Paxman in Patagonia

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The Sunday Times {Travel}

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www.cazloyd.com

UK Sunday 1, March 2015 18,19 1691 sq. cm ABC 801623 Weekly page rate £60,690.00, scc rate £144.00 020 7782 5000

Paxman in Patagonia Jeremy Paxman feeds his fly-fishing obsession with an odyssey to the trout-rich waters of southern Chile. True to form, he lets very few off the hook

O

ne sunny May afternoon in Wiltshire, I met an old man on the river bank. I was catching nothing. He asked what fly I’d been using, and when I showed him, he snorted and offered me one from his own box, saying he’d been taking trout all day. He said, in a rather falsely modest voice, that one of them had been a wild fish of more than 4lb — big for a southern English chalk stream.

A few hours later, I bumped into him again. Now he was with a friend, the two of them chatting as they sauntered up the evening river bank, keen to get home before it was too dark. “Thanks for that fly,” I said. “I’ve been catching fish all afternoon, though I didn’t get anything as big as your four-pounder.”

His friend answered before he could l “H ld i HOW bi ? Th

reply. “He told you it was HOW big? That fish was half that size — 2lb if it was an ounce.” And off down the river bank they wandered, friends squabbling and laughing as they had for decades. That’s one of the things I adore about fishing.

It makes you a child again.

I do not propose to spend many words explaining to those who have no ears to listen why I find the infantilising power of fishing so seductive. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. Read no further.

Most of us learnt to fish as children, and so going fishing is a reversion to a state of uncomplicatedness, before plans, before careers, before bills. Maybe lots of other pursuits have similar powers.

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The rivers cascade out of snow-tipped mountains and the air is so clean, you can almost feel it descaling your lungs I know nothing of bungee-jumping or embroidery. But I do know a little bit about the ability of fly-fishing to dissolve the cares of the world.

The worst times of the year for a fisherman are the dank days of late January and early February. By March we are already tying up flies that represent the triumph of hope over experience, and while I have never caught a trout on a March brown in March — a fabled achievement — it is a month of dreams.

But what to do about those first few weeks of the year? The close season, the spawning season, when no one goes fishing, is a period of miserable abstinence. It is time to think of going elsewhere.

Fishermen have always travelled. In the early days of the 20th century, the rivers of Norway and Iceland were infested with dukes, earls, successful bankers and industrialists. By the end of the century, travel agents were organising visits for any Tom, Dick or Harry.

Destinations proliferated. With the collapse of communism, former Soviet helicopters were used to ferry men and women in waders across the tundra of the Kola Peninsula or into Outer Mongolia. The 1,000 or so inhabitants of Christmas Island, in the Pacific, who had already done nothing to deserve being chosen as a nuclear-bomb test site in the 1950s, now found themselves invaded by an army of men and women in bad hats, trying to fly-fish in the sea.

To try to catch trout — the noblest of freshwater fish — in winter, you must go south. The imperial British took their obsessions with them when they grabbed their colonies, and today you can find the descendants of Loch Leven trout just about everywhere from New Zealand to Kashmir.

Chile was never a formal part of the empire, but, for my money, it has the best trout fishing on earth, with rivers cascading out of snow-tipped mountains d i l h l f l

and air so clean that you can almost feel it descaling your lungs. Surely the Rio Cisnes — a clear, wild dream of a river — is the place to be reintroduced to your 12-year-old self.

Doubtless, there were fish in the rivers of Patagonia before settlers planted trout in them a hundred-odd years ago.

But if so, they were long ago eaten or driven out. And if getting away from it all is what you’re after, Patagonia is the place to be.

Is there something absurd about spending 17 hours flying to Santiago, Chile’s capital, hanging about in the airport, taking another flight to reach the little regional capital of Coyhaique and then embarking on a three-hour road trip north — to a remote lodge, with just three bedrooms, not so far from the Argentine border? Yes, of course there is.

But at the end of the journey, at least we knew we were properly away, in summer in the middle of northern winter.

Where to wade in: my favourite spots for fishing in Britain Most of my trout-fishing nowadays is on Wiltshire and Hampshire chalk streams. In the West Country, you can fish miles of wild rivers for £10 or so a day (westcountryangling.com) and similar “passports” to unexplored bits of the Usk, in the Welsh Borders, can be obtained from the Wye & Usk Foundation (wyeuskfoundation.org).

In Herefordshire, I have happy memories of the River Teme.

In the north of England, my favourite rivers are the Wharfe and the Ure, in Yorkshire, where I first learnt to fish. Both have angling clubs and day tickets. Every fly-fisherman dreams of fishing a big salmon river such as the Tweed or the Spey, in Scotland, and occasionally you can get a guest ticket on local association water without taking out a second mortgage: it’s always worth inquiring.

Elsewhere in Scotland, there are hundreds of rivers and lochs you can fish at minimal charge — you just need to ask. That’s the moral: just ask.

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For an internet connection, you had to travel nine miles of dirt road, and then sit on the ground outside the municipal offices to hop onto the wi-fi in a town that appeared to be under occupation by an army of sleeping dogs with a very unusual number of legs between them. It was preposterous.

And it was heaven.

Though it will test the credulity of sensible people further to say so, it is important that it is not too easy to catch a fish. The rivers of Patagonia teem with wild trout and even the name of our lodge, La Posada de los Farios, translates as “the inn of the brown trout”. But that does not mean the fish are necessarily stupid, and the principles of fishing remain the same, wherever you are.

Part of the explanation for the pastime’s powerful grip may simply be the companionship of pals — I was travelling with two of them. But I think there is something else, too.

Fish cannot survive in our world for long, nor we in theirs. Fishing is where the universes meet. Flicking a fly onto the surface of the water and watching with bated breath as a trout swims lazily up to inspect it, then turns away, dissatisfied, is to be reminded of the limits of our capabilities: fully grown human beings humbled by a creature with a brain the size of a pea. The activity’s obsessional quality is what makes it instantly and unerringly comic.

For three adult males accustomed to being listened to, to travel thousands of miles to be ignored by stupid trout is just funny.

Fishing is about guile and deception. And its promise is to take you to a place where humankind doesn’t belong.

It might be the depths of a lake.

Or it might, like Patagonia, be a crazy landscape of snowy mountaintops, plunging valleys thick with ancient trees, prickly calafate bushes and fuchsias, at the bottom of which are racing, glacier-melt rivers on whose banks lupins have seeded themselves everywhere.

The only human you are likely to see all day might be a solitary black-hatted h b ld h h

gaucho on a piebald horse, with some indefinable breed of dog trotting at his horse’s heels. We even saw the occasional condor wheeling in the sky.

Ferdinand Magellan gave Patagonia its name because he thought the place to be inhabited by indigenous tribes with enormous feet, the Patagones. But, actually, humanity has trod very lightly on the landscape. Ibises honked their mild irritation at being disturbed on the river bank, but bronze-breasted kingfishers sitting on riverside branches seemed to have almost no fear of humans at all.

Mind you, the flies that we were asked to use by the two fishing guides seemed to have little relation to any insect we had ever seen — great rubber-legged supposed imitations of grasshoppers, with names like Fat Albert and what I took to be Purple Penis (I had misheard: it was Purple Peanut).

Sometimes we fished in the conventional English dry-fly manner, to rising fish. More often, we threw these fly patterns — the size of small birds — into what looked likely spots.

And soon we were back in the world of the child. Who had caught the most?

Who had caught the biggest fish? The bickering continued all day. Did I catch 18 or 20 trout that first day? Who cares?

But care you must, or else what does any of it matter? After a while we all lost count, but over the course of nine days, we certainly caught four or five hundred trout.

My biggest shock in Patagonia came when we stopped on a dirt road to pick up a bent old gaucho, standing with his thumb out. He looked to have walked out of a sepia photo, in pinstriped breeches and broad-brimmed straw hat. He had a strong farmyard smell, and attempted to put on his seat belt by attaching it to his trousers, as if it were a pair of back-to-front braces.

When I asked him “Cuantos años tienes?”, I discovered that he was the same age as me. It didn’t seem possible.

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THE BRIEF Jeremy Paxman was a guest of Cazenove+Loyd, which can organise a nine-night fishing trip to Chilean Patagonia from £4,460pp, including all international and domestic travel, two nights, full-board, at the Singular Santiago and seven nights at La Posada de los Farios (chilepatagonia. com) — where all food and drink, as well as a fishing guide, are included (020 7384 2332, cazloyd.com).

A condor swoops; above, a giant fly, ready for use

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In the swim A Patagonian brown tro Above La Posada de los Farios

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Leon Werdiner; David Kleyn/Alamy; Marco Simoni; Remco Douma/Getty; Rex Bryngelson

Wild frontierr A gaucho g on the p plains. Below, Jeremy shows off yyet another catch

La Posada de los Farios

Santiago Buenos Aires ARGENTINA

Coyhaique CHILE

Falkland Islands

200 miles

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C t f th d Patagonia’s rivers teem wit trout

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