I work for the Highway Administration of Argentina. My job is simple: to guide the desition making of the political authorities regarding road planning. And that requires to see things with your naked eye, before or after reading the reports. That is why I constantly “flash-travel” to every corner of our bast country.
Last year, our neightbour nation of Chile requested us to open a new way across the Andes montain range to connect our road network with their isolated town of O’Higgings. It’s been almost 40 years since both countries had almost fought to war and this region is the last one to which access has not yet been restored. This led us to explore an inhabited territory of about 200 miles long through steppe, canons, rivers, mountains and wild forest in a latittude where during winter there is almost no sunlight; that’s south Patagonia, the southest place on the planet, before Antarctica.
From our central office, we prepared a quick expedition with two techinal mannagers and design a roadmap to do it all in two days (mind that, first, one must drive 6 hours from the nearest airport, to wich we must fly from Buenos Aires). Officials from our Patagonian district and Border Patrol would be waiting at the spot to give us support with two pick up trucks.
Against what many expected, things went exactly as planned (weather helped) and we got to the border line right in the middle of nowhere with enough time to make our surveys and return to our basecamp befor dusk. We had to cross through rivers of glacier water and rocky swamps, cut across beatifull green meadows filled with flowers and all sort of birds, and drive across thick forest of trees like small sequoias where no non-military man has ever gone before. And allways, surrounded by gigantic mountans holding glaciers, hidding behind the mist.
These incredible landscapes and views in such an unreachable place once more made me realise the numerous wonders hidden in the Patagonia of Argentina, and how can there be so many people crowded in tight cities all along the world when there is so much room and richness to share. Back at my confortable office in Buenos Aires city, where cellphones outweight in number that of the people who live, I wonder if it is enough to share pictures and post about these places. “Off course not. We need to build roads for people to get there”, I, the engineer, would say. But, once you built it… how do you make someone who lives ten thousand miles away in a fancy house rise and travel to visit it? Well, precisely: sharing.