PATAGONIA, CHILE

 

Torres del Paine

“I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.”
― Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

-John Muir

“He who does not know the Chilean forests, does not know the planet.”

– Pablo Neruda

Lago Nordenskjold

Lago Nordenskjold

Lago Pehoe

“The wind chased me everywhere I went in Patagonia. It clogged my sinuses and sent the Jeep slithering across the gravel roads as though on ice. Birds flew backward. Trees grew horizontally. The wind was a living thing. It could be violent, punching holes in glass windows or sending spirals of dust rising above the flat, dry steppe like miniature tornadoes.”

– From “Land of the Living Wind” , by Simon Worral

Balmaceda Glacier

We reached the great face of Balmaceda’s hanging glacier, and docked at Bernardo O’Higgins National Park – at 13,614 square miles, some 18 times larger than neighbouring Torres del Paine National Park.

Serrano Glacier

Magellanic Penguins

“Felix believed that the answer to every problem involved penguins; but it wasn’t fair to birds, and I was getting tired of teleporting them back home. Somewhere in Antarctica, a whole flock of Magellanic penguins were undergoing psychotherapy.”
― Rick Riordan, The Throne of Fire

 

Cordillera Paine

Glacier del Frances

“Nature is man’s teacher. She unfolds her treasures to his search, unseals his eye, illumes his mind, and purifies his heart; an influence breathes from all the sights and sounds of her existence.”

-Alfred Bernhard Nobel