It’s nice to see two great travel writers talk about one of my favorite places. Rolf Potts takes a look at Patagonia…actually he talks with South America expert Wayne Bernhardson about Patagonia. Potts, you may know, now does a regular column on Yahoo, but is also the author of the book Vagabonding, about traveling the world on a shoestring. (He is also the writer of one of my favorite articles of all time about infiltrating the movie set in Thailand where Leo DiCaprio was filming “The Beach”). Bernhardson is a former Lonely Planet writer (10 years there) who now does guidebooks for the good folks at Moon Handboooks. I remember Bernhardson’s work well from when I was living in South America.
Anyway, the important thing here is the topic: Patagonia. Just last night (no kidding) a friend at dinner asked me where he should go if he had 10 days to kill and could go anywhere (he’s kind of an outdoors buff, too, btw). Patagonia, I declared. Head down south and see Torres del Paine, Punta Arenas, Argentina’s Península Valdés…the list goes on. Potts gets Bernhardson to open up about the region’s vast history (also nicely covered in Bruce Chatwin’s On Patagonia) and the many things to do and see in the region. I scribbled some things a ways back about Patagonia, which you can check out here, but take a read of this email interview between Potts and Bernhardson and give some serious thought to heading down South…it is almost spring/summer there, after all.