Patagonia - Argentina

It is time to call Patagonia's bluff. Ever since Magellan reported a race of giants striding the shores of Argentina—perhaps pata gones, or "big feet," is the origin of the name—the hyperbolic rhetoric has poured forth. For centuries, the vast spaces of this unknown region were filled with demon winds, terrible loneliness, ferocious natives, killer thirst, desperate shipwrecks and air crashes, tales of cannibalism and evil spirits. Jorge Luis Borges sent his characters south to die. Bruce Chatwin pursued phantom dinosaurs and lost colonies. The urbane Argentine writer Ezequiel Martínez Estrada turned his back on Patagonia, insisting that "entire towns live in a somnambulant state of free love and of drunkenness. Such are the ravages of solitude."
Like New Zealand, Tasmania, and South Africa, Patagonia is a shard of the earth's most southern and ancient geology, a flinty arrow reaching deep into the Antarctic currents, an outpost in the globe's harshest sphere of ocean and ice. But this is no land of demons, nor of murder, somnambulism, or even shipwrecks. It is simply far removed and barely populated, making it a repository for humanity's collective imagination, for various and assorted extremes. I declare an end to such nightmares. The wind does not always blow at sixty miles an hour. I have even seen completely windless days in Patagonia—once or twice. There be no dragons here.

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