On the trail of Bruce Chatwin in Patagonia
21.07.2023 - 08:23
/ roughguides.com
/ Stephen Keeling
Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia has served as a bible for those travelling through South America since its publication 40 years ago. Four decades on, Stephen Keeling follows in the footsteps of the legendary travel writer to see how much Chatwin's Patagonia has changed.
A Polish woman grins as the car ferry to Tierra del Fuego crashes over the Magellan Strait. The bus groans and moves very slightly forward, grazing the truck in front of us. I grip my chair.
She waves a book at me. “Have you read our excellent Podróże Marzeń guide to Chile?” She smiles again as the bus rolls back. The bus driver is outside and stubs out his cigarette. He shakes his head at the sailors trying to secure our vehicle. I tell her that I can’t read Polish.
“You are writer, no?” She points at my note pad. Yes, I say. Rough Guides? She stares at me. “Like Podróże Marzeń?” Yes, I suppose so. “You want a copy? I have a photocopy on my Samsung”. No thank you, I say. “Is the bus supposed to be moving?” She shrugs, then points to Bruce Chatwin’sIn Patagonia. “This is your book?” No, I say. This is by an author who is now dead.
“You know Bruce Chatwin?” She shakes her head. “He likes Patagonia?” Sort of. “Ah, yes, it is so very beautiful”. She looks sad. “But tomorrow our group goes to Easter Island, for the big heads.”
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Forty years ago, the publication of In Patagonia made Bruce Chatwin famous overnight – in the English-speaking world at least. In 1975 there were few tourists in southern Chile and Argentina. Chatwin finds Patagonia a place of “vicious” sunsets in “red and purple”. It has towns of “shabby concrete buildings, tin bungalows, tin warehouses and wind-flattened gardens”, a place littered with the insane, criminals and British eccentrics, leftovers from the sheep-farming boom of the early 1900s.
In Patagonia was a magical book – «a wonder voyage» – about a remote and mystical land. I knew the place must have changed – I just had no idea how much.
Ushuaia © saiko3p/Shutterstock
Chatwin finds Ushuaia, the world’s most southernmost city, especially dispiriting, full of “blue-faced inhabitants [who] glared at strangers unkindly”. Today this town is perhaps the most transformed of any he visited, a booming tourist depot serving European and American cruises and adventure travellers by the Airbus load – the main drag heaves with shops, Irish pubs, cool cafés and North Face outlets. English is spoken everywhere.
The old prison was a barracks when Chatwin arrived, «blank grey walls, pierced by the narrowest slits», with a brothel next door. He came looking for evidence of the failed anarchist Simón Radowitzky, imprisoned here in 1911. There are no more brothels (at least, none as obvious), and the navy now shares the old prison