What remoteness feels like: a guide's journal from Patagonia | part 1 of 2

There is a moment on the drive across the Argentine steppe when you stop expecting something to appear on the horizon. No village, no petrol station, nothing. Just the vast, tawny emptiness stretching in every direction under a sky that has never looked bigger. This is what remoteness feels like.

The landscapes of Argentina and Chile sit at the further end of what the world has to offer, two countries sharing a border but feeling entirely different on either side of it. Argentina's side of Patagonia is barren and otherworldly, wide open and wind-scoured in a way that makes you feel very small and very grateful. Chile's side, which we would reach later in the trip, would turn out to be lush and rugged and green. Both stunning, in their own quite different ways.

But first, Argentina.

We were somewhere on that vast, empty road when it happened. Our minibus slowed, and then stopped, because the road ahead was no longer empty. A herd of guanacos had surrounded us, curious and entirely unbothered, pressing close enough that we could see the details of their faces through the glass. Some were very young. All of them seemed perfectly at ease, which is more than could be said for some of us, in the best possible sense.

It is one of those moments that no itinerary can plan for. You are simply there, and then this happens, and the group falls quiet in that way that means everyone is making a memory they know they will keep. Nobody reached for a phone immediately. We just watched.

I have led walking holidays in a good many places, but I have rarely felt so clearly that I was a guest in someone else's landscape. The guanacos moved on in their own time. We did the same.

If I had to pick just one highlight from this trip, the Perito Moreno glacier would have to be in the conversation.

The scale of it is the thing. You can read about a glacier of this size, look at photographs, and still not be prepared for what it does to your sense of proportion when you are standing in front of it. The blue of it. The noise of it. The way it seems to go on long after you have stopped expecting it to end. It is one of those places that earns the word extraordinary without any help from marketing.

Patagonia does that repeatedly. It presents you with something so far outside ordinary experience that the usual vocabulary simply doesn't reach.

The food helps too. Argentina takes its steaks seriously, and rightly so. We ate empanadas warm from the oven, drizzled dulce de leche over things, and worked our way through malbecs that seemed designed specifically for the end of a long day. In Buenos Aires, we watched tango on the street, which is its own kind of magic: a dance that manages to be both performance and conversation at the same time.

Bring warm layers, whatever season you travel. The Patagonian wind is not a rumour. But come ready for food and drink that will make the cold feel worth it.

Part two of this journal picks up where Argentina leaves off, as we cross into Chile and head into Torres del Paine National Park. That is where the landscape turns green and wild in a different register entirely, and where we faced the hardest walk of the trip, and the most rewarding one.