THE POWER OF PATAGONIA : At the tip of South America, gazing upon one of nature’s most majestic landscapes from the comfort of the region’s first luxury lodge

In a moment, I will tell you how I got here, and probably you will be horrified.

But first let me say that on my first full day in Patagonia, I awoke warm and comfortable, surrounded by fancy bedding and green wood paneling. I remembered where I was. And I turned to the window.

Beyond lay a glassy green lake, silent hills and an utterly implausible range of mountain peaks. Then came a large and satisfying breakfast in a dining room resounding with Chilean and Brazilian accents, and two days of hiking, horseback riding and glacier inspection.

“There are very few places where you can get so far away that there isn’t a sign of civilization,” said Winsor Copeland, another newcomer, as he scanned the horizon later on that first day. “You can see forever. No roads. No power lines. Nothing.”

Patagonia is about as close to nowhere as a person can get on this Earth. The region begins where the rivers Negro and Limay cut across Chile and Argentina--the southernmost reaches of the South American continent--and sprawls southward across the outback of both countries down to Tierra del Fuego. It is not so much a landscape as it is an ongoing natural riot. Vast plains. Wild flamingos. Sparse population.

In the middle of Patagonia’s Chilean half, amid the sharpest mountain peaks and greenest lakes, is Torres del Paine National Park. The area has had national park status since 1959, and now has grown to include 598,000 acres. In summer (December to March) there is wind; in winter, snow. Rangers counted 36,038 visitors to the park last year--as many as Yosemite gets in three typical days. There are a handful of rough-hewn hotels around, but the hardiest campers disdain them and spend seven to 10 days hiking and camping on el circuito , a loop connected by hosteria s (sites with campgrounds and rustic shelters) up to 18 miles apart.

I’ll camp, I hope, on another trip. This time, I paid big money and checked into Explora, the first luxury lodging in the history of these parts.

Explora opened quietly in late 1993. Thanks to a pact between the government and the resort’s well-connected owner, Pedro Ibanez (whose company, Corpora, also owns several food companies and most of Ladeco Chilean Airlines), the lodging is set inside the park’s boundaries. Its location, on a hill overlooking Lake Pehoe, is nearly unsurpassable. Its exterior is stark, metallic and unnatural, but its interior is a cozily modernist concoction of blond woods, broad picture windows and Scandinavian design influence. There are just 30 rooms, and the staff is largely outdoorsy young people, most of whom speak English and Spanish. Guests pay about $260 a night and up, all meals and activities included.

And here is how I arrived: from Los Angeles, a five-hour red-eye flight to Miami. A seven-hour layover. An eight-hour flight from Miami to Santiago, Chile’s capital. A four-hour flight to Punta Arenas, where the Strait of Magellan ripples darkly beside the tiny airport, and the shores of Tierra del Fuego, the last bit of South America before the Antarctic begins, lie bare across the water.

Then a van driver and guide collected seven of us, and off we rumbled for another six hours, covering 250 miles of a narrow highway, slipping onto the graded gravel shoulder and bracing for a hail of pebbles at the approach of every oncoming vehicle.

Outside, flat spaces stretched endlessly, sheep grazed and charred stumps stood as a reminder of the scale and emptiness of the place: Early in this century, a settlers’ fire raced out of control and burned for three years over more than a million acres.

Rolling across that bare plain, we watched trees and hills rise, and the hills gather into mountains, and streams spread into lakes. Nearer the park entrance (admission: $4 for Chilean nationals, about $10 for foreigners), we spotted a dozen guanacos (a cousin of the llama) gathered at a watering hole, the Paine peaks rising behind them. The riot had begun.

For nearly five centuries, beginning with Ferdinand Magellan on his way around the world, the strangers who have straggled into the territory (and lived) have been inclined to straggle out with new ideas about the way of things on this planet.

One was a young English scientist on his way to the Galapagos in the 1830s. Passing through the Strait of Magellan, he and his shipmates met an indigenous tribesman before pressing on to the islands. The explorers marveled at how different the tribesman seemed from European man. Twenty years later, after much study in the islands, Charles Darwin went public with his theory of evolution.

Not quite 150 years later, and within a few seasons of each other, came the writers Bruce Chatwin (“In Patagonia”) and Paul Theroux (“The Old Patagonian Express”). Chatwin, a former museum curator, walked and hitchhiked, exulting in petrified turds from ancient sloths and spinning arcane theories. (In one, he explains why 16th-Century native Patagonians must have been Shakespeare’s inspiration for Caliban in “The Tempest.”) Theroux, winding up a 15,000-mile train odyssey, found he had a problem getting his bearings in a place so flat (in parts), so tall (in other parts), so miniature and so vast.

“I was an ant on a foreign anthill,” Theroux complained. “It was impossible to verify the size of anything in this space.”

Each morning I woke in my lodge-style room and marveled again at those mountains and lakes; seeing them through bleary eyes at 6 a.m. was like being sung awake by a 100-voice choir. Clearly, the view impressed the architect too: Above the sink, where every other hotel puts a mirror, my room had a glass panel so that I could keep an eye on the mountains and lake while flossing. (There was a mirror, too, off to the side.)

The hotel is open year-round, and guests stay for three, four or seven nights. Explora has done well with the rich and famous of South America, but has never advertised in the United States, apparently preferring stealth in seeking out the appropriately upscale and outdoorsy among us.

Among the Americans present during my three-night visit in January, Sandra Foxley and her son David of Denver had come on the advice of friends in Santiago; Fred and Amy Wesson had brought their three children and friend Copeland at the suggestion of a travel agent in Sao Paulo. Other guests were from Chile, Brazil and French Polynesia. In a register book on one of the Explora boats, I counted just seven Americans among the 45 guests who had signed in 1995.

Every night, there was a briefing on the next day’s outdoor options and a sign-up session. A 2 1/2-hour hike past an ice field to a condor lookout? A demanding daylong exploration, by boat and foot, of Grey Glacier? A strenuous daylong hike to the base of the Paine Towers? A horseback ride around the waters of Laguna Verde? There are more than a dozen standard activities, five of which are offered each day.

The menu is limited to a couple of main dishes each lunch and dinner (the chef is understandably inclined to concentrate on the area’s supplies of fresh fish and lamb). Garbage is trucked out. Children are not particularly encouraged, but during my visit there were half a dozen on hand. Those over 8 seemed to enjoy it more, and pose fewer problems than those younger.

On my first full day at the park, the picnic lunch was barbecued lamb, and the afternoon’s adventure was a horseback ride. I hastily saddled up and joined Copeland and others for the three-hour, seven-mile expedition. Our route passed a little of everything, including, as we climbed to a cleft between mountains, the most striking, and intimidating, view I’ve ever seen from horseback.

Beneath us stretched the aquamarine waters of Lago de Toro, miles of unconquered outback and a horizon of jagged mountains. Directly in front of us, a difficult mountainside path descended sharply on loose dirt, then cut across an even steeper slope of loose black volcanic rock. For hundreds of yards the slope descended, with nothing to slow the roll of a fallen horse and rider.

“Double black diamond,” muttered my fellow explorer Fred Wesson, half joking. Two children and one adult looked at what lay ahead, chose to dismount and made their way down on foot. This was an option offered by our Explora guide, Pascale Durandin, an accomplished rider and alert group leader.

Ice nuggets mingled with pebbles at our feet. Icebergs sloshed in the deeper waters.

But just a couple of minutes after we had reached the foot of the mountain, one of my bridle’s leather straps snapped, apparently worn through by years of use. In other words, for all those anxious moments on that slippery slope, my control of the horse had been essentially dependent upon a thread. A vaquero re-rigged the severed strap with a knot. He improvised a similar solution for Copeland, who had similar and nearly simultaneous tack trouble.

Nobody got hurt. But those equipment failures point up the inherent risks in places as remote as Patagonia, especially when there is only one company with a concession to rent horses in the park, as is apparently the case in Torres del Paine. Of course, Explora should demand from that operator as many safety measures as it can. But ultimately, there’s going to be some level of risk, and the traveler faces it, or chooses not to, in such far-flung places.

(Other things went wrong at Explora, too, but most seemed easily remedied, and may already have been. Sinks and tubs drained slowly. Printed telephone directions were inaccurate, and some of the amenities weren’t easy to locate. It was two days before some guests discovered where the indoor lap pool and outdoor whirlpool were. Only on the morning I left did I learn that there were new mountain bikes secreted away in a shed, awaiting riders.)

*

The day after our horseback adventure, we boarded a van, drove for half an hour on more dirt roads, piled out and crossed a wood suspension bridge on which the gaps were almost as wide as the planks, while a 35-degree stream raced milkily below. Then we trudged across a long sandbar, and soon a sparkling lakefront scene spread before us.

Ice nuggets mingled with pebbles at our feet. Icebergs sloshed, bluish and locomotive-size, in the deeper waters. And at the other end of the lake, the solid walls of Grey Glacier tilted toward us. It was enough to make the craggy mountain to our right, snow-dusted and tall enough to disappear into the high windblown clouds, seem incidental.

We crossed the lake by boat, scrambled onto rocks adjoining the glacial ice and merrily climbed around, snapping pictures. On the return trip, we sipped whiskey chilled with chipped-off bits of 12,000-year-old glacier.

Then, as we began the half-mile return hike across the sandbar, the wind kicked up--way up, to a force we guessed was 50 m.p.h. It drove the children to seek cover inside their mothers’ parkas, flung my cap into an icy puddle and knocked over a lady who looked to be about retirement age. And while it shoved us along, a new rain began to pelt us, and a shaft of sunbeam reached down to connect with a distant iceberg.

While we wimpered in our insignificance, the chunk of ice stood there gleaming like an outsize blue-white diamond in a world otherwise gray and wind-lashed. It was a sight, and a reminder: You can find comfort and you can find wilderness. But even if you travel to the end of the Earth to find them in their most concentrated and uncrowded forms, you may not be able to enjoy them simultaneously.

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GUIDEBOOK

A Passage to Patagonia

Getting there: Lan Chile flies direct to Santiago with two stops (Mexico City and Lima), and then connects to Punta Arenas. Lacsa flies direct to Santiago with four stops. United and American offer connecting service to Santiago via Miami. Aerolineas Argentinas offers connecting service from LAX to Santiago (via Lima and Buenos Aires). From Santiago, Lan Chile and Ladeco fly direct to Punta Arenas (via Puerto Montt). Restricted LAX-Punta Arenas fares on Lan Chile begin at $1,456.

Where to stay: Explora (reservations: Av. Americo Vespucio Sur 80, Piso 5, Santiago, Chile; tel. 011-56-2-208-0664, fax 011-56-2-228-4655) opened two years ago with 30 rooms and suites. Rates, which include transfer from Punta Arenas airport, all meals and daytime activities, run $963 person (double occupancy) for a three-night package; $1,263 for four nights, and $1,800 for seven nights.

The South American summer months (September through April) book up furthest in advance. (Unless you speak good Spanish, it’s easier to reserve through a travel agent.)

Two other lodgings in or next to Torres del Paine National Park: Hosteria Estancia Lazo (reservations: Sociedad Lazo Turismo Ltda., Angamos 1366, Punta Arenas, Chile; tel. 011-56-61-223-771) is a nine-room lodging on a ranch that neighbors the park.

A room for two, September-April, is $90 (less in the off-season). Hosteria Pehoe (reservations: Turismo Pehoe, 21 de Mayo 1464, Punta Arenas, Chile; tel. 011-56-61-41-1390) sits on its own islet in Lake Pehoe, its 31 rooms and restaurant and semi-ramshackle compound is connected to the mainland by a 100-yard walkway. Peak-season rates: $106 for two, breakfast included.

For information on camping and budget lodgings--or just about anything else having to do with South America, for that matter--the most useful guidebook is the South American Handbook (Passport Books, 1995, 1,490 pages, $39.95).

For more information: Contact Sernatur (Chilean National Tourist Board), c/o Ladeco Chilean Airlines, 9500 S. Dadeland Blvd., Miami, FL 33156; tel. (305) 670-6705 or (800) 825-2332.