Our latest contribution to Expedia’s YouTube channel is the Patagonia Travel Guide. Since this region is of enormous proportions, this is our longest travel video to date. The documentary-style travel video received over 4,000 views and 200 likes in just 4 days and, judging by the comments, Patagonia’s awe-inspiring nature surprised many viewers.
Mark and Jan, a photography team from Brisbane, set out to this remote destination as part of their adventurous tour of some of South America’s emerging tourism regions. They travelled around by car and even crossed the choppy Magellan Strait by ferry to film the southernmost tip, the legendary ‘Edge of the World’. Mark and Jan visited mountain after mountain and lake after lake. This involved a lot of hiking, long car and boat trips and enduring the windy weather and the cold of this southern land.
Since the footage they came back with covered a region that comprises about a third of Argentina and nearly half of Chile (although nobody really knows how big the region is!), it took days just to process the 900 or so video clips and another few days to put these in a logical geographical order. The pair had stopped in major tourist destinations, such as Bariloche, el Calefate and Torres del Paine, as well as Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, and numerous off-the-beaten-track mountain and lake resorts, so there was a lot of research involved too.
I had the honour of writing the script for the Patagonia travel video. As a travel writer, the biggest challenge is always passing on the feeling that a place evokes when you are actually there. How do you convey that sense of awe when you look up at giant glaciers, waterfalls and volcanoes, the aromas of the local food, the invigorating feeling of meeting new people, speaking a new language and discovering new cultures? (Especially since Patagonia is cold and windswept and I was sitting on the back deck of my office in Queensland’s subtropical environment while writing the script!)
So, I dug up my old journal of my own Patagonia adventures and let my memories take me back. I suddenly remembered the ‘whiskey on the rocks’ I drank while observing the floating icebergs, horse riding across the wind-swept plains of Torres del Paine, the Aurora Australis I had spotted while on the plane to Ushuaia, the huge wall of ice that came down with a deafening roar when I stood on the lookout point for Perito Moreno, the Argentinean wine and grilled lamb in the welcoming restaurants and the fun I had skiing in Bariloche.
From that moment on, the words just flowed and while viewing the amazing footage that our camera team shot, combined with reading snippets from the travel diaries of the likes of Magellan and Darwin, the story of Patagonia basically wrote itself.
The epic music for this Patagonia travel video was composed by Daniel and Jacquie, and the mammoth task of video editing was done in-house by Nick and Sawyer.
Watch the Patagonia travel video here and tell us what you think by leaving a comment on Expedia’s YouTube channel. Did we succeed in showing the world the legendary beauty of faraway Patagonia?
