Chile and Argentina share a border… that’s obvious. What’s less so, is they share a lake, albeit they use differing names. What’s unusual in lake sharing, as opposed to island splitting, which they also do, is that the world’s third longest border follows the continental watershed. A serpentine dash-dotted line that meanders from top to bottom but will cover every point of the compass in its 5150 kilometre journey.
At first I was somewhat intrigued by this incongruity, as the lake drains to the Chilean west. It’s only when sailing over the lake that there’s a possible geographical explanation. Look to the left, the horizon is a crenellation of ice-capped mountains, look the other way and the horizon flattens out into smoke-purple Patagonian Pampa. A distinctive change, one that happens abruptly, right down that international frontier.
Riding east, away from the customs post, the air turns arid, the flora to ashy-green, the scrub shrubs shrink down, retreating into the gritted dust. An evaporation of colour, where hard thorn has replaced soft succulence and the sky-horizon an ever expanding sphere. After six weeks of enclosure by forest trees and valley sides, its a pleasant opening.
A dramatic geographical morphage. What are not so obvious are the social-subtle changes.
Maybe it was the conversation about my carrying a plastic pipe dog-stick with the Gendarme at customs, or the first shop’s noticeboard advertising Tango dancing, or was it Raul’s exuberance as he invites us into his converted water-tank and feeds us a gargantuan dinner? Or was it the the rust-bucket cars that still cruise Avenida San Martin on a Sunday afternoon, or purchasing an ice cream at the heladeria, or navigating siesta closures or the lack of cashcard tapping at the checkout? Whichever, we know we’ve crossed a metaphorical boundary; we now know that were in Argentina.
Land-borders are endlessly fascinating places, for by now we’ve yet to find two Latin American crossings that are similar. From the cerebral angst of negotiating the ever-new variations of officialdom to the anticipation of seeing something new. From the sweepstake of ‘how many franked stamps will I collect just to get my bike into a country’ to ‘how far is it to the first reliable, safe money exchange?’ Or in the instance of a strictly phyto-sanitary Chile, how far will we ride to replace the confiscated food and find replacements that are not based around oats and polenta? Land-crossings are nervous fun.
If it’s monotonous standardisation you crave, try an airport.
Somewhere in the distant realm of a school geography lesson, I have a memory. Neighbouring Argentina and Chile were having another dispute over the ownership of the island of Tierra del Fuego and Great Britain in its inevitable colonial way decided to settle the matter. Queen Victoria is purported to have requested a pencil and ruler, whereupon she drew a straight line down the middle of the eponymous island and declared the dispute solved. I can find no confirmation and suspect that its apocryphal, the imaginative misunderstanding of a pre-teen. Was I confusing it with Belgium?
Yet when I encounter the reality of this piece of displaced Chilean Patagonia, the aberration is palpable. Our cycle distance from border to border will only be 260 kilometres, a mere three or four days, which will be dependant upon the omnipresent wind. Is it worth reinstalling the Chilean ‘phone chip, do we really need to go out of our way to find an ATM, will a room still be unheated and the bed come with a laden stack of four blankets? The reality is; much of the traffic is transiting Argentine, the prices are quoted in Argentine, that and guanacos, rias and skunks still wander over the road. There isn’t even an asphalted shoulder the likes of which we had become accustomed in the Chilean north, it’s really ‘Little Argentina’, only it comes with oil wells, nodding donkeys and an accent that I still find undecipherable.
Tierra del Fuego: split-island, a schizophrenic place where the estancia names are a reflection of Britain’s colonial adventurism. The Chilean estancias still have their English names, reflecting their original British ownership, the Argentine ones were rebranded post the Malvinas/Falkland Islands dispute.
A long shadow of an unamused monarch with her pencil and ruler creating just for us, yet another interesting border.