travelandleisureindia.in 117
Tomorrow, Armando said, would
be a long day.
I nodded, distracted, trying to copy
his posture in the saddle. Here’s the
thing about gauchos: they look really
cool. Armando has a dark beard and
long ponytail, and his daily uniform
was a quilted denim jacket, bloused
brown trousers, calf-high work boots,
and a perfectly angled beret. A beret!
As if a beret is something you can just
wear! In fact, all the gauchos seemed to
wear berets. Some also wore colourful
woven sashes into which they tucked a
long knife in a rawhide sheath, useful
for cutting a snagged rein or rope.
Often they rode with one hand tucked
insouciantly into a hip pocket.
Not so long ago, gauchos spent most of their lives in the middle of
nowhere, tending their herds, manfully enduring the elements. “The real
gauchos are gone, and that’s the truth,” said Armando, who grew up on a
sheep farm in the Tierra del Fuego. When not guiding or backcountry
skiing, he works cattle near Puerto Natales. “A gaucho used to be totally
self-suffi cient,” he explained. “From the city he needed only clothing,
cigarettes, liquor, maté, and bullets.” (I suspected that Armando, ever
courteous, might have delicately omitted female companionship.) Now,
he told me, gauchos have smartphones. Some watch television at night.
Armando spoke without judgment, but with a trace of loss.
That fi rst evening, we camped at an estancia farther up Last Hope
Sound. When we arrived, our cook, Levio, had already set up our tents
and prepared a shaker of pisco sours that was
waiting beside a spread of cocktail munchies.
While he cooked a dinner of salmon with
onions and peppers over an open fi re, we
snacked on cheese and olives and got a little
tipsy. It was all very civilised. After dinner,From left: Breakfast at
a campsite in Estancia
Perales, near the Río
Serrano; Armando, the
author's guide, shows
off his gaucho fl air.travelandleisureindia.in 119