In the past two weeks I've met a man who crossed the Andes on foot, horse, bicycle, car and — quirky, but true — rollerblades. I've trekked with a mountain guide to a rocky outcrop upon which he was due to marry his fiancé the following weekend — before abseiling down it with her.
I've stood in a forest with a woman who came here in the hope of finding the perfect plot of land; after trekking for three hours she had stopped dead in the midst of swathes of soaring, twisted southern beech trees, and had said to her disbelieving husband: 'This is it.'
Landscapes have a profound effect on the traveller — my conversations with these characters were undertaken against the backdrop of Argentina's improbable wine region, the parched province of Mendoza, and the steppes and mountains and icefields of Patagonia.
These people were showing me their homeland, delighting in it anew as I, the visitor, marvelled at jagged peaks and surging glaciers and vines irrigated with snowmelt via channels invented by the Incas.
But though we tell ourselves we travel to discover new places, it's their inhabitants who evoke for us the soul of a place far more effectively than do their landscapes. For what is an uninhabited place but a slate devoid of witness or attestation?
Even the emptiest of continents cannot be adequately understood without human interpretation: on a recent trip to Antarctica I would have observed the vacant landmass with my eyes rather than my intellect had it not been for the biologists accompanying our group.
How would I have known, for example, that the albatross spends most of its life at sea? What would I have made of the diversity of textures etched upon the pack ice and glaciers and icebergs, the infinite shades of white and blue that colour this continent, without knowing what had caused them?
It's not enough, then, to simply gaze out at the passing scenes and to believe that we have captured a country's essence. Unless we've also listened to the people whose explorations and migrations and settlements and wars have been lived out upon these tracts, we won't ever have truly seen it.
"People the world over are open to the inquisitiveness of others; they are quick to share their personal stories and so evoke the collective character of the countries in which they live or the places from which they have come."
And this is