The Light in Patagonia: Arriving at El Calafate

Afternoon moon in El Calafate, Argentina.

We had chosen to spend our first night in Palermo because it was 15 minutes from the national airport, and in the morning after our included breakfast of bread and dulce con leché — a caramel/Nutella-like spread that would become our morning staple — at the cheap, hospitable Casa Esmeralda hostel, we were on our way.

The cab driver gave us a look when he saw that we had luggage, as if it was a ridiculous thing to be transporting your belongings when heading to the airport. He was a fat Argentinian dude who took up one-third of the aluminum can of a vehicle and smoked the entire way. We weaved through the long, expansive boulevards riding on two wheels most of the way, slamming to frequent stops inches of the bumper in front of us, only for the driver to break out into a chorus of curses over the blaring radio. But he knew what he was doing and, more importantly, where he was going — so we let him have his way and tipped him well.

Three hours later, we were descending upon a field of white mountains with clear blue skies. We could’ve been landing on the moon, but instead we had arrived at El Calafate.

First aerial glimpses of El Calafate.

***

El Calafate didn’t have an airport until 2001, when tourism demands led to its formation. We landed in a small, clean terminal and were in and out with our checked luggage in a matter of minutes — and that is certainly one of the refreshing perks of traveling to small destinations. A fixed-rate of 50 pesos bought us a cab ride into town, some 20 kms away, and it turned out to be a completely different ride from earlier in the day. It was only then, with our oversized backpacks tucked away in the trunk and the stress of travel arrangements behind us for the moment, that I relaxed and looked out the window.

The clean, expansive road looked as if it was paved yesterday. In fact, it may have been since a vast majority of the roads in Patagonia are just now being paved to meet tourism demands. (A lot of people, yours truly included, are not a fan of this.) A fresh coat of yellow paint marked the dividers. I felt as if we were on cruise control in an ultra-high resolution video game. It must be the easiest gig in the world to be a cab driver in Patagonia. You could just close your eyes and let the long, straight road take you to the tiny glow in the distance.

Prior to our arrival, I kept hearing this word “steppe” used to describe the Southern Patagonian landscape, and although I had looked up the definition (“a vast, treeless plain”), I couldn’t really apply it to my mind’s eye. Now, here I was staring into it. Like the airport, everything about the landscape felt “new.” On either side of us was steppe, and only steppe. Parts of it reminded me of the many drives I had taken from Los Angeles to Las Vegas across the Mojave dessert. Part Utah. Part Arizona. With the difference of there not being the constant threat of the next McDonalds across the bend. There weren’t generic road signs telling you how many miles you were from civilized places like Reno or Phoenix.  We didn’t even see a gas station until town.

The other difference: where Southwest, U.S.A. was red-ish and canyon-y, Southern Patagonia was grainy and yellow. Like the color of a disintegrated castle in Andalucia, Spain. Like the sand of a dessert in Africa. It felt as if you were driving through the landscape in crackly, sepia film with haphazard blips and cuts in the reel.

Then there were those mountains, the ones we saw from the aeroplane. The ones people before television imagined planet Jupiter to look like. They were way off in the distance, like an frozen army lined up on an empty battlefield. Their presence was omnipresent.

Or at least that’s what it all looked like at this hour of day (late afternoon) because one of the most striking things I would go on to notice is how the light in Patagonia was forever changing. Without the hindrance of buildings and trees, the sun was free to drape the barren earth in all sorts of mysterious shades, giving away to the creation of new colors — colors that simply did not exist on the other side of the equator. Even the hills and mountains we saw were few and scattered, and the ice-bronzed mountains still further back. The amount of times you could experience the same landscape in a new way was infinite.

Claude Monet would’ve had a field — er, steppe — day here.

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