Gaucho Derby 2020: Day Three

And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the race stopped.  Riders and crew had been caught in a snowstorm in between vet stations two and three and the official Twitter account reports that the riders are sitting it out and the Adventurists' crew will guide them down off the mountain once the storm has passed.

All of the riders, that is, except Corie Downey and Marie Griffiths who have retained their lead and are sitting comfortably in vet station 3. They will have ditched their pack horses and once the race starts again, they will be able to set off on Arabs. It is hard not to see that the weather has handed these front runners a massive advantage; everyone else will be cold, wet and miserable while they put their feet up and drink maté. Or Malbec, as the official accounts make plentiful mention of.

While inconvenient for the riders and disconcerting for friends and family back home, this is an entirely appropriate situation to my mind and altogether in keeping with everything I know about Patagonia. Oh, she's an expert, you must be thinking. No, I'm afraid not - I haven't ever been anywhere near South America unless you count California, once. Everything I know about Patagonia is contained in the fantastic (but also fantastical) book "In Patagonia" written by English public schoolboy Bruce Chatwin.  And yet...  Here we are, with a truckload of foreigners stuck up a mountain in teeny-tiny coffin shaped bivvy bags, waiting for the snow to stop so they can load up their pack animals and continue down the mountain on horseback.  It sounds every bit as ridiculous as the valley full of Welsh-speaking Welsh people in Patagonia (also a Real Thing)(I've been on a bus trip to the National Library of Wales). So perhaps Bruce Chatwin isn't so bad a starting point in this particular instance.  Here is a passage from a letter Bruce wrote to his wife when he first arrived, having ditched a writing assignment in New York sort of on a whim, but really after years of thinking about it:

"You would think from the fact that the landscape is so uniform and the occupation (sheep-farming) also, that the people would be correspondingly dull. But I have sung “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” in Welsh in a remote chapel on Christmas Day, have eaten lemon curd tartlets with an old Scot (who has never been to Scotland) but has made his own bagpipes and wears the kilt to dinner. I have stayed with a Swiss ex-diva who married a Swedish trucker who lives in the remotest of all Patagonian valleys, decorating her house with murals of the lake of Geneva. I have dined with a man who knew Butch Cassidy and other members of the Black Jack Gang, I have drunk to the memory of Ludwig of Bavaria with a German whose house and style of life belongs rather to the world of the Brothers Grimm. I have discussed the poetics of Mandelstam with a Ukrainian doctor missing both legs. I have seen Charlie Milward’s estancia and lodged with the peons drinking mate till 3am. (Maté incidentally is a drink for which I also have a love/hate relationship). I have visited a poet-hermit who lived according to Thoreau and the Georgics. I have listened to the wild outpourings of the Patagonian archaeologist, who claims the existence of a. the Patagonian unicorn b. a protohominid in Tierra del Fuego (Fuego pithicus patensis) 80 cm high."

Superb.  And very enticing!  When it appeared, Chatwin's book was very well received and his name was made.  The people Chatwin had met in Patagonia weren't impressed, however. Many had been unaware he was planning to write a book and felt equally betrayed and exposed, any hurt further aggravated by the enormous fibs Chatwin had cheerfully dribbled all over his manuscript as he wrote.   

What can the riders take from all of this insanity?  Firstly, they are far from the first lunatic foreigners to appear unannounced - the gauchos won't turn a hair.  Secondly, Patagonia is Far Enough Away for the truth of the matter to be a matter of opinion at best and entirely absent at worst.  I expect tall tales and conflicting accounts for us armchair travellers to chew over until, oh, at least August and the next Mongol Derby.

Hasta mañana todos!