Argentina Highlights: From Buenos Aires to Iguassu Falls

Buenos Aires lands with impact. The taxi from Ezeiza crosses the sprawling Pampas before the city suddenly rises out of the flatness — a teeming, cosmopolitan capital that mixes European grandeur with South American passion. Your private city tour covers the whole tapestry: elegant Recoleta with its French-boulevard architecture, bohemian San Telmo with its cobblestone streets and antique markets, the colourful painted houses of La Boca and the chic waterfront of Puerto Madero. That evening: an unforgettable tango show with dinner, the dancers moving with a precision and intimacy that makes you understand immediately why this city invented them. Day three takes you out to the Pampas for a gaucho festival on an estancia — horsemanship displays, asado over open coals, folk music and the particular pleasure of watching skilled people do something extraordinarily well.

A short domestic flight delivers you to Mendoza, a city of tree-lined boulevards and plazas that sits in the shadow of the highest mountain range outside the Himalayas. The snow-capped Andes visible from almost every street corner provide a backdrop that most cities can only dream of. Your Mendoza City Tour covers the elegant parks and boulevards, the Frank Romero Day amphitheatre where the annual grape harvest festival is held, and Glory Hill for panoramic views over the city and the wine-producing valleys below. The highlight is the next morning's full vineyard visit — some of the world's finest Malbec country, tasting rooms set among vine rows with the Andes gleaming white beyond.

Another flight takes you north to Salta — one of Argentina's most beautiful colonial cities, its terracotta and cream colonial architecture earning it the nickname 'La Linda' (the beautiful). But Salta is the gateway rather than the destination. The small group tour from Salta ventures into the Quebrada de Humahuaca — a UNESCO World Heritage gorge of extraordinary colour: layered rock faces of red, purple, green and ochre, Andean villages where Quechua is still the first language, salt flats and the extraordinary Cerro de los Siete Colores (Hill of Seven Colours) at Purmamarca. This is Argentina's most visually dramatic landscape, utterly unlike anything further south.

Nothing prepares you for Iguassu. Eleanor Roosevelt, on her first sight of the falls, reportedly said: 'Poor Niagara.' The system stretches nearly three kilometres across the border of Argentina and Brazil, comprising 275 individual cascades. The Argentinian side puts you at water level, walking catwalks that extend to the edge of the falls — the spray, the noise, the sheer volume of water moving is overwhelming in the best possible way. The next morning, the Brazilian side offers the panoramic view: a single vantage point from which you can see the entire arc. Between them, you understand why this is one of the seven natural wonders of the world.