Patagonia

In many ways Ted has made an artform of life on the road, with one trip detouring smoothly into the next until another year has slipped by. “The expense and difficulty is getting to the other side of the world,” he explains. “Once you’re there, why not keep going?” His travelling partners don’t always see it the same way, Ted bidding them adieu as they return home. “I've had a lot of surf trips to some of the most special places in the world, and the surfers I’ll be with just want to get home for Friday night at the pub. ‘Guys, we can go up in the mountains and see Machu Picchu?’ And they're like, ‘Nah, there’s a good band playing Friday night.’”

And while the waves are his reason for going, they’re not the reason for him staying. “It’s like sex without love,” Ted famously quipped of travelling just for surf. “The journey is what it’s all about. The whole surfing experience for me is much more sophisticated than that.” And that’s why one of the world’s great surf lensmen often finds himself landlocked, two days drive from a surfable wave, as he does here.

This story begins at home – Ted’s original home on the windswept Victorian east coast – where he found himself at the local pub on Christmas Eve. Ted’s sister struck up a conversation with a woman who mentioned in passing she organised trips to Antarctica and was looking for a photographer. Ted materialised instantly, sprouting from the carpet between the two, pouring on his inimitable charm, and that was that. He was soon on a ship to Antarctica, the only of the seven continents he’d never visited before.

The ship left port from Ushuaia in Tierra Del Fuego, and as Ted is prone to do, upon his return decided to roll one trip straight into the next. He hired a car and off he went for a week, driving solo around Patagonia. “It seemed pretty logical to smell the roses while I was down there, so to speak.”

Ted had visited Patagonia twice before, decades earlier. He’d spent eight months on the road, riding a motorbike from LA to Patagonia with a friend. The other time he’d been drunk with another friend in Peru and made a late-night pact to fly down to Patagonia and look for surf. The next morning, complete with pisco sour hangovers, off they went.

This time it was Ted, alone and at a loose end, with his cameras, a hire car and some of the most spectacular landscapes on earth.

“It was impulsive as per standard,” offers Ted of this recent trip. “It was just a matter of jumping in a car and going… but was a little trickier than I thought. I had to get special exemptions to take the car off Tierra del Fuego and explore further north, and then you're zigzagging across the Chilean/Argentinian border, due to the nature of the geography there.”

“The driving's pretty straightforward,” says Ted, who has spent great chunks of his life crammed into hire cars. “They were all good roads. Some of the parks might be just dirt roads and they turn to crap, but nothing too difficult. In one of the most stunning parks, Torres del Paine, it seemed weird that the closest fuel was back in Puerto Natales, half a tank away. By the time you drove there, you almost had to drive back to fill up.”

Ted didn’t hike on the trip (“a bit of a dodgy knee”), but it allowed him to pull his perspective back and capture the land in a wide frame. “Photographically, I was almost looking at the forest rather than being in it,” is how he explains it. “Even thinking about it now, it's like the photography doesn't do it justice. I would say after Antarctica – which was awesome – Patagonia as a photographer is more gobsmacking. Whereas Antarctica is more of an awesome experience, it’s very hard to photograph and document that awesomeness.”

Travelling in late summer, the weather was mild by Patagonian measures, but still dynamic enough to make the landscape dance for Ted’s camera. “Patagonia is quite famous for its wind, and apparently people go mad with the really strong winds. Apparently, it's quite common for people to go a little bit loopy. After a few days I was starting to feel it.”

The wind however whipped the Patagonia sky into life. “I developed a bit of a cloud fetish down there,” Ted confesses. “The clouds in the late afternoons on tops of the mountains just form all these bizarre forms, and the lighting when it hits them is stunning. The moisture from the Pacific feeds them, then they snag on the mountains and are swirled by the updrafts and the circulation of the wind. Then you get the low light because you’re at such a low latitude and the sun never really gets very high in the sky. As a photographer, it gives everything a texture and a shape.”

“The first time I went there,” reflects Ted, “I thought I got really lucky with the clouds. The second time I thought, "Oh, I got really lucky twice." But then the third time I realised, "This must happen every day down here. It’s a living postcard.”

This story features in Roaring Journals, Edition Two.