The Last Hope

This is the last page of my journal...its a poem about Patagonia that I copied from the wall at the Pehoe Refugio. Here's the actual text since my handwriting is probably too small to read:

PATAGONIA
It's a vast territory: wild and virgin.
A land that has never recognized frontiers
nor human limits,
only those chosen by its own free spirit,
not those imposed by the politics
of two republics.

Its dominion stretches
from the estuary of the river Santa Cruz in the east
to the Golfe de Penas in the west,
both linked by an imaginary line,
to a shared south on the rocks of cape horn.

It is a land of extremes,
lashed by merciless winds ever since the ice cracked
open many years ago allowing the vegetation,
clinging to the rocks, to emerge.

A magical land, contradictory,
whose physical dangers are nothing
to the biggest threat of them all:
the challenge to the spirit.

Patagonia bewitches
with the game played by the clouds being chased
by the great, high currents,
with its iridescent skies, and eternal ice,
with the vastness of its pampas and the murmur of its streams,
with the lament of the forests and
the sighs of the relentless wind.

It is a land to be discovered,
with the explorer embarking, banner in hand
ready to take possession,
only if Patagonia itself is willing.

It has seen an era of adventurers,
who came in search of a better destiny,
as well as born witness to the disappearance
of the first inhabitants
who fell in the face of modernity.

The short, winter days,
contrasting with the short summer nights,
have not forgotten the blood spilled.
The same blood that has watered the great valleys and
united both dreamers and the first inhabitants.

But in spite of everything,
in the heart of this vast land...
there remains...
The Last Hope.