Ten days in Argentina: a different country at the end of every flight

Long-haul flights from Europe and North America land at Ezeiza in the morning, which means you have an afternoon whether you want one or not. Use it gently and stay in the old centre.

Everything political that has happened in Argentina has happened on Plaza de Mayo, from the 1810 revolution to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who have walked their circuit around the pyramid in the middle every Thursday afternoon since 1977. The pink presidential palace fills the eastern side and the colonial town hall the western one.

Then sit down. The old cafes on Avenida de Mayo have been in business since the 1850s and nobody will move you on, which after fourteen hours in a seat is the correct next activity.

Eat late and sleep. Tomorrow is a proper day.

Argentina was among the richest countries on earth when it built its opera house, and the Teatro Colon is still ranked with the best in the world for sound. The guided tour covers the horseshoe auditorium, the workshops underneath and the gallery where the acoustics are supposedly best, and it sells out in high season, so buy the slot before you land.

Ten minutes away on Avenida de Mayo is the strangest office building in South America. Palacio Barolo was laid out as a diagram of Dante's Divine Comedy, with hell in the basement, purgatory up the shaft and a lighthouse at the top for paradise. Tours go to the lantern and have to be reserved.

In the afternoon, walk or take the Subte up to Recoleta for El Ateneo Grand Splendid, a 1919 theatre converted into a bookshop without anybody taking the theatre out. The boxes are reading nooks and the stage is a cafe.

Dinner in Palermo, which starts around ten and needs no booking on a weeknight.

Recoleta Cemetery is the reason to give a day to this side of town. The old families built themselves marble houses instead of graves, in whatever style was fashionable the year they died, and the result is a walled grid of streets you walk through with the doors at eye level. Some are polished and fresh with flowers; others have collapsed inwards and you can see the coffins.

Eva Peron is here, in the Duarte family vault down a side lane, and it is a modest black tomb with a queue in front of it. The map at the gate marks it, along with presidents, admirals and a girl who was reportedly buried alive.

Ten minutes away the national art collection is free and better than most people expect: a strong European nineteenth century room, and Argentine painters upstairs that almost every visitor skips.

Finish across town at the Evita museum, which is small, partisan and much more interesting for being so. It is housed in a building her foundation ran as a shelter for women and children, which does more to explain her hold on this country than any label could.

La Boca is where the Genoese dock workers landed, and they built with what the shipyards threw out: corrugated iron and ship's paint, one colour per wall because that was what was left in the tin. The result is the most photographed street in Argentina and a neighbourhood that has stayed poor.

Go in the morning, keep to the few blocks that are policed, and arrive and leave by taxi rather than walking down from San Telmo. Inside that boundary it is a tourist strip with tango dancers working for tips, and it is still worth seeing.

The stadium is four blocks away and it is the other reason people come. Even without a match, the museum and pitch tour explain more about Argentina than most museums manage.

Come back through Puerto Madero, the converted docks, where a white pedestrian bridge crosses the water and the old brick warehouses are now restaurants. Pack tonight: tomorrow's flight is from the city airport, not Ezeiza.

An hour and three quarters from the city airport to Puerto Iguazu, over the pampas and then over red earth and forest. The temperature goes up by ten degrees somewhere over Corrientes.

The town is small, hot and functional, and its one genuine pleasure is a private garden a few streets from the centre where the owners have spent years planting for hummingbirds. You sit on a bench and a dozen species come to within a metre of your face. It takes an hour and costs almost nothing.

Walk down to the Hito Tres Fronteras afterwards, the obelisk on the bluff where the Iguazu meets the Parana and three countries face each other across the water, with Brazil on one bank and Paraguay on the other.

Buy tomorrow's water and sunscreen tonight, and set an alarm. The park gates open at eight and the first two hours are the only quiet ones.

Around eighty percent of the Iguazu falls are on the Argentine side, which means Argentina has the walkways and Brazil has the view. There are something like two hundred and seventy separate cascades spread along nearly three kilometres of cliff, and the park has built catwalks that put you directly above, below and between them.

Do the Garganta del Diablo first, before the crowds and the heat. A small train runs to the far station and a kilometre of catwalk crosses the flat brown river to the lip of a horseshoe where the whole thing simply goes. The noise is physical and the spray soaks everyone. There is a viewing platform and there is nothing to say about it that the platform does not.

Then the Circuito Superior, which walks the tops of the falls, and after lunch the Circuito Inferior, which drops through the forest to the bottom and gets you wet. Isla San Martin, out in the middle of the whole thing, is reached by a free boat whenever the river is low enough.

Watch the coatis. They look like friendly raccoons, they are neither, and they will open a bag to get at food. Do not feed them and do not eat with one nearby.

The longest travel day of the trip. A direct flight to Salta runs in some seasons; otherwise it routes through Buenos Aires and takes most of the day. Either way you arrive in a different country: the humidity is gone, the light is hard, and the mountains start at the end of the street.

Salta's main square is a complete colonial set piece, arcaded on two sides with a pink cathedral on a third, and cafes under the colonnades where people sit for hours. The old town hall on the western side was built in 1783 and has the best surviving arcaded facade in Argentina.

Across the square is the reason to give Salta more than a night. In 1999 an expedition found three Inca children on the summit of Llullaillaco, a volcano of nearly 6,700 metres on the Chilean border, where they had been left as offerings five hundred years earlier and frozen ever since. They are not remains in the usual sense. One of the three is shown at a time in a cooled case, and the museum handles the question of whether they should be shown at all more honestly than most institutions would.

Eat empanadas, and go to a folk bar on Calle Balcarce late.

North of Salta the road climbs into a narrow valley of layered rock that has been a trade route for several thousand years, first as an Inca road and then as the mule track between Buenos Aires and the silver at Potosi. UNESCO listed the whole valley in 2003.

Purmamarca comes first, a small adobe village under the Cerro de los Siete Colores, a hillside striped in ochre, green, violet and red. The colours are strongest in the morning and there is a short circuit walk behind the village that gets you away from the craft stalls.

Tilcara, half an hour on, has the Pucara, a partly reconstructed hilltop fortress of the Omaguaca people with a cactus garden at the entrance and a long view up and down the valley.

The last stop is the best. Above Humahuaca a rough road climbs to about 4,300 metres and turns a corner onto the Serrania de Hornocal, a serrated ridge banded in fourteen distinct colours running the whole length of the horizon. It wants the afternoon sun, which is conveniently when you will arrive.

This is a twelve hour day and a hard one, most of it above three thousand metres. Drink constantly and eat lightly.

The Tren a las Nubes exists because Argentina wanted a railway to the Chilean border across country that has no business carrying one. It climbs from the valley into the puna on switchbacks and spirals and ends at La Polvorilla, a steel trestle bridge on stilts at 4,220 metres with nothing around it for as far as you can see.

How the day is organised has changed more than once, and the current version usually involves a coach out to San Antonio de los Cobres with the train doing only the final section. Check what you are actually buying, because the difference is several hours.

Either way it is a full day, roughly fourteen hours door to door, at an altitude that will make you slow and sleepy. A doctor travels with the train and oxygen is carried, which tells you the altitude is not decorative.

The high plateau on the way is the real reward: llamas, salt, adobe villages and light that carries for a hundred kilometres.

Cerro San Bernardo stands directly behind the city and a cable car goes up from the park at the bottom in eight minutes. There are also about a thousand steps if you would rather earn it. From the top the whole valley is laid out with the ranges beyond, and it is at its clearest early.

Coming down, the Pajcha museum is the right last thing in Argentina: three rooms of Andean and Amazonian textiles, silverwork and religious carving, privately assembled, very well chosen, in a house that most visitors walk straight past.

Flights to Buenos Aires leave through the afternoon and the airport is twenty minutes from the centre. If you are connecting to an international flight, remember that it goes from Ezeiza and not from the airport you land at, and leave three hours for the transfer.