Ghost Towns of Patagonia? A Review of "False Calm"

When the great Charles Darwin looked back on his travels, he displayed a surprising affection for Patagonia’s endless plains: “"In calling up images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes; yet these plains are pronounced by all wretched and useless.  They can be described only by negative characters; without habitations, without water, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants.  Why then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory?  I can scarcely analyse these feelings; but it must be partly owing to the free scope given to the imagination."

A crossroads on the Patagonian steppe

Darwin’s focus was natural history, but he also observed Patagonia’s peoples and cultural landscapes, as he did in his description of the ruins of “Port Desire” (now known as Puerto Deseado): “It was formerly attempted to make a settlement here; but it quite failed from the want of water in the summer, and the Indians in the winter. — The buildings were begun in very good style, and remain a proof of the strong hand of old Spain.” He thought the area almost uninhabitable, though, “As the fate of all the Spanish establishments on the coast of Patagonia, with the exception of the Río Negro, has been miserable.”

María Sonia Cristoff—herself a Patagonian native—might agree with Darwin, but for different reasons. When I first saw False Calm – A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia, the subtitle suggested something very different from what I then read about, an area I’d gotten to know pretty intimately over the course nearly 40 years. I had to check the Spanish version—“Un recorrido por pueblos fantasma de la Patagonia”—to clarify exactly what she meant. That wasn’t enough, though, as she wasn’t writing about abandoned settlements like remote Cabo Raso or the old Frigorífico Swift company town near Puerto San Julián, both of which I had visited regularly if not frequently.

Cabo Raso is a genuine ghost town on the coast of Chubut province

The Frigorífico Swift, on the outskirts of Puerto San Julián, is an industrial ghost town.

Cristoff, though, is not interested in nostalgia-laced curiosities in a region renowned for its wildlife and wild Andean backcountry. Rather, she focuses on what I would describe as semi-urban backwaters on the Patagonian steppe that begins just inland from the Atlantic and extends well beyond the limits of Darwin’s vision at Puerto Deseado, and I might call her experience a "stay" rather than a "journey."

Las Heras, one of Cristoff's "ghost towns," survives on fossil fuels.

Personally, I might also call her destinations "backwaters" instead of "ghost towns," and Cristoff is more an ethnographic participant observer of life in settlements like Cañadon Seco (population roughly 900), which is only 14 kilometers from the coastal oil town of Caleta Olivia (population 80,000 or so, which I know fairly well). Except for the inland oil town of Las Heras (population 23,000, which I’ve visited once), most other settlements are so far off the beaten track that I struggled to find them on road maps that showed only gravel tracks in the area.

Cristoff's hometown of Trelew is more prosperous than the towns she writes about.

She gets to know her destinations through residents who seem stuck where they are or, on occasion, are returnees (escapees?) on brief visits to their former homes. Her stories often tell us the darker side of small communities that we know exist but may prefer to overlook. These absorbing but taxing tales almost completely ignore prosperous places like Trelew—the author’s hometown—and nearby Puerto Madryn, which have flourished with the tourist trade, wool, and industries such as aluminum.

That said, this is a worthy counterpoint to Patagonia’s romantic image, as seen from afar or on brief sightseeing tours. I know the translator Katherine Silver slightly and, while I might still quibble with the term “ghost town” in English, it’s perhaps metaphorically appropriate to places whose inhabitants are wraiths even to their fellow citizens who pass through their communities. At the end of the day, the title “False Calm” implies aspects of Patagonian life that short-term visitors are likely to miss but are nevertheless important.

A Park To Oneself? At Laguna San Rafael

When southbound travelers head to Patagonia, a frequent motive is the opportunity to see something “off the beaten path.” One of their bucket-list sights might well be Chile’s glacier-studded Parque Nacional Laguna San Rafael, southwest of the regional capital of Coyhaique, which remains one of the region’s least visited parks – technically, at least.

Laguna San Rafael is one of Chile’s largest national parks, where the ice from the Campo de Hielo Norte, the Northern Patagonian Icefield, still reaches the sea. I have viewed the jagged seracs of the park’s namesake glacier (pictured above) - the world’s lowest-latitude tidewater glacier - on three separate trips, but I have never actually entered the park.

In fact, even though thousands of visitors view the glacier up close and personal every year, only a relative handful ever enter the park – as recently as 2009, only 158 persons (82 Chileans and 76 foreigners) actually set foot in it. That’s because the jurisdiction of the Corporación Nacional Forestal (Conaf), which manages the park, ends at water’s edge – where the Chilean navy exercises authority. Thus, almost everybody arrives on catamarans and cruise ships that spend a few hours before heading back to Puerto Chacabuco (pictured below), the port from which they sailed.

On my most recent visit, a few years ago, I took the catamaran Chaitén (pictured above), which sailed from Chacabuco at 8 a.m., arriving at the glacier around 1 p.m. after a couple brief stops to view sea lion colonies en route. Over the next couple hours, the crew shuttled the passengers on rigid inflatables along the glacier’s face - not too close, to avoid the crash of melting towers of ice and the waves they create - on a magnificent day that yielded the best views I’ve ever had of the advancing river of ice and its surrounding peaks.

In the course of my Chilean travels, I have also taken the Navimag ferry from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales at least half a dozen times, and it still amazes me that, in a world of six billion people, such an enormous area could be almost unpopulated - human settlements, or any sign of population, are virtually absent in an area that resembles the Alaska Panhandle. Verdant forests rise from the sea to mountains bearing the last of the winter snow, among other peaks of perpetual snow and ice, but they remain largely nameless, to me at least.

In reality, except for the handful who earn their livelihood at sea, this is still the nearly trackless wilderness it was when John Byron - grandfather of the famous poet Lord Byron - was shipwrecked here in the 18th century, and when the Beagle, with Darwin and FitzRoy aboard, anchored at Laguna San Rafael in 1835. In one sense, the forested hillsides and islands of archipelagic Chile differ little from the barren wastes of the Atacama desert - there is a verdant monotony to them. Yet in the Atacama the evidence of human habitation and activity is present everywhere, while in the lush south it's simply overgrown, if indeed it ever existed. There is no simple way to orient yourself, other than by the cardinal directions - in general, you’re going north or south.

While seeing Laguna San Rafael other than by sea has been difficult, that’s starting to change. This past year, the total number of visitors rose to 4,728 – still only an average of 13 per day, though that’s misleading because almost everyone goes between mid-October and April. I had hoped to go last January with the operator Río Exploradores, which now takes hikers by road and sea to the park for day trips, and for one- and two-night packages with dome tent camping from the town of Puerto Río Tranquilo, 228 km south of Coyhaique by a mostly paved highway.

It’s not cheap, but prices compare favorably to the catamaran and cruise ship excursions; unfortunately, there was no space available on the one day I had to spend in Tranquilo (which, however, has its own brewpub (pictured above) and several other excursions, like the nearby Capilla de Mármol on Lago General Carrera, pictured below). I’ll give it another shot this upcoming season, though.

Patagonia's Parallel Route: a Road-Trip Reminiscence

Patagonia’s a huge region – Argentina’s sector is about the size of Texas and Chile’s is roughly the same as Germany – which means that the region provides almost limitless opportunities for a road trip. I’ve written here often on Chile’s scenic Carretera Austral, but I’ve paid less attention recently to Argentina’s Ruta 40, which parallels the Chilean highway.

Connecting northernmost Argentina’s border with Bolivia to the southernmost tip of its continental territory, facing the open South Atlantic, Ruta 40 is a legendary highway – comparable to Route 66 in the United States. Many US musicians have covered the rhythm and blues standard “Route 66,” but Argentina’s Dylanesque singer-songwriter León Gieco has recorded a series of albums covering the geographical (and musical) distance from La Quiaca (in the north) to Ushuaia (in the south), with assistance from Oscar-winning composer Gustavo Santaolalla. Their musical route strayed from Ruta 40 at times, but always pointed in the right direction.

I have driven most (but not quite all) of Ruta 40, most memorably in in 1991, when my wife, a friend and I took four days in southern Patagonia to cover the distance between El Calafate and the more northerly town of Perito Moreno on what was then a precarious gravel road – though now it’s an almost entirely paved parallel to its Chilean counterpart. In a rattling 1969 Peugeot panel truck (pictured below) I got from my father-in-law, we covered some 500-plus kilometers in four days and saw a total of three other vehicles. En route, our transmission lost first and fourth gears, so we made most of the trip in second and third (eventually we were able to repair it in Bariloche).

Unlike the forested Chilean route, the Argentine side consists mostly of scrubby steppes which, however, in the words of Charles Darwin, were notable for “the free scope given to the imagination.” Many times I’ve crossed the “Big Sky Country” of Montana, but this was even “Bigger Sky Country.”

But there were individual sights to remember. One was a westward detour to the splendid isolation of Parque Nacional Perito Moreno (pictured above, not to be confused with the Perito Moreno Glacier), where we were the only visitors on the eastern front range of the Andes. Another was the desolate settlement of Bajo Caracoles, still home to the only gas station along the route and a landmark roadhouse hotel. Then there was the Cueva de las Manos - now a UNESCO World Heritage Site - for pre-Columbian paintings of human hands, wildlife and even abstract designs in the canyon of the Río de las Pinturas (pictured below).

In the ensuing years, I’ve driven this segment and more at least another dozen times. The road and its services are constantly improving – guest ranches and even restaurants are more common – but it’s the vast landscape that brings me back to an area that, to paraphrase Darwin, has taken “so firm a hold on my memory.”

There is also public transportation, at least in summer, from El Calafate and El Chaltén north to Los Antiguos (and beyond to Bariloche), with Chaltén Travel and Taqsa. At those destinations, and at several other locations, it’s possible to cross the border and continue the road trip on the Chilean side.

China Dam(n)s Argentine Patagonia?

For some years now, there’s been controversy over the ecological impact of several new dams planned for Chilean Patagonia, and concern over the deforestation required to build transmission towers through thousands of kilometers an almost roadless area. That’s still unsettled but, in the interim, plans for similar hydroelectric projects in Argentine Patagonia have gone almost unnoticed outside the country’s borders.

Environmentally, the parallels are imperfect. On the well-watered Chilean side, exposed to Pacific storms, the dense native forests are vulnerable and erosion could be severe; on the Argentine side, the Río Santa Cruz meanders through seemingly endless steppe. In April of 1834, according to Charles Darwin, Captain Robert FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle organized an excursion up the broad Río Santa Cruz, around the site of present-day town of Piedra Buena (the bridge pictured above crosses the river just south of town), but the strong current forced the crews of three whaleboats to pull the vessels upstream from shore.

As Darwin described it, the river (pictured above) “runs in a winding course through a valley, which extends in a direct line westward. This valley varies from five to ten miles in breadth; it is bounded by step-formed terraces, which rise in most parts, one above the other, to the height of five hundred feet, and have on the opposite sides a remarkable correspondence.” Over three weeks, the expedition managed to ascend roughly 140 miles and came within sight of the snow-covered Andes before turning back; an ascent that took them nearly six days of hard labor took just one to return to the Beagle, anchored on the Atlantic coast.

Given the terrain that Darwin describes, the hydroelectric potential is obvious and, in fact, there are two dams planned at sites downstream from the popular tourist town of El Calafate. The more westerly of the two will be named for the late president Néstor Kirchner, husband of current president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, while the more easterly will take its name from Jorge Cepernic, a former governor of Santa Cruz province.

While the ecological consequences of flooding parts of the sprawling Argentine steppe may not be quite so dire as deforesting the Chilean side and submerging its rushing whitewater, the project is not without controversy. First proposed in 2007, it failed to find adequate funding and then, three years later, a Buenos Aires-based consortium took it over. That lasted only briefly, though, after a dispute between the province and the federal government, followed by a new contract with a different group and the Chinese  construction company Gezhouba, which built the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze.  The cost, though, will be nearly US$1 billion greater than the previous bid, raising questions as to where all that extra money will go.

The Panorama of Santa Lucía de Santiago

Long overshadowed by Buenos Aires, whose reputation for European elegance belies its essential modernity, Santiago de Chile is an underrated city that’s embraced that modernity at the same time that it’s managed to preserve enclaves of its history – despite the seismic uncertainty that’s never far below the surface. That’s especially relevant as the second anniversary of the massive 2010 earthquake approaches at the end of the month, though that quake impacted the Chilean capital less than it did the smaller cities and countryside to the south.

That became apparent as I landed in Santiago Wednesday morning, took the shuttle into town, and spent most of the next two days running a few errands and seeing some sights that I needed to revisit.  Over the past three decades-plus, I’ve been to Santiago dozens of times, watching its transition from the drab days of the dictatorship to an economically and culturally vibrant city.

That’s not to say there aren’t problems: on the trip from the ultra-modern airport (pictured at top), one of the region’s best, first-time visitors can’t help but notice uninspiring concrete block houses and the graffiti that often cover them. In fact, Santiago’s graffiti problem appears to be getting worse rather than better, especially in older neighborhoods.

While I visit Santiago frequently, I recently realized that my photo library of the city needed to be updated, not having visited many key sites since I acquired my digital SLR about six years ago. One of those sites is Cerro Santa Lucía, the promontory where Pedro de Valdivia held out against the Mapuche in the 16th century, and Charles Darwin observed the “impressive and unique” view in 1834. It is now a lushly landscaped public park and, just below the summit, the “Jardín Darwin” commemorates his visit.

Twelve years before Darwin, Scottish immigrant Maria Graham had left a more eloquent description of the view: “From Santa Lucía we discovered the whole plane from Santiago to the Cuesta del Prado [in the coast range], the plain of Maypu [Maipú] stretching even to the horizon, the snowy Cordillera, and beneath our feet the city, its garden, churches, and its magnificent bridge all lit up by the rays of the setting sun…what pen or pencil can impart a thousandth part of the sublime beauty of sunset on the Andes?”

Many things have changed, obviously, since Valdivia, Darwin and Mrs. Graham ascended Santa Lucía’s summit. I have a badly scanned wintertime slide, taken a decade ago, that still shows the snow-capped Andes to the west above a relative paucity of high-rise buildings. On Thursday, though, a photograph I took from a slightly different perspective shows a proliferation of apartments and other high-rises stretching east toward the Andean foothills. At this time of year, of course, there’s no snow on the closest summits, but the sheer density of construction is impressive – even if they haven’t yet obstructed the views from Santa Lucía.

Later in the afternoon, I went to visit Brian Pearson of Santiago Adventures, a US citizen who set up a tour company here partly because of the city’s easy access to the Andes (Brian is a passionate skier, and the slopes of Valle Nevado and its neighboring resorts are less than an hour from downtown). He remarked that, after some cities in China, Santiago has seen the world’s biggest building boom over the past decade. I can’t recall the exact numbers, but that’s certainly plausible.

Chile's Least Visited National Park?

Southwest of the regional capital of Coyhaique, Parque Nacional Laguna San Rafael is one of Chile’s largest national parks, where the ice from the Campo de Hielo Norte, the Northern Patagonian Icefield, reaches the sea. I have viewed the jagged seracs of the park’s namesake glacier - the world’s lowest-latitude tidewater glacier - on three separate trips, but I have never actually entered the park.

In fact, despite the fact that thousands of visitors view the glacier up close and personal every year, only a handful of them ever enter the park - in 2009, the last year for which complete statistics are available, only 158 persons (82 Chileans and 76 foreigners) actually set foot in it. That’s because the jurisdiction of the Corporación Nacional Forestal (Conaf), which manages the park, ends at water’s edge, and almost everybody arrives on catamarans, cruise ships and ferries that quickly turn around and head back to Puerto Chacabuco, the port from which they sailed.

That was my experience again on Wednesday, when Catamaranes del Sur’s high-speed Chaitén sailed from Chacabuco at 8 a.m., arriving at the glacier around 1 p.m. after a couple brief stops to view sea lion colonies en route. Over the next couple hours, the crew shuttled the passengers on Zodiacs along the glacier’s face - not too close, to avoid the crash of melting towers of ice and the waves they create - on a magnificent day that yielded the best views I’ve ever had of the advancing river of ice and its surrounding peaks.

In the course of my Chilean travels, I have also taken the Navimag ferry from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales at least half a dozen times, and I never cease to marvel that, in a world of six billion people, such an enormous area could be almost unpopulated - human settlements, or any sign of population, are virtually absent in an area that resembles the Alaska Panhandle. Verdant forests rise from the sea to mountains bearing the last of the winter snow, among other peaks of perpetual snow and ice, but they remain largely nameless, to me at least.

In reality, except for the handful who earn their livelihood at sea, this is still the nearly trackless wilderness it was when British naval officer John Byron - grandfather of the famous poet Lord Byron - was shipwrecked here in the 18th century, and when the HMS Beagle, with Darwin and FitzRoy aboard, anchored at Laguna San Rafael in 1835. On one level, the forested hillsides and islands of archipelagic Chile differ little from the barren wastes of the Atacama desert - there is a verdant monotony to them. Yet in the Atacama the evidence of human habitation and activity is present everywhere, while in the lush south it's simply overgrown, if indeed it ever existed. There is no simple way to orient yourself, other than by the cardinal directions - in general, you’re going north or south.

While seeing Laguna San Rafael other than by sea has been difficult, that’s starting to change. A new operator, affiliated with Coyhaique’s Condor Explorer and Puerto Río Tranquilo’s El Puesto, is taking hikers by sea to the park for day trips, and for one- and two-night packages with tent camping. It’s not cheap - about US$180 for the day trip and US$300 for the overnight, not counting transportation to the end of the Río Exploradores valley road - but the price compares favorably to the catamaran and cruise ship excursions.

Darwin vs. the Penguins

For all the faunal observations he made in The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin was strangely silent on penguins. Only off the shores of Uruguay and on the Falkland Islands did he bother to mention the birds that, for so many people, are on the main reasons they visit the Southern Cone countries (though penguins are found as far north as Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands, almost all of them breed in sub-Antarctic and Antarctic shores).

Darwin’s primary penguin sightings came in the Falklands, where he described a confrontation with one of the birds:

“Another day, having placed myself between a penguin and the water, I was much amused by watching its habits. It was a brave bird; and til reaching the sea, it regularly fought and drove me backwards. Nothing less than heavy blows would have stopped him; every inch he gained he firmly kept, standing close before me erect and determined. When thus opposed he continually rolled his head from side to side, in a very odd manner, as if the power of distinct vision lay only in the anterior and basal part of each eye. This bird is commonly called the jackass penguin, from its habit, while on shore, of throwing its head backwards, and making a loud strange noise, very like the braying of an ass; but while at sea, and undisturbed, its note is very deep and solemn, and is often heard in the night-time In diving, its little wings are used as fins; but on the land, as front legs. When crawling, it may be said on four legs through the tussocks or on the side of a grassy cliff, it move so very quickly that it might easily be mistaken for a quadruped. When at sea and fishing, it comes to the surface for the purpose of breathing with such a spring, and dives again so instantaneously, that I defy any one at first sight to be sure that it was not a fish leaping for sport.”

As Darwin noted, penguins are far from passive, as my daughter Clio learned in the process of banding them this summer at Argentina’s Reserva Provincial Punta Tombo (pictured above), where upwards of 200,000 Magellanics - as the jackasses are properly known - breed in burrows on the arid Atlantic shore. When my wife saw her after she left Punta Tombo, she exclaimed “Darling, you’re disfigured!” because of the bites she had suffered, mostly on her hands. In Clio’s words, “I've got a few pretty good ones that I hope will stick around until I get back to the states. Yes, those chicks were very bitey. I also have an adult penguin bite on my shin that I still have a mark from, so that'll tell you how much worse the adults bites are than the chick ones.”

Clio’s internship was part of a long-term research project by University of Washington biologist Dee Boersma, who has UW grad students and a handful of Argentine interns at Punta Tombo every summer. An article on Boersma’s research, and the occasional obstacles to working in a country such as Argentina, appears in the current issue of Wildlife Conservation magazine.

Meanwhile, I have not yet had a correct answer on Thursday’s quiz, which I thought should have been simple enough, at least to anyone who read the piece at all closely. So I’ll leave another clue - go to the Cruceros Australis website and follow the boat’s itinerary to find the name of the archipelago whose waters Darwin described as resembling “a miniature likeness of the Polar Sea.” Please send your answer to me at southerncone (at) mac.com, and you will win a copy of the new edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia.

Win This Book - for Darwin's Sake!

Today is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin, history’s greatest scientist and one of its greatest travelers, who changed the way we look at the world. Recalling five years aboard HMS Beagle, Darwin wrote that the part of the landscape that remained longest in his memory was the Patagonian steppe, but he also left a vivid description of some of the world’s wildest terrain at South America’s southern tip:

“The scenery here becomes even grander than before. The lofty mountains on the north side compose the granitic axis, or backbone of the country, and boldly rise to a height of between three and four thousand feet, with one peak above six thousand feet. They are covered by a wide mantle of perpetual snow, and numerous cascades pour their waters, through the woods, into the narrow channel below. In many parts, magnificent glaciers extend from the mountain side to the water's edge. It is scarcely possible to imagine anything more beautiful than the beryl-like blue of these glaciers, and especially as contrasted with the dead white of the upper expanse of the snow. The fragments which had fallen from the glacier into the water, were floating away, and the channel with the icebergs presented, for the space of a mile, a miniature likeness of the Polar Sea.”

In honor of Darwin, I’ll be giving away one copy of the new edition of Moon Handbooks Patagonia to the first person who can name the island depicted in the photograph above, which Darwin visited aboard the Beagle, and which I will be visiting again next week aboard the small cruise ship Via Australis. Please send your answer to me at the following email address: southerncone (at) mac.com. Previous quiz winners, please let someone else have a chance (but feel free to send me the answer anyway).