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The restaurant at
Bahia Bustamante.Simple design
elements inside
Bahía Bustamante’s
main lodge.nowhere is a hard sell for elementary schoolers. So
we told them we were going to see penguins,
cormorants, sea lions, steamer ducks, whale
carcasses, and more stars than you can count.
None of that was visible from the driveway,
though. I could see from the kids’ faces that they
were trying to reserve judgment.
Bahía Bustamante was established as a seaweed
farm in the 1950s by Lorenzo Soriano and is still a
working ranch. The property is now operated by
Lorenzo’s grandson Matias, a 55-year-old mystic
naturalist with gentle eyes. Matias’s wife, Astrid
Perkins, is a bright-eyed, mischievous figure who
divides her time between advising companies like
Hermès on South American PR strategies and
reading the phases of the moon to determine when
to plant fava beans at the ranch.
The lodge has only 10 guest cabins, which sit 30
meters from the beach; they have giant plate-glass
windows and are decorated with rustic furniture.
There’s also a 1970s church, built in the Brutalist
style of the Brady Bunch house, that looks stunning
at sunset. The human imprint here, though, feels
almost inconsequential. At Bahía Bustamante the
animals and sky and land are the main event. (That
said, there’s a small bar that serves excellent
Argentinean wine, as well as craft beer made with
seawater, and a restaurant. So you’re not exactly
roughing it.)
We woke up early the next morning. One of the
guides met us in an aging Land Rover, stocked with
a breakfast cooler replete with little pastries and
carafes of coffee, mate and hot chocolate. The sun
was just coming up, and the tide was out. We made
our way along the coast to a shallow lagoon, where
we got onto a wooden boat and set off into a bay.
We saw bushy steamer ducks and petrels, giant
seabirds with the cold-blooded eyes of plaintiffs’
attorneys. Then we motored to Cormorant
Island—inhabited only by cormorants,ATLANTIC OCEANArgentina
Buenos Aires
Bahía BustamanteW
HEN WE ARRIVED at Bahía
Bustamante, a small, windswept,
sun-bleached, perfectly godforsaken
lodge on the edge of eastern
Patagonia, my eight-year-old son,
Finn, said, “It seems like we’re kind
of in the middle of nowhere.” I did
not then say, We came here to go nowhere. Which
was true, and would be a terrible name for an
Emily Dickinson poem.
Since my wife and I relocated our family to Los
Angeles a year ago, we’d come to believe we were
trapped inside a Möbius strip of strip malls, each
with the very same fro-yo shop. So the idea of
spending spring break at the empty far reaches of
the planet appealed to us.
Please note: it took us two days to get to
nowhere. First a flight to Atlanta, then one
to Buenos Aires, then a third to Comodoro
Rivadavia in the province of Chubut, Argentina.
From Comodoro, a small truck drove us several
hours through an endless landscape of towering
blue skies and flat expanses of arid scrubland.
We hardly passed a car, a house, or another road—
when you’re nowhere, there’s nowhere else to
go, and no one is trying to get there. Eventually,
we turned into the driveway of Bahía Bustamante.
“We’re here,” we told our son and daughter.
(Though we weren’t—on a 10,000-hectare ranch,
even the driveway is a 45-minute ride.)
“Where are the penguins?” Frankie, our 10-
year- old daughter, said suspiciously. A vacation toTRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM 39