What I’ve learned from a lifetime of travelling

In the language of the Mapuche people of Patagonia, futa (I’m told) means ‘river’ and leufú means ‘big’. So Spanish–speaking Chile could have called it the Rio Grande but instead have kept the indigenous name, Futaleufú, for this sinuous, deep, swift-flowing river, hurling its clear turquoise waters at the black basalt that flanks its roaring gorges. That this is one of the finest white-water rafting and kayaking rivers in the world is uncontested. And the river has given its name to the small town nestling beneath snowy Andean peaks and glaciers, past which it flows.

Before crossing the border into Argentina on a dirt road, six miles upriver, I spent a day in Futaleufú last week. We’d come far by bus from the south in Chilean Patagonia, and were on our way home to England via Buenos Aires a thousand miles north. My partner and our two companions had hired horses and cantered off up the hillsides and into the magical forest of southern beech cladding the lower slopes of the Andes. I don’t ride, so they left me at the bank to change money. And I was happy to be abandoned for a day.

Travelling, as we’d been doing for ten days, shows you much, and fast. Jungles, mountain passes, small towns, waterfalls, gorges thick with greenery, had slid past our steamed-up bus windows, and every so often we’d stop for a break; but never long enough to adjust to where we were. A hoot on the bus’s horn and we’d pile back in.

In a lifetime of travelling, I’ve found that you don’t begin to know a place until you’re stuck there with nothing to do. Only then does the bustle and tension of travel, the absorption in where you’re going and where you’ve come from, begin to fall away. Then you start to take things in.