A solo great escape to Patagonia

No time. No money. No childcare.

Not this time. For years, while married and taking care of my two young sons full-time, suffocating in the stay-at-home suburbia of Los Angeles, I’d dreamt of being able to take off again one day for South America, as I had when I was 19 years old.

A talisman to my pent-up adventure, Bradt’s guide to backpacking in Chile and Argentina, published when I was childless, beckons from my living-room shelf. It’s one of the few books that has survived my ten address changes in as many years as life with kids teetered through a wobbly marriage, international moves and, eventually, a long and bruising divorce.

I take it down. It is March, and I am in London in the perfect storm. My ex-husband is still living in Los Angeles and hasn’t seen our sons in two months. The death of my father, a fractured wrist, a broken heart and several months of teaching my 10-year-old son how to multiply fractions for his 11-plus maths exams have taken their toll. I want out.

So when a man I’ve been seeing announces that he cannot imagine being with me because I already have children – a man who I know yearns to visit Patagonia almost as much as I do – it is obvious how to act. I book to go on my own.

The rest is remarkably easy. I e-mail my ex-husband our sons’ Easter school holiday dates, and suggest he fly the boys to him in California. As soon as he accepts – two weeks later – I pay for my ticket. Meanwhile, I’ve sketched out time in Buenos Aires, trekking in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, a sea voyage through the fjords of Patagonia and horse-riding at Peuma Hue, a lakeside ranch in central Argentina. One more week and I’ll be off.

“How are we going to talk to you every day when you’re away?” asks my 12-year-old. “You’re not,” I tell him, as gently as I can. “We’ll e-mail.” I figure my sons will be fine. They’ll be with their dad. It’ll be good for all three of them. You know that I love you, I tell them, and I know you love me. We’ll survive a month of silence.

I don’t want to worry every precious day I’m away about mobile signals and time zones. I don’t want to drag you out of friends’ swimming pools to have one of those “What are you doing?” “Nothing” exchanges we all loathe. Besides, I need a break from the hourly, daily, monthly maternal tyranny of always being there.

This last bit, of course, I keep to myself.

And away I go, kitted out with a spine-friendly rucksack, winter thermals and a slinky Lycra party dress rolled tight inside my walking boots because? well, you never know.

My plans unravel on Day Two. I miss my connecting flight from Buenos Aires to southern Patagonia because I’m at the wrong airport. But here is the simple beauty of travelling alone when you are used to shepherding family members: if you mess up, nobody cares.

So giddy am I to rediscover this old basic freedom that, as Sylvie, an airline customer service agent with immaculate nails, writes out a $25 penalty to book me a later flight, I blurt out that I’ve longed to see Argentina since I was 9 years old. “¿Anda sola?” she asks. Are you travelling alone?

Yes, I say. “¡Pues, es una fantasía!” she says. So it’s a dream come true. And she tears up my change-fee slip. “We cannot let you pay.”

Once I’ve landed, my journey quickly becomes an exercise in how to avoid other people. The Andean foothill town of El Calafate, my first stop, is a dull grid of souvenir shops, dud cash machines and aggressive tour agents who plug excursions to the famous Perito Moreno, a glacier so splendid that my guidebook tells me that nobody who comes within 500 miles of it should fail to go.

That does it. I instantly rebel. I haven’t travelled 30 hours from London to stand on a viewing platform with day-trippers. If I want images of the striking blue glacier, I’ll download them from the net. Solitude is what I’m after. I take a bus out of town before dawn and cross the border into Chile.

Everything about Torres del Paine thrills me. Its lakes are turquoise, green, yellow and blue, their shores milky with mineral deposits. Its mountains are huge. I take a four-hour walk through woods and streams, past boulders flecked with lichen, stones the size of houses dumped by ice floes millennia ago. Checked into a wooden lodge in a valley grazed by wild horses, I sleep for 13 hours.

The next day, my hopes of hiking a seven-day circuit are dashed. Four backpackers in their twenties are slumped at reception, hungry and hobbled. The season’s first ice storm – it is late autumn in southern Patagonia and the leaves on mid-level slopes have turned – has dropped knee-high snow, forcing Sergio Nuñez, a mountain guide and director of lodges here for 13 years, to close a northern section to walkers for safety reasons.

Nuñez points me to the alternative route that follows the edges of lakes and several valleys. It is a well-known trail, yet I manage to walk alone most of the day. The number of visitors arriving has slowed to a trickle from the mobs of summer. “In winter,” Nuñez says, “I fall in love with the park all over again.”

Walking fast, there is just enough time to hike to the Glacier Gray and back before nightfall. At the crest of a steady uphill path, I am unprepared for the sight of my first icebergs. In the vast silence, and without meaning to, I hear myself gasp, “Oh, my God.”

Below me, in a crater lake, they are the colour of a child’s electric-blue felt-tip pen, not pointy and triangular like cartoon icebergs, but shaped and sized like motor yachts and landed aircraft. Later, my photos will play tricks on me. Without the relative enormity of the park’s panoramas, it is impossible to tell if the icebergs are 2 metres long or 50. I eat my packed lunch on a rocky outcrop facing the glacier. In the afternoon haze, the ice stretches away like the sea, blurring into the sky, away into infinity.

The snout of the glacier is a frozen cliff, risky to approach by boat and too dangerous to walk across. An hour goes by. I sit on my rock. A slice of the ice-blue wall crashes into the water, shaking the valley for several minutes. The glacier is melting. I am enjoying my own insignificance. There is nowhere I have to be. It relaxes me to feel so small.

One day, I don’t hike at all. As other walkers set off after breakfast, I wander back along my previous day’s path instead of pushing on with everyone else to the next lodge. I find fossils on a pebbled beach, and look at the views from a new direction. I listen to avalanches; the creaking of the earth. I follow wind patterns across the lake and track a small motor boat, put-putting softly as it delivers food to the lodge where I am staying.

From a viewpoint overlooking a lake in front of a mountain in front of lakes in front of other mountains, the longer I look, the more layers of lakes and mountains I see. Thinking of my sons in California, with my phone camera, I take pictures of my weather-beaten face against the high-altitude sun.

Too late I remember that there is no signal for miles around. I cannot send them.

After six days of hiking up and down mountains, my knees need a rest. I head to Puerto Natales by bus to meet my passenger ferry, eager to lie around on a ship for a few days and read. Travel, however, like life, is what happens when you’re busy planning other things. My ferry has broken down.

The shipping company sales manager explains that I can fly north to the busy port city of Puerto Montt or make a 36-hour bus trip. Neither option appeals. I want to feel how big their country is, I say; travel in real time, the old-fashioned way. They think this is hysterical.

Fortunately, so does the captain of a Chilean Merchant Navy cargo ship, the Evangelistas. He hears that I speak fluent Spanish, and takes me on board as his only passenger with 11 truckloads of cattle, horses and sheep. My cabin smells of cigarettes.

I wake to find ice inside my portholes. There is a knock. El capitàn suggests I might be more comfortable in the empty sick bay on the officers’ deck. I am invited to take all my meals at the captain’s table. I hang out on the bridge, study the charts, visit the engine room, and have afternoon tea with the galley crew.

I chat to the lorry drivers when they’re on deck. They all ask where my children are.

With their father, I say. Which is true. Your husband, says the captain, must be a special man to let you make this trip on your own.

I have read in my guidebook that Chile does not recognise divorce. So I smile, I hope enigmatically. “Eres una chica extrema,” says the second mate. You’re an extreme girl.

I wonder if this observation is true. Travelling alone as a mother certainly elicits strong opinions, all unrequested. Some women think I am “brave”. Others ask if I was scared, although nobody ever asked me this when I travelled alone in foreign countries as a newspaper reporter. I don’t feel either. I am making this trip because I want to reconnect with who I am, however lame that sounds.

I like how the captain steps in for me when his first mate asks why I am alone. “Es una independiente.” She’s an independent type.

Never at any stage of my trip am I lonely. Instead, I feel wonderfully, powerfully alone. What inhibits the fulfilment of a dream, I tell myself, is not circumstance but state of mind. I’ve moved my body and soul for less than the cost of another woman’s trip to a luxury spa.

Nowhere do I feel more alive than on a part of the trip for which I haven’t planned at all: several days in Tierra del Fuego, the hemisphere’s rugged tip. In the gap between one cargo ship being cancelled and the other arriving, I luck out by arriving at Punta Arenas airport in Chile an hour before the one daily flight to Puerto Williams, the southernmost year-round inhabited town in the world.

It is winter here in the Beagle Channel, where Charles Darwin marvelled at icebergs 176 years ago. Restaurants are closed until spring. The only nightlife to speak of is a bar for yachties on a rehabbed sunken frigate.

In this remotest of spots, I rent a mountain bike for $5 and cycle the 40-mile round-trip on a dirt track to a Yagan cemetery. On the far side of the channel is Argentina. It is a day of all weathers and terrain. I see what I think are Magellanic penguins huddled on a rock in the swell. I see birds of prey, seabirds, beaver dams, moss, reeds, kelp.

Suddenly, it hits me. This, the all-time perfect day of my life, is my dividing line. All that has gone before – divorce, grief, devotion to my children at the expense of some of my dreams – all of that is my past. Today is the start of my future. For the last hour of this magical day, I cycle under a full moon. When I finally get off the saddle, I can barely walk.

So, how was it? Everyone asks me the same question on my return to London. The best few weeks of my life, I reply. So far.