Sampling Argentina

Gaucho girl: Jackie Annesley stays tall in the saddle on the El Colibri ranch near Cordoba

10 April 2012

This is me on a horse in Argentina. The transformation from harridan mother from W10 to gaucho girl was a year in the planning and about a week in the making.

By the time I was cantering through these alfalfa fields, I had almost forgotten I had three young children, that the world was deep in recession or any other thought that could be construed as a worry.

We had arrived in the country seven days earlier at the start of a second honeymoon. It had taken us only 10 years of marriage to realise that relaxing family holidays were a cruel myth.

To hell with the credit crunch — this was our bid to reclaim one of those lazy vacations that the allure of babies had consigned to history.

We had managed to offload the kids for just 10 days — after an overnight flight we were walking the boulevards of Buenos Aires.

The last time I'd been was in 1990 on a $10-a-day six-month tour of South America. Little had changed in this glorious city which has been in economic decline since the Thirties.

The Alvear Palace hotel — which I remember sneaking into to use the loo as a backpacker — was our crispsheeted, marbled-bathroomed home for the next 48 hours.

A pavement café lunch and walk through the extraordinary architecture of the Recoleta cemetery was followed by an early evening visit to the little known Confiteria La Ideal, a Belle Epoque tea room converted into a dance space.

This slice of old Buenos Aires, with its authentic Thonet furniture — where the social inticracies of asking a women to dance remained — cannot compare with a touristy tango show.

John and I shuffled around the floor like two elephants amid the graceful throng of over-50-year-olds and marvelled that such places still existed.

It was the highlight of our short time in the capital, closely followed by lunch the next day in the El Obrero steakhouse in La Boca, and a visit to the suburbs that evening where Argentinian chef Diego Felix feeds "underground diners" local cuisine and wine in his garden for about £25 a head.

The low point was being fleeced for £60 by a cab driver who turned crisp 100-peso notes into fakes with a sleight of hand.

No matter, Patagonia beckoned.

It is hard to do justice to this vast tract of empty land a three-hour flight south of Buenos Aires, other than to say it contains the most spectacular ancient landscape I've ever seen. Our hotel, the

Eolo, had huge picture windows that looked out from the eastern face of Mount Frias. If a brontosaurus had bounded down the wide treeless valley, I'd hardly have been surprised.

The next morning we found ourselves staring into the blueness of an iceberg in Los Glaciares National Park.

I'd never expected to witness this in my lifetime — the extraordinary colour of ice that had fallen as snow up to 15,000 years ago, forming a frozen river that had crept down the mountains before breaking off in massive chunks.

We were on Lake Argentino, en route to Estancia Cristina, now a 12-room hotel but once a 22,000-hectare sheep farm founded by Englishman Joseph

Masters in 1914 in one of the most remote places on earth. We had 24 hours here and the moment our boat hit the shore we were off — a 9km hike up Mount Carnero, a two-hour horse ride through glacial rivers, a feast of trout and steak as the sun went down, then up at dawn for another 10km hike to the Upsala glacier, down through a canyon full of fossils and ending with lunch of pumpkin soup under a tree by a lake.

Hatless, in my sneakers and jeans, I was hopelessly unprepared but sore feet and sunburn were worth it to see a baby condor in flight and hear the gunfire crack of a glacier on the move.

Our final four days on the El Colibri ranch near Cordoba confirmed that after 10 years of marriage we still actually liked each other a lot.

There was reading and beer drinking by the pool, lie-ins and leisurely rides around the huge property that grows organic fruit and vegetables and raises cattle.

It's run by Stéphanie and Raoul Fenestraz, who left France with their three children for a life on the pampas. Guests will find their hospitality seamless, the cuisine delicious and the quality of horses outstanding.

In the departure lounge on our way home, we overheard two foreign businessmen discussing the merits of buying property in Argentina and riding out the recession. Now there's a thought..

THE PACKAGE
Scott Dunn (020 8682 5030, www.scottdunn.com) specialises in tailormade travel worldwide, including Latin America.

Nine nights from £3,995pp, including British Airways flights to Buenos Aires, economy domestic flights with LAN, taxes and private transfers, full board including activities at Estancia Cristina in Patagonia and Estancia El Colibri in Cordoba, and B& B the Alvear Palace in Buenos Aires and Eolo in Patagonia..

THE NEW HOTEL
Film director Francis Ford Coppola's latest venture is Jardin Escondido, with six bedrooms and a studio for exclusive hire or just one floor in Palermo Soho, one of the most vibrant neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. Black Tomato (020 7426 9888, www.blacktomato.co.uk) has five nights from £1,699 pp B& B, concierge service, return flights and transfers.

www.turismo.gov.ar

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