Patagonia

Susan Ellicott in Patagonia

Never at any stage of my trip am I lonely. Instead, I feel wonderfully, powerfully alone. What inhibits the fulfilment of a dream, I tell myself, is not circumstance but state of mind. I’ve moved my body and soul for less than the cost of another woman’s trip to a luxury spa.

Nowhere do I feel more alive than on a part of the trip for which I haven’t planned at all: several days in Tierra del Fuego, the hemisphere’s rugged tip. In the gap between one cargo ship being cancelled and the other arriving, I luck out by arriving at Punta Arenas airport in Chile an hour before the one daily flight to Puerto Williams, the southernmost year-round inhabited town in the world.

It is winter here in the Beagle Channel, where Charles Darwin marvelled at icebergs 176 years ago. Restaurants are closed until spring. The only nightlife to speak of is a bar for yachties on a rehabbed sunken frigate.

In this remotest of spots, I rent a mountain bike for $5 and cycle the 40-mile round-trip on a dirt track to a Yagan cemetery. On the far side of the channel is Argentina. It is a day of all weathers and terrain. I see what I think are Magellanic penguins huddled on a rock in the swell. I see birds of prey, seabirds, beaver dams, moss, reeds, kelp.

Suddenly, it hits me. This, the all-time perfect day of my life, is my dividing line. All that has gone before – divorce, grief, devotion to my children at the expense of some of my dreams – all of that is my past. Today is the start of my future. For the last hour of this magical day, I cycle under a full moon. When I finally get off the saddle, I can barely walk.

So, how was it? Everyone asks me the same question on my return to London. The best few weeks of my life, I reply. So far.

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