Catching up - Patagonia

Sometimes I blog myself into a corner. I did that a couple of weeks ago, blogging from Argentina, when I promised to write more about Patagonia the following day. Due to bad Internet connections, among other things, I never got to that second post, and as a result, I haven't been blogging at all.

So let me finish Patagonia. Did I mention that it rained a lot? We were on a deserted stretch of coastline, an hour's drive on dirt roads from the highway, 90 kilometers from the nearest town. In fact, we were pretty much rained in. By the day after our arrival, Land Rovers were finding the muddy road nearly impassable, and we never did get to visit a petrified forest an hour's drive away. Instead we made drives to places a little farther south along the coast to hike along different rocky formations. The whole are is volcanic, and the rock piles itself in formations of different shapes and colors. Some parts look like sloppy brickwork, while others look like little abandoned gnome villages with small, empty caves. Long peninsulas and marshy inlets complicate the coastline.

The weather was bad, considering that this was the equivalent of our August. Temperatures hovered in the fifties, and the wind blew when the rain wasn't falling. Still, on one sunny day we went boating, and we saw sea lions, penguins, cormorants, three species of tern, and the giant Arctic petrel, along with herons and cranes. Another day we crossed at low tide along solid ground to an island where Magellanic penguins nest. Under every bush, penguin parents had hollowed out a depression where a gawky teenager now lives. These are slacker penguins who travel up the coast in cold weather and never brave the Antarctic seas. Groups of males came strutting single file up the rocks, calling for their mates.

Another day Sabrina and I went riding with the grandson of the seaweed villages founder, Matthias. ("He's the one that looks like a lion," one of the staff told me, and he does, with a lovely uncombed leonine locks and beard.) The Criollo horses, nurtured and bred over a couple of centuries from the original Spanish stock, were sturdy and incredibly docile. Their most common color is somewhere between gray and tan, in the region called dun. The horses labored through mud well above their ankles as we crossed what should be arid land, and when we finally broke free, we rode above the marsh and galloped along the beach. We stopped at one mound of shells left by long-ago indigenous foragers, and Matthias found a spherical stone about the size of a tennis ball, with a groove worn in it. This was a bolo ball, meant for throwing on a cord to tangle the legs of game, like guanacos and rheas.

And yes, we saw guanaco, which are the wild cousins of llamas; we even ate guanaco stew one night. And we saw rheas, the flightless birds of South America, about one-third or one-half the size of ostriches. I also saw my first armadillos, as well as the carcasses of numerous pilot whales who threw themselves on the beach three years ago. I saw lots of sheep, a skunk, European hares, and on the last day the rare and misnamed Patagonian hare, or mara.

The mara is a big animal, 18 to 30 pounds, with relatively short, yet rabbit-like ears, and it moves with a long-legged hop, like a hare, but actually it's a large rodent. We saw a pair of them fifty yards from the road as we drove back from our last hike along the rocks. That was our good-bye to Patagonia, except for the guanacos we saw just before the highway on our return drive to the airport at Comodoro Rivadavia.

A visit to Patagonia

I just spent five days in Patagonia, which is close to the end of the earth, the farthest south I've ever been. Chile and Argentina share Patagonia, and we were on the Atlantic, Argentinian side, in the little "seaweed village" of Bahia Bustamante, named after a Spanish captain who mapped the South American coast, fruitlessly sought the Northwest Passage, and ended up as governor of Montevideo in Uruguay.

The bay is a part of the Golfo San Jorge, and it used to be known as "Rotten Bay" because of the piles of stinking, rotten seaweed coating the beach. Don Lorenzo Soriano came to the Patagonian coast in the 1950's, seeking a source for the seaweed products he needed to produce his patented hair gel. He bought a ranch on the coast and gradually enlarged it. From 1962 to 1992 was the heyday of the seaweed village, with 500 inhabitants working to harvest, clean, sort, and process the seaweed into products like agar-agar for use in soaps, food, lotions, and any product that needed stabilizing and emulsifying.

An oil spill in 1992 killed off much of the most valuable seaweed, and in its place grew a decorative but commercially undesirable Japanese invader brought on the hulls of tankers. The seaweed business continues, but with only 50 workers, and with imported as well as local weed. Meanwhile, the ranch, now 200,000 acres of scrub, grassland, and desert, raises sheep that run free until the gauchos round them up for breeding, shearing, or sale.

The ranch is now within a national park, and the owners are trying to manage it in a way that preserves the grassland by rotating the sheep to new pastures. In the last six years they have also brought in a small number of tourists during a five-month summer season. Usually it's hot and dry from January through April, but unfortunately for us, Bahian Bustamante is just coming off the wettest two weeks in years, so some of our activities were rained out. More on that tomorrow.

Night walk in the mangrove forest

Going for a night walk in the mangrove forest at Drake Bay, we saw a different world. Gustavo, the guide, provided rubber boots and flashlights, and he instructed us to shine our lights around looking for the reflections of eyes. Almost immediately we found the first of many bullfrogs. As big as two fists held together, the bullfrog sat absolutely still, convinced we couldn't see it, though Gustav warned us that if we tried to grab it, it would cry loudly with the sound of a baby crocodile, perhaps in one last hope of scaring off a predator that might fear the mother crocodile was on her way.

Next we saw a tree ear fungus that appeared to be steaming in the darkness. Instead, Gustav told us, it was releasing spores.

So many animals appear to use freezing absolutely still as a defense at night that we were able to get very close to many, including the Jesus Christ lizard, or basilisk, which runs upright across water. We also came very close to a pretty yellow and white bird, a flycatcher. We saw a caiman across the water, and we picked up baby shrimp and even flounder hiding in the sand beneath the brackish swamp water.

We saw spiders - wolf spiders, jumping spiders, and very poisonous Bolivian wandering spiders, which cause necrosis where they bite. Then Gustav went in pursuit of the red-eyed tree frog, which more than anything seems to symbolize Costa Rica. He called to one high in the trees, and after sloshing through the mud he found one too high for us to see well. Using a long stick, he coaxed it off its branch and brought it down for us to see. It's a gracile frog with a white belly and bright green back, and its eyes are truly red.

Around that time I slipped and fell flat in the mud, which was only a little humiliating. We sloshed on. Our last new creature of the night was a marine toad, known as a cane toad in Cuba. It exudes poison from glands in back of its head, so predators don't do that well on it, and although it's a national hero in Cuba for eating the cane beetle, in Australia it has become an invasive nuisance.

We wrapped up our night walk looking through Gustav's telescope at Jupiter and five of its moons.We had probably walked only about a quarter of a mile in all, but all at once the jungle around us had come alive with a whole new layer of secretive fauna.