Patagonia, in South America, is a place where many Welsh people fled in order that they could speak their own tongue and celebrate their ancient culture without fear or assault from the English.

It is a vast area straddling the lands of southern Chile and Argentina.

Local Indians tell stories of the Yoshil, a creature that roamed in the Haush, armed with a club. The first modern account of the Yoshil was given in 1886, when Yioi:molke was hunting cormorants.

The Spanish named Patagonia when they discovered it in 1520, after the creatures they claim they saw there that were so big that they named the land after the size of their feet pata gones. The Indians of the Haush were afraid of these protohominids, who had lichenous hair of yellowy-green colour, for they were rumoured to be magical creatures.

The last positive sighting was in 1928 by the hunter Pai:men.

But during the Great War, an Indian called Paka, was camping alone in the forest when a Yoshil appeared before him, stepping out of the woods silently without a single rumour of his presence. Paka knew of the dangerous reputations of these creatures, and fearing he'd be murdered in his sleep, he shot an arrow at the Yoshil.

The Yoshil disappeared.

The next day, he found a corpse a little way off in the forest, he had slain the Yoshil with his arrow. He turned the creature over, and to his horror saw not face of the beast that had disturbed him the night before, but that of his brother, who had just recently died.

He buried the Yoshil, unsure whether it was his brother or not.

People are unsure as to when Patagonia became colonised by humans, archaeological evidence suggests perhaps between 10,000 and 13,000 years ago.

In Tierra del Fuego, there is are two paintings of creatures hunting something that looks like a deer with a horn. It appears to be that of the Yoshil, hunting unicorns.

Not many people know much about South America, as opposed to Central America. But once tasted, never forgotten.

At one time there were actually more Welsh speakers in Patagonia than there were in Wales, although thankfully that has now been reversed and the fight for the Welsh to determine their own future, as well as their past, has been recognised.

We endure, as we always have done.

There are still Aboriginals roaming the interiors and hinterlands of South America that are ownly known by rumour.

There are land right issues as there always have been where cultures collide, as in Australia, the US and Canada.

The most fascinating people that I met there were the Quechans, people that still regard the Andes as their country, the mental maps of their lands, their namesongs, stretching not only backwards, but forwards and across the vast folded landscapes of the most colossal, contiguous ranges known to man.

A village where there is no cancer, where condors soar above the skies, where forgotten civilisations dwell brooding in the infinite valleys that split off like fractals at every mountainous turn. Of cloud forests, rain forests, jungle, high flung lakes and tors, lands where no truck, donkey of horse can travel, just you and your feet and your burning desire to see what is there, over the next thrown peak soaring twenty thousand feet above you.

The cleaness of the air, the sweetness of the waters, the unchartered land, the uncatalogued creatures and plants, the avalanches and the wild orchids, the forts built fifteen thousand feet up, looking out at you as you walk through clouds and the jagged precipices where jaguars sit brooding over their domains.

The spine of South America is an infinite territory, one that inspires, daunts and whispers to you at once of its antiquity and its terrible unforgiving to the unwary.

It is a land of ancient ghosts, ancient tales, ancient cultures and ancient superstition.*

It is a territory that beckons you back with a crooked claw, for it has captured you once and thence forever, and back you must go, as surely as the yawning earth beckons you to her bosom at the end of all your glory days running beneath the lambent chuckle of the sun.

yechydda,