The town supports this transient economy with museums, hotels, arts and crafts shops, a little nightlife and restaurants which serve everything from local cuisine to the weirdly alien — beaver, a type of llama
called guanaco, and krill — the microscopic shellfish that is whale chow.
My itinerary was Torre del Paine National Park, a preserve of stark beauty with jagged peaks bisected by frozen glacial rivers of ice, herds of
guanacos, nandus (large ostrich - like birds also
called rheas), foxes and, most nearly - extinct of all, the rarely - seen authentic cowboy.