First, there was the simple fact that our whirlwind – three-week -- trans-continental excursion had included no less than seven flights, countless bus trips and an average 10 miles a day of hiking. In total, we spent twenty nights sleeping in tents, hostels, one hotel and on the planes and buses we used to get from place to place.

Additionally, nearly every day of the trip seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. We covered ground like conquering soldiers as we established bases in the Patagonian towns of El Chalten, El Calafate, Puerto Natales and Bariloche. Even on our four-day backpacking trip along the “W” trail within the Torres del Paine National Park and on our many, long day hikes elsewhere in the Region, we moved at a pace that was much faster than my typical Pinetop area rambles.

Each night, I fell into such a deep sleep that when I awoke the next morning, Ihad hardly moved a muscle (at home, in my own bed, I typically turn like a rotisserie chicken all through the night). Such profound fatigue was a blessing since in both our campsites and in the hostels, we were packed in with other travelers like pilchards in cans of tomato sauce.

Not only was the day-to-day progress of our travels break-neck, there was also the change in seasons and the shift in day lengths to be reckoned with. Given the fact that flying from the southern United States to Patagonia entailed a shift from Fall to Spring and from 11-hour day lengths to 15-hour day lengths. All in all, by the time our trip was over, I felt as weary as an old draft horse.

Even now, as I finally get around to trying to capture what we saw during our travels, I feel as though I look back at our adventure “through a glass, darkly.” Nonetheless, let me do my best to wipe clear that glass as I attempt to describe a few choice moments from that momentous trip.

Let me begin at the beginning -- or at least the beginning of our first day off of planes and buses and in an actual Patagonia town. The town was El Chalten and it was my favorite town of the entire trip, due in large part to its small size (both population-wise and in terms of area) and to the fact that it is nestled right up next to the FitzRoy Mountain Range - a snaggle-toothed escarpment of dramatic, icy peaks.

As we got off the bus and hoisted our massive packs onto our backs, the first thing I noticed were the dogs. There were dogs everywhere -- and not your typical scrawny strays, either. Although they appeared to be free, if not feral, the dogs of El Chalten (and indeed in many a town in Patagonia) were big breeds, mostly of the herding types: shepherds, sheepdogs and derivatives of Pyrenees and St. Bernard’s. They were well behaved, well fed and even reasonably well-groomed but with no owners in sight, ever.

The dogs roamed as free as foxes, day and night. In the bigger towns, you could see them in the evenings, congregating outside of the restaurants that specialized in “parrilla” (Argentina, in particular, is famous for its grilled beef and mutton) where, when the restaurants finally shut their doors late in the night, the curs would extract sheep femurs from garbage cans and chase each other through the streets, stopping occasionally to gnaw on their prize.

After walking the mile or so it took to get to our accommodations (one of the many hostels in town), we checked in at the front desk and were shown to our room. Our room wasn’t exactly a room -- it was, in fact, a quasi-dormitory equipped with eight Spartan bunkbeds. But the price was right (a mere eight bucks a night) and it was clean and warm.

After chatting a bit with a couple of our dorm-mates (a young man from Israel and a young woman from Brazil), we took a stroll up the riverbank that leads toward the mighty FitzRoy Range. Tomorrow, we would scale one of the steep trails that would take us to Tres Lagos (with its amazing views of three lakes: one still iced over and two in liquid form) but this evening, we just wanted to finally stretch our legs and commune with nature. Naturally, I brought my binoculars and, in no time, we were rewarded with spectacular views of ibises and lapwings - two stunningly plumed species that caused my pulse to quicken.

While watching these two types of shore birds, we suddenly heard a flock of fast flyers wheel overhead, not more than 20 feet above us. Rick and I both swiveled to see what they were and watched as these long-tailed, stocky birds zipped downstream only to bank back around and, once again, fly directly over our heads. On their second pass, I confirmed what I had suspected, they were some species of parrot or a closely related cousin.

At this point I need to explain an embarrassing fact -- namely, how I managed to arrive in Patagonia without a field guide to the Region’s birds. I will admit, point-blank, that I was unbelievably stupid not to bring one but there was a certain logic to my decision. First, Rick isn’t a bird-watcher per se and, since he was the person who planned all the many logistical details for our trip (the when, where, what and how of literally every day of our trip), I suspected -- based on the jam-packed itinerary he had shown me -- that we simply wouldn’t have (or take) the time to do any birding. Riiiiight, so now I’ve just shamelessly blamed it on the other guy….

But that wasn’t the entirety of my thinking on this issue. I also knew that, since we would be carrying very heavy packs (stuffed full of backpacking gear suitable for temperatures ranging from the 20’s to 60’s F), I didn’t think I could afford to carry anything non-essential, such as field guides or other books. Moreover, in the weeks leading up to our trip, I did a bit of internet research and it didn’t appear that the bird diversity was very high in the cold climes of Patagonia so I figured I could probably just remember the species that we would see and could periodically look them up on the internet using Rick’s smart-phone. Oops, bad plan.

It turned out that, for starters, Rick and his phone were inseparable. In fact, as we traveled about Patagonia, packed with tourists and travelers such as it was, I noticed that everybody from the Affluent World (and our fellow travelers included scads of people from Europe, Oceania, Japan and the United States plus a goodly number from many of the Latin American countries and the occasional random place like South Korea) came equipped with a phone SUPER GLUED to their non-dominate hand.

And there was good reason for all these folks to have smartphones, as they used them for language translation, currency exchange calculations, navigation, photos and videos, bus schedules, restaurant selections and, who knows, maybe even for phone conversations. There may even have been one or two freaks who looked up a bird now and then.

Fortunately, when we finished with our invigorating evening stroll which included sightings of no less than eight species of birds that were, not surprisingly, brand new to me, I noticed that the hostel had an old desktop PC for customers to use. I Googled “birds of Patagonia” and was taken to a site that had photos of fifty or so species from the Region.

I quickly tracked down the eight species we had seen, as they were all common to the area. The parrot type birds we had seen were identified as Austral Parakeets and, interestingly, are the southern-most ranging species of parrot in the entire world. I was intrigued by the word Austral, as two of the other birds we had seen that evening also bore that moniker (the Austral Thrush and Austral Negrito). So, I looked it up.

As it turns out, the word “austral” literally translates to “southern” but, as I continued to delve deeper into the greater sense of the word, I realized that, not only is it primarily used by biologist and geographers to describe species found south of the Equator, but that it really connotes a sense of the far southern latitudes -- as in, below 45 degrees and heading further south toward the realm of Antarctica. In other words, just as we have the northern term “boreal” (describing the latitudes as one moves north of 45 degrees and heads towards the Arctic), the other end of the planet has its austral world. Therefore, just as we have our northern boreal forest, they have their austral forest. The same thing applies when it comes to the Northern Lights (“Aurora Borealis”) and Southern Lights (“Aurora Australis”).

But enough about how “up is down, and down is up.” Maybe about now you can empathize with that sense of disorientation that I described at the beginning of this article. As such, perhaps this is a good place to conclude Part 2 of my Patagonia Diary. And since time and space are clearly malleable, come April, I will conclude my austral tale with a third and final chapter.