If only I could have kept my eyes open long enough to see it all in, the chamomile colors of the southern steppe would have beckoned me to linger here for hours. Tears were sucked out by the wind and reapplied to my face like a mask. Then there drift hunters was the fact that Al Capone, my horse, was growing irritable (I predicted he might when I first heard his name). From there, we walked back to his house and my hotel, which, it turned out, had been built with the wind in mind, as it is the most important factor in Argentine Patagonia.
As I took off my chaps, the resident manager, Valentn Virasoro, told me that Eolo was named after Aeolus, the Greek deity of the winds. We stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows in the lobby, which he had escorted me to. Eolo, on the other hand, "sits on top of a hill," although "most houses in this area are placed in sheltered valleys." The resort was rather brazenly situated to face directly into the path of the unrelenting austral winds that sweep in from the Southern Ocean, he went on.
In the tradition of early estancias in Patagonia, Fernando Bustillo, grandson of renowned Argentine architect Alejandro Bustillo, created Eolo. It first welcomed guests in 2004, and up until this past December, it stood as the area's only 5-star establishment (though there are a half-dozen just across the Chilean border in Torres del Paine National Park). There are 17 rooms spread out in a square formation under the gable roof, with a private courtyard in the middle. The hotel does not have any flat-screen TVs, instead opting to give entertainment in the form of seeing the clouds outside as they are blown about the area like Van Gogh's brushstrokes.
The view outside the restaurant's windows was like a nightly performance, making supper there seem like a trip to the theater. Chef Juan Pablo Bonaveri's inventive, contemporary menu featured a flaky pink cusk eel served over roasted artichokes; afterward, I had a bottle of plummy Malbec in my room. It was unusually warm for late January in Argentina, when summer officially begins. The open window blew the beige draperies about and zapped the static from my hair. I clinked my glass in triumph, telling myself, "I've made it back to Patagonia." The force of its grasp had me again and again.
El Calafate wasn't on my itinerary during my 2015 visit to this region due to the high winds. As any native will tell you, planning to spend a full month exploring both Chilean and Argentine Patagonia is a beginner error. To paraphrase an ancient adage, "he who hurries loses time," a shopkeeper in Cochrane, Chile, once told me. The Southern Highway in Chile ended at the border town of Villa O'Higgins, where I became trapped due to bad weather that prevented me from boarding the ferry to Argentina.
