes Mountains, which run North-South until turning West-East at the bottom of the continent. This portion of the Andes is home to the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, which extends 220 miles (half-way from San Francisco to San Diego!), feeding dozens of glaciers in the area, with those going to the west flowing into the fjords of the Patagonian channels of the Pacific Ocean and those going to the East supplying Patagonian lakes and rivers that eventually run into the Atlantic Ocean. 

So if Patagonia isn’t a country, where did it get its name? If you were awake during your World History classes, you might remember a guy named Ferdinand Magellan. In the late 1400s Magellan thought it was possible to reach the treasured Spice Islands from the east, sailing westwards across the Atlantic to South America. He got into a quarrel with his Portuguese king, who denied his repeated demands for an expedition. Magellan bothered the king so much that he was allowed to leave for Spain, where the 19-year old King Charles approved the expedition and put up most of the money for it. Magellan’s fleet of five ships and 270 men set sail from Spain in September 1519, crossing the Atlantic and making landfall at Rio de Janeiro before sailing south along the coast, searching for a way through or around the continent. Magellan found a bay which eventually led them to a strait, now known as the Strait of Magellan, allowing them passage through to the Pacific. The name Patagonia comes from the word patagón, which was used by Magellan in 1520 to describe the native tribes of the region, whom his expedition thought to be giants. The people he called the Patagons are now believed to have been the Tehuelches, who tended to be taller than Europeans of the time. Five hundred years later, the name Patagonia has stuck and we got to set out on our own modern day exploration of this “Land of Giants”.

Before setting off into this sparsely populated part of the world, we spent a couple of days in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires, where we would soon meet our Wilderness Travel trip leader and fellow travelers. The first order of business in Argentina was to exchange some US dollars for local currency. The hotel staff recommended a “currency” business down the street, which turned out to be a black market exchange where two men sat behind glass in rolling office chairs with a bill counting machine perched on a wheeled cart between them. The front door was guarded by a young man who limited the number of people allowed inside. The whole operation looked like a pop-up business but with only guns and money. We walked up to the glass window, showed the man our 200 US dollars and, because of our poor Spanish and his lack of English, he punched in the exchange rate on a calculator. We accepted his “offer” of 71 pesos to the dollar and he disappeared into the back, returning a couple of minutes later with an ENORMOUS stack of Argentine money, which he ran through the bill counter. When it was done, he pointed to the final number: 142,000 pesos. Ironically, this “black market” rate was much more generous than anything the banks or merchants offered. We were flush with cash and ready to roll in Buenos Aires!

A few things surprised us about Buenos Aires, translated as “good airs” or “fair winds”. It’s considered one of the most diverse cities in the Americas due to the influx of millions of immigrants from all over the world in the last 150 years, particularly during and after WWII. Fly to Buenos Aires for great Italian food and ice cream? Who knew?

We checked out “the world’s most beautiful bookstore” and found Rapanui, what the locals said is the best ice cream in the city. Neither disappointed.

Buenos Aires is also a green city with more than 150 parks and open spaces. The largest, Parque Tres de Febrero, is 989 acres (larger than New York City’s Central Park) and includes a rose garden, botanical gardens, and the largest Japanese garden outside of Japan. Like Central Park, there were runners, rollerbladers, dog walkers with their herds, and a few cyclists… until a torrential rainstorm sent everyone running for cover. 

Our first official day with Wilderness Travel included a city tour with a local guide. We visited the Recoleta Cemetery, and the blue collar barrio La Boca. Our final stop was the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the Presidential Palace, where we learned about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. This is a movement of Argentine mothers who continue to campaign for their children who had been “disappeared” by the military dictatorship of 1976 – 1983, when an estimated 30,000 individuals were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by the government, with their bodies disappeared and removed from public records. In 1977 the mothers of the disappeared decided to risk a public protest, although gatherings of more than three people were banned. Since then, they have gathered every Thursday, wearing white head scarves to symbolize the diapers (nappies) of their lost children, embroidered with the names and dates of birth of their offspring. They have largely succeeded in their original aims: as of 2016, more than 1,000 of the dictatorship’s torturers and killers had been tried and 700 sentenced. But the mothers – most of them now in their late 80s – have expressed concern that the current era of “alternative facts” and revisionist history poses a new kind of threat for their country. Hmmm – that sounds familiar.

Next up: We fly to the End of the World and hang out with penguins.