CHILEAN Patagonia is roughly the size of Mississippi, Alabama and northern Florida combined, and makes up Chile's southernmost landmass. When I first went there in 1994, there was only one road. For me, there was only one reason to take that road: brown trout. The road was, and still is, the furthest extension of the Pan American Highway, running from Dead Horse, Alaska, to Villa O'Higgins, Chile. As the road was being built -- and it is still years from completion -- it opened Patagonia to fly fishers, who now can drive into one of the remotest areas of South America to catch big, fat brown trout on grasshopper flies. The road and the fly fishers, in turn, exposed the gauchos -- semi-nomadic cowboys -- to the outside world.

For two centuries, gauchos have lived in relative anonymity. They bring cattle to market on drives that often last months at a time. In winter, when the snow is too deep to travel comfortably, they communicate via smoke signal. Now, many are leaving the mountains for the town of Coihaique, central Patagonia's only real population center and the only place in 42,000 square miles where the 21st Century has made inroads. Patagonia's only road comes into town from the north and exits to the south. In five minutes, you can go from an Internet café on Calle Prat, Coihaique's main drag, through a time warp and into a part of South America where the population density is reportedly lower than that in the Sahara Desert.

To some gauchos, seeing the fly fishers was like looking into a mirror that reflected all the shortcomings of a life with neither electricity nor, in many cases, running water. This left them with a tough decision to make: stay put, or go through the time warp to town.

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