Latest Posts

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 […]

Anticipation is an underrated aspect of travel. There’s so much pleasure that goes into planning a trip and looking forward to what you’ll do when you get there, from studying your  itinerary to putting together a packing list. For me, that’s only heightened when you’re going on a trek, where the journey is as much […]

The coastline of Chilean Patagonia is crinkly edged. The Andes Mountains begin their slow eruption for the sea here, leaving behind them a steep-sided landscape punctuated by some of the world’s most spectacular fjords. It’s a perfect landscape when seen from the water on an expedition cruise or by kayak, but until relatively recently little […]

Birdwatching can take you to some unexpected places. I come from a family of birdwatchers and we’ve travelled the world with it, from the cloudforests of Costa Rica and the Australian Outback to the green hills of Sri Lanka. My most recent birdwatching experience was on an Antarctic expedition cruise, where icebergs offered a beautiful […]

Patagonia is somewhere that’s synonymous with adventure. It’s about rugged landscapes, snowy mountains, and a great untamed wilderness. It’s why we love it. But one question we often get asked at Swoop is how safe is Patagonia for a solo female traveller? Well, as just that – a solo female who has spent over 18 […]

The map of Tierra del Fuego is littered with so many sad place names that you’re often left feeling that its first European visitors just weren’t having a very good time. Places like Disappointment Bay, Port Famine and the Gulf of Sorrows hardly offered encouragement to potential colonists – and even today a traveller might […]

If you visit one region on your trip to Patagonia, it will almost certainly be Torres del Paine National Park. Located in southern Chile, Torres del Paine is the crown jewel and hiking hub of Patagonia. Its iconic landscape is a quintessential postcard view, the image you conjure when your mind hears the word ‘Patagonia’: […]

Torres del Paine National Park is full of truly extraordinary landscapes, from its immense granite towers to the hulking mass of the Paine Massif itself. But in six seasons of working in the park as a guide and hiking the W Trek more times than I care to remember, there was one place that I […]

Wetlands are some of the world’s most important carbon sinks. Marshy areas soak up atmospheric carbon far more quickly than trees, to the extent that as well as being crucial biodiversity hotspots, wetlands collectively store twice as much carbon as all the forests in the world.  These wetlands don’t just have to be vast areas […]

Chile’s Atacama Desert is, by some measures, the driest place on Earth. The salty earth here bumps up against an amphitheatre of camel-coloured hills and the ground has the texture of burnt pizza crust, cracking under the pressure of your boots. The air feels as if it’s whooshed in from some giant unseen hair dryer. […]

Any traveller to Argentinian Patagonia quickly becomes familiar with the name Perito Moreno. It’s the name of one of the region’s most celebrated landmarks, the epic Perito Moreno Glacier in Los Glaciares National Park, which can be explored in a host of ways, from boat trips along its frozen cliffs to ice-hiking on its back. […]

In April 2024, Florida-based landscape architect Sydney Fisk travelled with Swoop Patagonia to Torres del Paine. Her experience centred on a stay at EcoCamp, which had been the focus of a research project on sustainable travel and eco-resorts. We caught up with her after her trip to discover what it felt like to finally visit […]

Patagonia has no shortage of incredible scenery. From the volcano-dotted landscapes of Chile and Argentina’s Lake Districts, the spine of the Andes mountains with its glaciers, ancient forests and crinkled fjords, to the wild coastline at the southernmost tip of the Americas, this is a region made for adventure travel.  But which are the best […]

The ship had barely pulled out of Punta Arenas when the talk turned to Cape Horn. Would we really get there? It felt like a mythical place, all treacherous weather and shipwrecks. Not quite the southernmost tip of the world when you look at the map, but definitely the most extreme in my imagination. It […]

‘Don’t go right. Please, don’t go right…’ Talking to the road is never a good sign, but I’d become obsessed with its direction and the crazy thought that I could win it over as an ally in my all-consuming struggle with the Patagonian wind. Now so strong I could barely keep my bike on the […]

It’s a story as old as humanity itself: the conflict between farm and wilderness, between those raising livestock and predators looking for an easy lunch. Whether it’s ranchers and coyotes on the American plains, Maasai herders and lions, or shepherds versus wolves in the mountains of Europe, the question always remains: can people, livestock and […]

Note: This article was updated on 14 November 2024 In July 2024, Chilean authorities announced that the Las Guardas Bridge, a key crossing point along the O Circuit trail in Torres del Paine National Park, had been seriously damaged by winter avalanches. We are pleased to announce that thanks to the support of Swoop customers, […]

The trees outside my window were bent double by the wind, a permanent reminder of what a tough place Patagonia can sometimes be to make a home. I was on Navarino Island in Chilean Tierra del Fuego, and I was waiting to see the dentist.  Not just any dentist – my teeth were actually just […]

There’s a common idea that a meal at the best restaurants should come with a side order of drama. Dinner served up from a theatrically pretentious menu perhaps, or from a red-faced celebrity chef shouting orders at his harassed crew. They certainly don’t come from a remote cabin that looks like a fisherman’s shack and […]