The Last Blue Mountain by James Chilton

Author:James Chilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909477520
Publisher: Clink Street Publishing

The route plan of Aero Argentinas’ in-flight magazine still laid Argentinian claim not only to ‘Islas Malvinas’ but also South Georgia and The South Sandwich Islands. The TV national weather forecast included them too. Flying south across the billiard table plateau of Buenos Aires province, square boundaries drawn by eucalyptus or poplar, indicated cattle estancias with ruler straight dirt roads connecting them. Three hours later the view over La Pampas province was unchanged. Later, in the Andean foothills, lakes coloured in shades of pea soup, gooseberry fool and raspberry sorbet appeared each with a piping of sugar indicating a mix of minerals and salt deposits. And then, strung along the horizon like meringue beaten to peaks were the Andes themselves. Above, a sky of the palest and coldest blue; below, the gravel brown of the Patagonian pampa and then the lakes changed to aquamarine and turquoise and the land wrinkled, riven by erosion. From the air it looked magical and, best of all, I was going there.

El Calafate, with its high street of tree trunk façades, had a schmaltz of alpine charm fronting the concrete of the back streets. The few shops selling high altitude climbing equipment were outnumbered by ‘genuine Patagonian crafts’. The beat-up pickups of out of town sheep farmers with big, tough dogs barking in the back will not rattle through for much longer. The middle aged, moneyed tourists (Spaniards and Italians this week), in cruise ship quantities, will soon add restaurants, jewellers and fur shops and backpackers will convert the side streets to bars, cheap sightseeing agencies and more ‘genuine Patagonian crafts’. My Footprint guidebook recommended Sendarian as the best meaty establishment in town. Here, it was said could be found beef fed on alfalfa, grazed under the stars of the southern hemisphere and massaged by handmaidens (whoever they are). I had trained for dinner with a snacky lunch and read several menus to ensure that the juices were flowing and expectant but never before had quantity so overwhelmingly outclassed quality; brick size was not my size and the mixed grill would have fed Ethiopia. I left inflated and humbled.

The Perito Merino glacier is one of 47 in the Parque Nacional los Glaciares but at 200 ft (60m) high and 3 miles (5kms) wide, it is the biggest. Twenty eight tourist buses rather spoilt the personal visit I had planned but as it turned out, their passengers were like snowflakes in a blizzard, such was the scale of this great wall of ice that moved forward at six feet per day – a glacial sprinter. Following a boat trip that emphasised the stupendous height of the ice wall at water level, I watched from the myrtle-covered shoreline only a couple of hundred feet away and gazed into the deep blue of its visceral soul. Those watching were strangely silent – even the Italians; there was respect and reverence for this gargantuan lump of ice and the final moments of its 100 year journey. Along its wearisome way it had been beset by terrible events that had riven and crevassed its surface.

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