Category: Epic Adventures

I grew up in a bilingual household, speaking both English and Welsh and I’m very proud of my Welsh heritage, but I never realised, until I started working for Swoop Patagonia, that the connection my family home in north Wales had with Patagonia. It is a hidden history that I wasn’t taught at schools – […]

I’ve travelled the length and breadth of Patagonia, but Los Glaciares in Argentina has always been my favourite national park. I first backpacked here in 2002, then again a few years later when I did a mad cross-continental bike ride from Rio all the way south to Ushuaia at the very tip of South America. […]

At Swoop Patagonia we’re obsessed with the ends of the Earth. Few things excite us more than the view of peak after snowy peak after climbing a stiff mountain pass. Or the release after holding your breath as you watch a puma pass by with her cubs, or a wind so bracing it cuts like […]

The Andes Mountains are ancient. They’ve formed a rampart down the spine of South America for around 14 million years. In Chile, they’ve helped form landscapes as wildly diverse as the Atacama Desert on its high altitude plateau, the ragged and glacier-draped coastline of the Chilean Fjords, and of course the great granite peaks of […]

Before I moved to Chile, I had never really given the stars much thought. I grew up in the middle of England, where the skies were either grey because of rain clouds or glowed orange at night thanks to sodium street lamps. I knew the same small handful of constellations that everyone else did and […]

Ushuaia on the southern tip of Argentina can feel like the last outpost of civilization. It’s somewhere that’s always embraced that image: tourist slogans reading ‘fin del mundo’ are everywhere, alongside street art showing convicts in stripy prison uniforms, remembering when this part of Tierra del Fuego was somewhere you were once sent as a […]

A road trip is one of the great dreams of travel. It’s no wonder that time and again songwriters have returned to the idea of a car and a highway that stretches on forever as the ultimate promise of freedom. Bruce Springsteen practically built a career on the idea, and everyone knows that Route 66 […]

I’ve always loved horses. Ever since I was little, I’ve felt a deep connection to them. Growing up in a city didn’t provide much opportunity to ride or even be around them. My grandmother’s brothers kept horses, but women weren’t allowed to ride them, let alone little girls. There was still a part of me […]