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".
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