If you listen hard, you can hear the Pacific rolling gently on to the black
beach. Look out of the window, and all you see are forested mountains
plunging down into the sea. In the distance, a glacier glows turquoise and
blue.
Early morning in remote Patagonia can be quite unlike anywhere else on earth.
On a clear day, like today, it seems like some temperate paradise.
Patagonia is one of those places that have acquired their own place in the
public imagination, a mysterious province at the end of the earth, with
mountains and rivers and the occasional colony of German or Welsh settlers.
Few travellers go there for the very good reason that it is a very long way
away and there is not much to do when you arrive.
They call this place Bahia Mala (“Bad Bay”) and we had reached it by plane,
Jeep, and, for the last hour and a half, boat. On the last stage of the
journey, we had been pursued by leaping dolphins, barked at by indignant
sea-lions on a foul-smelling rocky island, and peered at by albatrosses.
It is true that there is an awful lot of not very much in Patagonia. Although
the military junta attempted to encourage settlers to move into Chilean
Patagonia (there is even a little one-horse town that rejoices in the name
of La Junta and bears a big plaque commemorating the vision of General
Pinochet for sending its residents to live here), it remains one of the last
great untamed wildernesses. The human imprint here is negligible,
non-existent in most places. The weather changes from sun to rain to high
wind and back again quicker than you can say Futaleufú, the spectacular,
foaming torrent of a river that plunges down from the Argentine border.
It was rivers that had brought us here. Among fly-fishers, Patagonia is a sort
of El Dorado. On rivers such as the Cisnes, Simpson, Baker — and plenty that
are less well-known — you can find brightly stippled and highly aggressive
trout, which swallow grasshoppers the size of small birds. I have fished
several of these rivers, and their reputation is fully justified.
This time we had been drawn by tales of trout that bred in the rivers and came
in and out of the sea on the tide. They were said to grow fat and sleek and
so strong that they slashed at the fly with vicious urgency.
On our way down to Bahia Mala we had fished the Rio Limay, which flows through
grey Argentine scrubland beneath crazily wind-carved mountain tops.
Attempting to throw a line into 40mph winds had not been a picnic, but the
scenery more than compensated.
Just about the only other tourists we saw were wind-burnt backpackers heading
down to the nearest town, Bariloche, on their way to the Patagonia (non)
Express, which trundles 700km (430 miles) down to the Atlantic.
But we headed in the opposite direction, ten or more hours, mostly on dirt
roads, towards the Pacific. We dropped down into Chile along the banks of
the Futaleufú, whose tumbling, roiling torrent provides some of the most
testing rafting conditions in the world.
The mountains here are so densely forested that felling trees to allow cattle
to graze is almost prohibitive. Occasionally you see cowboys riding from one
small clearing to another, a dog or two trotting at their horse’s heels. In
Argentina, they tend to wear big leather boots and broad-brimmed hats. In
Chile, they prefer black berets and woollen ponchos. One time we saw an
entire family, mother, father and a child who could not have been more than
three, all in heavy ponchos, turning their horses into the wind to trot off
down a defile. The three hawks sitting on top of consecutive fence-posts
looked at them quizzically and then ignored them.
At a place called El Yunque (the anvil) we stopped and threw our lines into an
enormously deep lake, hidden among myrtle trees and red fuchsia bushes that
came right down to the water’s edge. The whitened skeletons of long-fallen
trees winked up through the clear water and high above the mountain tops a
condor sailed on motionless wings.
On we drove until there was no more road, and then took a small boat along the
coast to our final destination. It was now that we disturbed the sea-lions
and listened to them bark at us indignantly.
The next day a single strip of white cloud hung low in the valley, but
otherwise the skies were clear and the wind had slackened. We set off for
the river in a trailer drawn by an ancient tractor that belched blue smoke
and was driven by a man who also skippered the boat, mended the boat, lit
the fires, tended the water-driven generator and whose big, cackling laugh
disclosed a mouth more gaps than teeth. We crossed the beach and trampled
through the tendrils of wild strawberries running across the black sand.
Fishing is always a matter of luck, and when you set out prospecting a river
it takes a while to understand it. The water was coloured and seemed only
fishable in the pools just up from the sea. It took a while, but then we
found them: when the tide began to flood, the fish came too. If you could
find the place that our guide called “el chorro”, where the
fresh water met the salt, your fly could be hit with a savage aggression
that would see line tearing off the reel as if it were attached to a
locomotive.
When we finally pulled them in they were the sleekest, shiniest trout I had
ever seen, perfectly proportioned between head and body, their flanks a
squamous chromium. It was a hell of a long way to have gone to find them. It
had pelted with rain that was almost horizontal. It had blown so hard that
sometimes it was hard to stand up. But I would endure any amount of rain and
wind for the prospect of those two gloriously clear days and those
magnificent fish.
