This Way Southward

This book follows the authors travels south from Buenas Aires to Tierra del Fuego, with some side trips into the south of Chile. This time the author travels in a car, rather than by horse, for which he is more well known (in one of his earlier books he travelled from Buenas Aires to Washington by horse). His reasoning for the vehicle - there was insufficient time to travel by horse before the winter, and he couldn't spend two years on the trip.
The winter certainly did follow his efforts, every time he settled in for more than a few days the weather became colder and he had to set off again.

I enjoyed the writing in this. Tierra del Fuego is an interesting sounding place - not written about too often, although he only spent a short time there - more of the book was about the mainland travel. Tschiffely's writing is like a series of short stories. He has many friends and acquaintances in Argentina, and he runs into them in the most out of the way places. So many people seem to know of him due to his earlier exploits, and many ask after his famous horses Gato and Mancha who he visits in their retirement several times in this book.

As well as his stories about places and people, and the chronicling of his current travel, the intelligence / memory of horses gets plenty of time in this book - it is a theme the author returns to a number of times. He has a number of anecdotes to illustrate this, but none more obvious that his own horses reaction to his voice having not seen them for seven years. He also dips into the history of various places, adding a depth to his story.

Three and a half stars, rounded up.