Lago Argentino and Gunther-Plüschow-Memorial

 

Recently I rearranged my library and suddenly leafed through a book. It has been a book by Gunther Plüschow [1]; Segelfahrt ins Wunderland (Sailing voyage to Wonderland) . There has been a distant bell ringing, but I had to look him up in Wikipedia [2]. Then I remembered having been at his memorial site at the Brazo Rico of Lago Argentino.

In his book Plüschow tells about his journey on the sailing vessel Parma in 1926, which took him around Cape Horn to Valdivia, from where he traveled overland to Patagonia. The book is adventutous, but also nationalistic and colonialistic. Not to my taste. The book ends with his retun to Germany.

The next year sees him back in Patagonia. He and his engineer, Ernst Dreblow, brought his plane to Punta Arenas and they flew to Ushuaia and later explored Torres del Paine and other parts of Patagonia. In 1929 he returned to Germany because of funding issues. In 1930 he returned to Patagonia and was killed together with Dreblow in a plane crash near Brazo Rico in 1931. It's a beautiful landscape he chose to explore. He died aged 44. His son Gunter Guntlof lived from 1918 until 2017.

 

Links and References:
[1] Plüschow, G.: Segelfahrt ins Wunderland. Ullstein A.-G., Berlin 1926
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunther_Pl%C3%BCschow and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunther_Pl%C3%BCschow

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