Across Patagonia
By: Greer Clarke
Tags: Travel, Patagonia, Argentina, Instagram

The cover of Lady Flo’s book: Thankfully, I kept crossing rivers on horseback to a minimum.

I spent the month of January in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ostensibly to complete a short-term exchange and get some study credit during the holidays, but mostly just to go on an extended holiday to an exotic new continent. I think little nail-pulling is needed to reveal something similar as the honest collective motive of most Uni students who undertake various study trips or exchanges.

I stocked up on 36mm film — rationalising that I’d be more likely to treasure a few rolls of 24 exposures than the infinite contents of my iPhone camera roll — and ramped up the Spanish on DuoLingo. My travel reading of choice was Lady Florence Dixie’s 1880 memoir, Across Patagonia. Somewhat obscure, I’d ordered it online a few weeks in advance of my departure date.

I’m glad I chose such an old book. I’m also glad it didn’t have a plot, because I wasn’t anxious about ‘feeling something’ super strong by the end of it. The pressure of falling in love with a bestseller (the way in which everybody else has done so, thus making it a bestseller) can be suffocating. Instead, this memoir was more like a personalised time capsule of research rather than narrative. Since I didn’t get to go to Patagonia (OS-HELP will take you far, but not that far), I liked reading about it.

For context, Dixie wrote Across Patagonia ‘for’ the future King Edward VII. Not many people had been to South America yet, which meant her recounts were decently useful information. That also meant she included some pretty painful (i.e. racist) descriptions of the indigenous people. But what I couldn’t help noticing was that it meant she showed off a lot when describing various events along the road. If something is beautiful, its stunning. If the horses wander from the camp, they stray miles away. If they shoot a guanaco for dinner, its only after a long and dramatic chase.

Even if her stories are true and I’m not just pathetically cynical, even if she’s not over-exaggerating the prairie fire or whatever it may be, she still gets to pick and choose the stories she includes. And that’s where I found the most similarity between my own trip and Dixie’s, more so than being in the same country or eating the same food.

Those finite film photos I painstakingly develop, only to upload them straight to Instagram, represent a calculated, glorified, and filtered version of my trip. The steak is only ever ridiculously delicious (never mind the below-average one from the first night), and the streets are only ever perfectly quaint (never mind parts of the city that just… well, look like Brisbane). When something is bad, it’s disastrous (thank you to the night-long blackout and freaky classmates for that content).

Both Dixie and I are taking the opportunity to filter our travels before we share it with people whose opinions we care about. And perhaps that blunts the significance of what we do share. I’m not trying to depress, or polarise, or cry woe-is-us, the social media generation. If anything it shows that after all these years we still do the same old shit when telling stories. Nobody’s lives are consistently interesting, but we continue to chase the moments when they are. And that’s not just tolerable, it’s good.

It allows us to grasp for relation with this woman who decided to head off to the new world two-months post-partum, returning with a jaguar and some corrections for Charles Darwin regarding observations from his own trip to the region. My own exploits in South America may have not have been quite as dramatic, but it didn’t stop me from trying to get a good story and photo out of it.