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Paula Gutiérrez and Alejandra Bunster, the villas are made of lenga, a kind of beechwood. Guests get their own guide and a 4x4 vehicle for exploration. I also visited Explora Hotel Salto Chico, the oldest luxe lodge, which opened in 1993 and was remodeled in 2011. Explora is the only luxury lodging inside the park and is known for its comfort and its great guides. You get a wonderful sense of the park from everywhere in the building, with terrific views of the Paine Massif. I stayed at Tierra Patagonia, a new-ish hotel on the shores of Sarmiento Lake. Designed by Chilean architect Cazú Zegers, it has a dramatic glass and lengawood exterior, so that it seems to merge with the grassy landscape. Indeed, it looks as if aliens might have built this low-rise structure, which honors the surrounding radical landscape by doing little to disturb it. Once again, it’s all about the views, and the dining room has picture postcard vistas of the Paine Massif. It’s where I savored Chile’s remarkable beef, the seafood bounty from a coastline not that distant (king crab, abalone) and a compelling range of Chilean wines. I especially liked the outdoor hot tub after dinner, the best place to look for the Southern Cross and drink in the Milky Way thousands of miles from any city and its accompanying light pollution. I went hiking under a sky dotted with condors soaring above me. There were icebergs in the waters, carved from glaciers left over from the last Ice Age. I went to the foot of the Torres del Paine, which is something of a holy grail for climbers. One day I saddled up and went biking on the Cañadón Macho, a trail that’s mostly downhill until it’s not. That was a great opportunity to see some guanacos and get a workout at high altitude. But the highlight was kayaking on Lake Grey, listening to the creaking sounds from a glacier, with small icebergs jutting out of the lake. Honestly, though, there is so much more to go back and see. In early 2018 Chile established five new parks, courtesy of an endowment from the late Doug Tompkins, a philanthropist and founder of The North Face, the clothing and outdoor equipment company, and his partner Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, the former CEO of the apparel brand Patagonia. It remains the largest donation of private land to a government in South America. Now a total of 17 national parks have been linked by Chile into the Route of Parks, an almost unimaginable hiking trail though glacier country, mountains, volcanoes, steppes and forests. It’s a 10 million-acre Patagonia National Park system, which is more than three times the size of Yosemite and Yellowstone parks combined. That’s a lot of wilderness to see, mindboggling, in fact. But then, so is Patagonia itself, the end of the world, where touches of luxury can take the rough edges off and there is always much more to explore. Neophytes may suspect that the name Patagonia stands for someplace magical. We who have been there know that for sure.
3/6/19 1:45 PM