It had taken over three decades of existence, but by early 2019 I’d gotten myself to a stage where I’d stepped foot on every inhabited continent bar one: South America. Aka the one that was most logistically difficult and financially taxing in relation to my home location of Shanghai. But I was scheduled to begin my postgrad later that year, and there was no way that I could have dedicated myself to studying if I was still riddled with itchy feet. So I dropped a whole lot of $, took four separate planes (inc. suffering one of my worst flights ever courtesy of the diabolical American Airlines who gave me a $300 voucher for the shitshow (which I promptly left unused because fuck ’em)), and somehow rocked up in Chilean Patagonia on a cool April morning. I was bedraggled, browbeaten, but ready to embark upon a six-week journey across the entire continent that was outright ludicrous in its designs: Chile to Argentina to Bolivia to Peru to (briefly) Colombia to Brazil, most of it done overland. It was an odyssey which tested the limits of my endurance and capabilities as a traveller, and it’ll likely remain the most ambitious trip that I’ll ever attempt given the time constraints and the distances involved.
the first 24hrs: Strait of Magellan (complete with Antarctic ocean liner) – Punta Arenas – Puerto Natales
I wish there was more to write about Chile. I had intended to spend a bit of time in Santiago before arriving in Patagonia, and had envisaged crossing back into the Atacama Desert later in my adventures, but a series of unexpected mishaps laid rest to both those plans. After stopping over at Punta Arenas – the southernmost city on mainland South America – and getting some long-awaited glimpses of the legendary Strait of Magellan, I rolled into Torres del Paine National Park where I was to complete one of my travel holy grails: the W Trek. Possibly one of the most famous hiking trails in the world, and justifiably so as it’s home to scenery so magical and so jawdropping that the sheer splendour of the place ends up knocking you off your feet far more frequently than the notoriously temperamental wind speeds.
the weather here can change on a dime, the winds turning into gales that sweep you off your feet – notice the visible effects on the lakes (I remember water being sprayed into my face from the third image), as well as the uprooted trees in image two
awful photo of an awesome trio! we met again in Cambodia later in the year, but have lost contact since. I hope that changes one day!
Hindsight suggests that 2019 may well have been the peak version of myself. In the years since, I’ve been both an active and passive participant in the dismantling of all the dreams and drive and direction that defined me back then. There have been many, many low points, and the sheer velocity of that u-turn – firing on all cylinders pre-Covid, a disembowelled shell of myself in the aftermath – is something that I’m still processing to this day. But amidst all that chaos and carnage, there’s one memory that my mind consistently wanders back to, one memory whose beauty reverberates above all else: the solitude of Patagonia. I hiked the W with an awesome Swiss couple, and had great fun in all the delightfully-bougie refugios along the way, but I’m an infamously fast walker, and the weather gods were mostly kind during our trek, which meant that I spent a fair chunk of the time by myself – overwhelmed by my surroundings, enveloped by the majesty of nature in a corner of the planet so distant from all that I was familiar with that it may as well have been Mars. It was bliss. And liberation. A memory that I cherish.
scenes that constitute the very fabric of my daydreams
So, yeah – I may not have too much to write about Chile (I was there for less than a week, most of that on the W), but I was blessed enough to capture some images that do sufficient justice to what my eyes beheld. It’s a gallery that features some of my all-time faves. Enjoy!
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