There are some places that no matter how long you stay, it’s never long enough. And so I daydream about Patagonia’s Andean lakes region, which straddles both sides of the Chilean and Argentinean border and is blessed with 5,000-foot peaks, dozens of lakes, snow-capped volcanoes and rushing streams and waterfalls. While the lakes region is hardly undiscovered, it remains widely unknown. To my mind, Patagonia is a South American paradise.
Tourism came to the area 100 years ago, promoted by a Swiss man who touted it for its combination overland/boat trip between Chile and Argentina.
Today, you can take a series of bus and boat rides from Puerto Varas in Chile to Bariloche in Argentina, on a circuit known as the Cruce de Lagos (Lakes Crossing). Most people do the trip in two days, with an overnight stay at Puella, which offers horseback riding, fly fishing, kayaking, ziplines and trekking. Although it’s a year-round destination, peak season is during Chile’s summer (December-February), when there’s daylight from 5:30am to 10:30pm. But probably the prettiest months are in autumn (April and May).
It’s a magical landscape, which ranges from dense forests rising from sparkling lakes to emerald-green verdant pastures dotted with grazing cattle and sheep and alpine-style farmhouses. A temperate rainforest, the region receives lots of rain, with about 160 rainy days and 125 inches of rainfall a year. That translates into a lush countryside that’s tropical with ferns and bamboo but also alpine, almost like it’s a Swiss-Olympic Peninsula-Hawaiian hybrid.
But it’s the sky’s remarkable clarity I remember most. On days when the sky is clear, it’s so blue it seems digitally enhanced. And on cloudless nights, the stars are so many and so distinct they take your breath away. Patagonia is indeed a South American paradise.
