Homage To Patagonia

A rugged Andean passage from Argentina to Chile-once immortalised in literature and on film-is now as luxurious as it is adventurous.

- Mark Johanson

There's a point near the start of Che Guevara's classic travelogue The Motorcycle Diaries when the young Marxist revolutionary crosses from his native Argentina into the unknown wilderness of Chilean Patagonia. "What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier?" he asks as he embarks on a nine-month quest to check the pulse of South America. "Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land."

This scene, set in the remote Andes in 1952, gets limited page time in Guevara's scrappy coming-of-age memoir, which his family released posthumously in 1992. Yet in the Walter Salles film of the same name, which came out in 2004, it's the moment that really propels the narrative into action. Guevara (played by Gael García Bernal), who was a medical student at the time, and his companion, biochemist Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), sail across a fjord-like lake, then travel onward into Chile, their motorcycle dwarfed by granite peaks as they navigate snowy roads.

I remember watching The Motorcycle Diaries 20 years ago and being struck by those images; the frosty Patagonian forests were so different from what I'd imagined South America to look like. The colour of that lake-teal and radiant, like liquid peacock feathers-lingered in my mind. I moved to Chile 10 years later but let another decade slip away before I decided to cross those same Andes myself.