Patagonia: Travelling to the end of the world

Alex James finds that three seasons in a day is just a walk in the park when you're in the glacial expanse of Patagonia, the enormous wilderness that straddles Argentina and Chile

The journey to the bottom of the world flips you over the other way, around the arse/elbow axis, while equally strange things have happened to your buttocks and feet by the time you get there. Patagonia is a long way away. Out of the window of the plane, the geometry of the world is confusing all of a sudden. It's quite disorientating. Punta Arenas, close to the southern tip of Chile, feels more or less the end of the world. When you've gone that far south, it is a little disappointing not to be able to just keep on going, but we were now heading slightly north to the Torres del Paine national park.

The weather was quite busy when we arrived. It was a fight and the rain was winning, but the wind was trying to blow it all away. The hotel sent a van with blacked-out windows to ferry us the last couple of hundred miles. There was one road, pristine, made from concrete slabs, and it went on for hours. We rarely saw another car. The whole vast, yawning landscape was as neat and tidy as a seabed. The weather had turned really foul by now and I put my shades away, only to fish them out again half an hour later as dazzling sunshine broke through, with black clouds on the right, white ones on the left and clear skies ahead.

The Explora hotel in the Torres del Paine national park is a sexy, modern building right on the shore of a huge glacial lake. The last time I was in an area this wild I was overcome with a peculiar, listless nausea and I didn't know what to do with myself. There was no chance of that here. The place was humming with activity. It is the pet project of Chilean billionaire Pedro Ibañez. He operates a "fit in or sod off" policy. More and more I prefer to stay in places that represent the realisation of someone's mad vision of paradise, rather than places that try to please everybody.

Our room was beautiful but, as far as luxury goes, that's harder to measure. Most "luxuries" in hotels, like movies, room-service, massage, and that old enemy of the people, the minibar, are in fact just ways of screwing more money out of you. They surround you, or more significantly your wife, with temptations and bleed you dry. But there was no television or minibar here. Everything was included except phone calls and laundry.

Really great holidays aren't about the hotel, however. This is a unique and wonderful place to stay, but the true beauty is on the outside. Staying at Explora is about connecting with the subtle and powerful beauty of the natural environment. It would be possible to do this just by turning up in Patagonia, but at Explora they ensure you make the most of your time. It's a safari, really, and a high-class one. Every night there is a one-on-one briefing with a guide, and maps about the next day's activities, which might include kayaking, horse-riding and ice-walking.

For the first day we opted to go for a walk. The clear weather had held and we hauled ourselves through breakfast into a crisp spring morning. After 20 minutes' hiking, we crossed the brow of a hill as the wind whipped up. My army parka, a Britpop relic, seemed to hold up to the elements, but Claire's fashionable scarf and sweet little hat, which work very well in Soho, didn't cut it here so I leant her mine. From the top of the hill the park was laid out before us; whacking great mountains, grey and turquoise lakes full of icebergs, rolling hills and green plains.

Condors were circling far above. They make you feel good, like the sound of running water, or the sun coming out. Just as the wind had come from nowhere, it disappeared as we turned another corner into a snug, peaceful wood. Twenty thousand years ago, everything we were looking at was under water and it gave the impression of a seascape still. We scampered around eating berries and drinking from streams. I wasn't sure whether smoking was allowed. There have been terrible fires here - recently a young Czech took out 40,000 acres with a dodgy primus stove.

The simple pleasures are the best. The hotel's sauna is next to a lake full of icebergs. You stay in the heat for about 15 minutes or until you can't focus your eyes on the egg timer any longer, then leave with the sole purpose of jumping in the lake. If you start thinking about anything else, you chicken out and change your mind. It's important to get your head under the water. It makes you shriek and shout, but when you climb out, your skin prickles and tingles and it's delicious. It was such a good feeling I jumped in three times on the first day, before going back to the sauna to warm up.

The weather looked like it was going to hold and we signed up for a reasonably ambitious 10-mile hike up to the Grey Glacier. The walking party was quite large and chummy: skinny Americans, big Brazilians and a few English couples. I thought how nice everyone was and realised I must be enjoying myself.

We walked up a slate gorge for an hour or so. The slate gave the landscape a very contemporary-kitchen kind of feel. We stopped for lunch on a pebbly beach and I burnt my fingers hauling an iceberg out of the water. It was sunny and warm and the water was making tiny lapping noises with the pebbles.

The picnic was the old-fashioned variety, the sort you need chefs, butlers and footmen to pull off. Fortunately, they were all to hand. The food was good, but the thing that made it unforgettable was the appetite we'd worked up after a morning's march. Pea soup, my favourite, has never tasted that good. It was an elixir.

It wasn't much further to the glacier. The striking thing about glaciers is that, although they are made from ice, they are blue. There is silence on a massive scale near these huge lumps of ice and then a groan like thunder as the whole thing creaks forward. Glacier-blue has been harnessed as a marketing device for so much toothpaste, shower-gel, after-shave and other toiletries that my subconscious short-circuited with associations of freshness and I was overcome and invigorated by a slow-moving avalanche of hygiene-power.

A boat ferried us back through the icebergs to the hotel. There is a Steinway in the bar. I'd tried "Tea for Two" but the E-flat below middle C was very fruity, and that was just the start of it: there were all kinds of twanging and ringing problems in the high register. When we returned, an older guest, eyes shut and an expression of pure bliss on his face, was knocking out a tricky Gershwin number, as condors floated past the mountains and the sun beat in through the big windows. It sounded better with half the notes mangled. It might have been corny otherwise.

Next day there was a traditional Patagonian barbecue complete with gauchos. These are Patagonian cowboys with a lot of style - often they wear berets and a cravat-style tie. They herd sheep and cattle and they ride around on their horses looking cool and being free. We rode out to the barbecue on horseback. I had sun-cream in my eyes and I felt quite scared as we hit a canter on the open pampas. There were six or seven of us and a bunch of crazy dogs really enjoying themselves. It was a huge sunny day and calves were skipping about.

As far as I can tell, horses fall into two categories: the ones that want to go faster than you want them to, and the ones that don't want to go at all. Maluengo, the chestnut gelding that I was rocking around on, wanted to be at the front, and kept breaking into a gallop. It got less scary eventually, and by the time we arrived at the gaucho's house at the top of the valley, where we were having mate, I was enjoying myself. Mate is the local brew, it's a kind of green tea that really peps you up nicely. You drink it out of a bowl through a metal straw and it's polite to pass the bowl back to the gaucho, who refills it and passes it to someone else.

We rode on through rivers and waterfalls, and arrived at lunch exhausted. Lambs were being expertly roasted around a glowing furnace. I was served a whole leg and had to have a lie-down afterwards with the dogs.

The afternoon hack was quite terrifying. It was within the realms of an adrenalin sport. No one having taken a tumble in the morning, we were all promoted to advanced horse-riding. The horses, living as they do in the mountains, are sure-footed and confident. We trotted up a 60-degree slope and flew along a precipice at a canter. Falling off would have meant certain death. My hand was white from gripping the saddle and everything ached; it still does.

Patagonia, which is supposed to mean "big feet", after the clod-hopping giants who are said to have lived here originally, is partly in Chile and partly in Argentina. We were to spend the next few days in El Chalten, which is Argentina's newest town.

With the head guide, Maurice, his right-hand man Max, and a driver we struck out for El Chalten, a day's drive away in another national park, Los Glaciares, in the province of Santa Cruz. The town was built by the Argentines specifically to further their claim for the territory, which was in dispute with Chile until the late 1980s.

A geopolitical new town might sound like the last place you'd want to go on holiday, but it was a marvellous location. You understand how popular the wilderness has become when you get to El Chalten. It's like a Wild West gold-rush town, still under construction. It sits in the shadow of a huge mountain range, which includes the Cerro Torre, the world's most challenging ascent. It was only officially conquered in 1976, although an Italian claimed to have reached the summit in 1959. The town has attracted people seeking alternative lifestyles, who have specifically chosen to live there, and are passionate about it.

Cecilia was our local guide and she clearly loved the place, and everything about it. She stopped and studied a puma turd for a good five minutes. It was quite interesting as these things go.

We were in a beech wood. The trees were cute. They don't grow very high. It was all a bit Star Trek-ish. You could almost be in Scotland, but actually, everything is just slightly different when you look at it. Birds, trees, flowers, the shapes of the clouds were all like nothing I've ever seen before. There are ducks, but different ducks, and the birds are singing other songs. Even the rock we were standing on was a bit strange, a moraine.

The weather had taken a turn for the worse. It was raining steadily, and the mountains were obscured in cloud. A walk in the rain is, they say around here, just as good as a walk in the sun. I have to agree that it all looks good in the wet. It doesn't matter what Gore-Tex space-age clobber you're wearing, though: if it rains you get wet through eventually, but walking does keep you warm, and pretty soon you're peeling off another layer.

Walking agrees with me. Unlike driving for four hours, or a four-hour flight, which induce head-splitting nausea, a four-hour walk in the rain, although it is a more daunting prospect, is actually guaranteed to make you feel good.

We had lunch in the mountaineers' base-camp, a tin-and-log hut that made the cosiest haven. A couple of mountaineers arrived and drank some mate. They were camping out waiting for the weather to clear before attempting the summit of Mount Fitzroy. That meant that they were either world-class climbers, or madmen. One of them was exceptionally cool and handsome - you'd be hard pushed to find anyone that glamorous in New York, and here he was in a log cabin, in the rain, in the middle of nowhere. They told us they'd been staying in a cave further up the mountain, but they'd had carbon monoxide poisoning from their gas stove. I wondered if they'd be OK. We gave them our spare food and wished them luck.

I noticed their names were still up on the board at the tourist centre when we left El Chalten, indicating that they were still on the mountain. They may well be there still; it can take weeks for the weather to settle.

After lunch we zig-zagged our way up the base of Fitzroy to Laguna de Los Tres, a frozen lake fed by a calving glacier. Max fired up the stove and brewed up some submarines, a fantastic local favourite of hot milk with melted chocolate bars. The rain had turned to light snow and the sun was shining on the green steppes in the distance as we sipped the nectar in a happy, silent stupor. "Look," said Cecilia, "All three seasons in a day. We don't have summer."

Summer is overrated. When we left Patagonia it was with a new sense of this wonderful world, beautiful people, and a thorough grounding in geology, geography, botany and zoology.

GETTING THERE

There are no direct flights between the UK and Chile. To reach Patagonia, you must first fly to Santiago, then to Punta Arenas. Santiago can be reached from the UK by connecting in Madrid (to Iberia), Paris (to the new Air France non-stop service) or a US city.

The writer travelled with Journey Latin America (020-8747 8s315; www.journeylatin america.co.uk). An 11-night trip to Chile and Argentina including the Explora travesia in Patagonia (eight nights), one night in Santiago and two nights in Buenos Aires, starts at £3,696 per person. This includes Iberia flights to Santiago, returning from Buenos Aires (both via Madrid), internal flights, land transport, guided excursions and hotel accommodation with most meals.

STAYING THERE

Explora Hotel Salto Chico, Patagonia (00 56 2 206 6060; www.explora.com). Doubles start at $4,120 (£2,288) for a four-night stay, including transfers, meals and expeditions.

VISITING THERE

Torres del Paine National Park, Patagonia ( www.torresdelpaine.com).

Los Glaciares National Park, Santa Cruz, Pagatonia (00 54 29 62 493 004; www.losglaciares.com).

FURTHER INFORMATION

Chilean Tourism (00 56 2 431 0530; www.visit-chile.org).

Latin American Travel Association (020-8715 2913; www.lata.org).