Patagonia Wild

Punta Arenas sits on the Strait of Magellan, the last real city before Antarctica, and it has the weather to prove it. The wind greets you on the tarmac like an enthusiastic dog. A transfer takes you north through the steppe — flat, brown, infinite — to the edge of Torres del Paine National Park, where the mountains appear on the horizon like a row of broken teeth. Check into your lodge, a glass-and-timber structure that frames the Paine massif like a painting that happens to be real.

The trek to the base of the towers is Patagonia's signature day hike — ten hours of forest, moraine, and wind, culminating in a glacial lake at the foot of three granite pillars that rise a vertical kilometre above you. The final scramble over a boulder field is the price of admission, and when the towers emerge from the cloud (if they emerge — Patagonia makes no promises), the scale is almost impossible to process. You are a dot at the base of a wall that took twelve million years to build.

A day trip east to El Calafate and the Perito Moreno Glacier — one of the only glaciers on earth that is still advancing. From the viewing platforms, the scale is disorienting: five kilometres wide, sixty metres high, and impossibly blue. Every few minutes, a crack like a rifle shot echoes across the lake and a chunk of ice the size of a building slides into the water in slow motion. An afternoon mini-trek on the glacier itself, crampons biting into ancient ice, with whisky poured over glacial chips at the end.

A day at a working estancia on the Patagonian steppe, where gauchos still herd sheep on horseback and the asado has been burning since dawn. You ride through grasslands that stretch to the horizon in every direction, the wind a constant companion, the silence beneath it enormous. Lunch is slow-cooked lamb, split and splayed over an iron cross above an open fire, eaten with red wine and bread baked in the wood oven. The gaucho pours mate and tells you about winters when the snow reaches the eaves. You believe every word.