I’
ve never been a lover of hiking in the rain. But standing in Chile’s Queulat National Park, soaked to the skin and ankle-deep in mud, I fi nd myself mesmerised by it. Mist drifts between giant beech and cinnamon trees, water droplets cling to moss-covered
bark like scattered diamonds, and on the forest fl oor, caterpillars shelter beneath nalca (Chilean rhubarb) plants with leaves the size of elephants’ ears. This is Patagonia, but not as I’d expected it.
The vast landscape spanning southern Chile and Argentina is better known for its dry steppe and stark granite peaks. Yet in Chile’s Aysén region, where rain falls most of the year, the Valdivian temperate rainforest blankets most of the area, earning it the nickname Patagonia Verde. “I fi nd it strange when it’s sunny,” my driver
Juan had said earlier that morning on the drive into the park. As we bumped along a gravel road, waterfalls spilled down the forested hillsides and across our path. “The rain is normal for us. Without it, Patagonia wouldn’t be like this.” He glanced towards the snow-capped peaks and added: “Para nosotros, estos paisajes son vida (‘for us, these landscapes are life’).” Northern Patagonia is undeniably beautiful,
but it’s not easy to get here. Cut off from the rest of Chile by a maze of waterways, steep mountains and the vast Northern Patagonian Ice Field, Aysén remained isolated for centuries. Even today, despite the arrival of the Carretera Austral, the region’s main highway, it still takes around fi ve hours to reach Queulat National Park from the nearest airport in Balmaceda. “There’s no easy way in,” says guide Federico
Hernandez, who I meet later on a boat trip to the San Rafael Glacier, one of dozens of glaciers fed by the Northern Patagonian Ice Field. “That’s why this part of Patagonia still feels so wild. Sometimes I look out from the boat deck and there’s just nothing and no one for hours. It’s beautiful.” At the trailhead, the forest seems ready to swallow
me whole. Plants reach for my boots, and moss and lichen droop from the trees in thick green curtains. Water has already begun to seep through my coat. Before I disappear beneath the canopy, Juan off ers a fi nal piece of advice: “Listen to the forest,” he says. “The rain, the birds. That’s how you connect with nature here.” Then, with a grin, he nods towards the trees. “And keep an eye out for the pumas.” I enter the forest, where the air is cooler and
the smell of damp earth more intense. Even the rain sounds diff erent here: it no longer pounds on gravel, but seeps and trickles softly through the canopy and ferns. A chucao tapaculo — a robin-like bird native to these forests — hops through the undergrowth near my feet, pausing to watch as
I squelch through the mud, before letting out a loud, cackling call. As the trail steepens, I take Juan’s advice to use
my ears as well as my eyes: rain patters on leaves overhead, a red-headed woodpecker taps somewhere high in the canopy and water rushes beyond the trees. Eventually, I emerge onto a wooden suspension bridge swaying above a thrashing glacial river. It wobbles beneath my feet, the wind whipping at my face and shaking the trees around me. Below, whitewater crashes over giant boulders, its roar echoing in my ears. “‘Queulat’ means ‘sound of waterfalls’ in the
language of the Indigenous Chono people,” Juan had told me. The Chono, one of several Indigenous groups in Chilean Patagonia, were seafaring hunter- gatherers who navigated Aysén’s f ords and rivers by canoe for more than 1,000 years before colonists settled here in the early 1900s. Today, the Chono are widely considered culturally extinct, their legacy preserved in place names such as Queulat and shell middens scattered along the water’s edge. At last, there’s a gap in the canopy as I reach the
trail’s viewpoint. I thought the weather would deny me the park’s most famous sight, but the clouds have lifted just enough to see it: the Ventisquero Colgante, or Hanging Glacier. A ribbon of ice-blue clings improbably between two slate-grey peaks
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER – LATIN AMERICA COLLECTION 11
IMAGES: GETTY; AWL IMAGES
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124
