A remarkable road trip in Patagonia

Argentine Patagonia is "thrilling", said Stanley Stewart in the FT – "the scale of it, the solitude, those long empty roads, the Patagonian winds sweeping vast skies clean, the Andes rising in the west". 

This is "the land of great drives" – most famously the journey to the deep south along Ruta 40. People come from all over the world to do it, in everything from camper vans, and 4x4s to pushbikes. But there are other, equally spectacular and far less-travelled roads, as I discovered on a recent trip to the region – a 12-night adventure in a 4x4. Heading out from the coastal town of Comodoro Rivadavia, I drove inland for six hours to the Andes, before heading south on Ruta 41, through "savage uninhabited country" where other vehicles became a rare sight: "for four hours I saw almost no one". The gravel road twisted through "woods of fairy-tale trees", and past vistas of "scarred ethereal mountains rearing above water meadows where horses grazed". 

In the Posadas valley, beneath the great summit of San Lorenzo, I stayed at the lonely inn of Lagos del Furioso, perched on the isthmus between two lakes, one "electric blue", the other a "delicate" green. The inn's "old-fashioned painted cabins" were delightful, and I filled my days there with fly-fishing, kayaking, and picnicking on deserted beaches and in the gorge where the Rio Furioso "plunges through a narrow defile". 

Heading further south, I reached Parque Patagonia, a conservation area run by Rewilding Argentina that now extends to roughly 700 square miles. The park's lodge, La Posta de Los Toldos, is like "a chic ranch house in Montana", with a great chef and a good wine list. Guests can go looking for condors and puma in the Caracoles Canyon, with its "soaring walls" and "cathedral hush". And there's much other wildlife to see, as well as the Cueva de las Manos Pintadas, a cliff face covered with painted hand prints – a "moving and strangely timeless" work of art, between 9,000 and 13,000 years old. 

The 12-night trip costs from £7,000pp with Cazenove+Loyd (cazloyd.com).