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Argentina, January 2001.
A publisher once told me that the best way to absolutely guarantee never to sell a book was to write one about South America. “It’s amazing,” he said, “It’s the great remaindered continent.” And you sort of know what he means. In terms of travel and curiosity, our imaginations are still hooked on holidays in history. We tend to revisit the bits of the globe that were once pink and where the natives have second-language English we can patronise and giggle at.

I have a mental picture of South America, but no idea which bits fit into which country. Then, in passing, a psychiatrist mentioned to me that Argentina has more citizens in full-time Freudian analysis than any other on earth, and that did it. Buenos Aires, here I come. When I got there I thought there must have been some mistake, that the plane had been diverted while I slept. BA is utterly familiar: the restaurants, the traffic, the shops, the sounds and smells; it’s a European city, and the people hustling off to make their appointments with their shrinks are all European. This, it turns out, is Argentina’s little problem. There are Italians who speak Spanish and want to look English. And they can’t understand why they’re stuck here on the edge of the River Plate. Argentina is a country of postponed promises. It was going to be the great powerhouse of Latin America. It had it all – the brains, the culture, the sophistication, Come Dancing – but it never happened. The great expectation collapsed into political sleaze, hyperinflation and an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

It’s that disappointment, the unfairness of it, which sends them to the couch. To begin with, I minded that Buenos Aires was so European, perversely in a way that I don’t mind with New York. You don’t go to New York and ask: “Where are all the Mohicans?” But after a bit I just fell into it, fell for it. It’s a modernist city that’s all of a piece, in a butch, macho, historic sort of way, and it has the most wonderful trees. I wouldn’t normally mention trees in the city, but BA’s are spectacular. Jacaranda, eucalyptus, rubber trees, long, shady avenues in gardens, and it’s very Anglophile, which is always a relief.

We have more in common with the Argentina that I knew. We built their railway, tried to invade two or three times in a half hearted, flirty sort of way, and where would English food be without Fray Bentos (a real place)? Then there’s polo. Wherever there are horses, the English will slavishly follow with a broom. Many English have settled here and they all have one thing in common: they’re all women. Can there be a horsey girl from Fulham to Cirencester who hasn’t shagged an Argy polo player? If there is, could you pass her phone number to them – they’d be happy to accommodate, mostly because Argentina girls don’t. Ever. Certainly not until they’re married. This is still a Latin Catholic country, with 19th century colonial morals and snobbery. The girls are beautiful and bewitching, and they maybe know ways of not having sex that even the Vatican hasn’t considered. On every street corner and bar there are people being in flagrante tangoed. It’s a syncopated mime of what you’re not gonna get later, sonny.

We left BA for Patagonia, but only just. I’d been warned about South American airlines – never travel with a football team, they said – but this is the first time I’ve got on a plane where neither the check-in-girl, the stewardess nor the captain knew the destination. “Is this where we’re going?” I asked, pointing to the name on my ticket. “Who knows?” lisped the hostess with a wiggle, then added: “We’ll see.” Not going all the way is obviously a female obsession in Argentina, and, as it happened, we didn’t. The captain came in to land, but at the last minute decided against it. So we were dropped off somewhere else all together, which in England isn’t so bad – being diverted to Stansted is a bore, not a tragedy. Argentina, though, is the size of Jeffrey Archer’s self delusion, and it matters a lot.

We continued in a taxi for a month, through a snowstorm. The snow was a worry, it was meant to be tropically spring-like, not awayday Reykjavik. Finally we arrived at an estancia that was going to be our holiday home, having travelled through a landscape that might have been nice if it hadn’t been seen through God’s net curtains. The next day I woke with a grim British determination to make the best of things, muttering boy-scoutishly words like “bracing” and “adventure” and “should have packed my thermals”. I opened the door, took a deep breath and felt a severe pain in my jaw as it fell to the floor. The sun was out, it was crisp and clear, and there was Patagonia, right there, there and way over there.

Patagonia is unfeasibly beautiful and vast. The beauty never lets up, it’s like ocular tinnitus, a repetitive deafening of the eye, a visual peal of bells that rings from dawn to dusk. We all have a personal template for nature’s wonder, some scale to hold up against a new landscape. Mine is Scotland. Patagonia is Scotland squared, with sagebrush instead of heather. It has all those sense-tingling ingredients that push my personal buttons. It’s leggy and fit, a sinuous place with great curves, it’s competent and emphatic and it’s got a temper, it swears, and, most of all, it doesn’t give a damn. It’s not one of those landscapes that are arch and secretive, it isn’t gentle or flirtatious. It doesn’t wear make-up and it’s not promiscuous. It’s not for everyone.

The best way, indeed, the only way to see Patagonia is from a horse. Which is why we’re staying on a working ranch, with a few thousand head of Hereford that need seeing to. Now, I have a problem with horses, I don’t like them. Not just that, I actively loathe them unless they come with potatoes. I don’t do equestrian. I’ve ridden twice in my life, once on a malevolent, child-abusing pony, and one to do a story on fox-hunting. It’s been enough. So after breakfast (very good bacon and eggs), the English woman who runs the estancia, who has a character and demeanour that has been hewn by the landscape, threw a pair of chaps and a poncho at me and introduced me to a horse whose name I can’t recall. I can never remember animals’ names, but then they never seem to remember mine, and I leapt into the saddle just like that. Well, not so much leapt and not so much a saddle. More like a four-year-old trying to get into the top bunk onto a sheepskin.

Within half an hour the damnedest thing happened: I was having the time of my life. And I realised that it wasn’t horses I hated, it was English horses. These Patagonian jobs are neat elegant and as sure-footed as cat burglars, and they’re automatic. You drive with split reins in one hand, held loose, left to go left, right to go right, tug to stop. This is how riding is meant to be. Not that manual shift, hands-knees-and-bumpsadaisy business they tell you to do in Gloucestershire. Best of all, these beasts don’t trot, which is great because neither do I. They go from ambling to 40 in five seconds flat.

Herding cattle is surprisingly good fun, a bit like being a mounted policeman at a Chelsea match – you get to shout “yee-haw” and “yippee kayo” and “horseradish”. There is the pain, of course, which is just the other side of extreme. After two days the only place I felt comfortable was in the saddle, which suited me fine, as I didn’t want to get off. Apart from herding, corralling, separating, branding and roping, I won a calf first go and the rawhide lasso nearly ripped my hands off. There are other things to do on a horse. You can ride up vertical shale mountains to see condors, which are very big vultures that hang in winds you can lean against, and you can visit Indian burial caves with abstract wall paintings.

This sort of hacking beats mooching around B-roads in Surrey into a ten-gallon hat. When the dog goes off foraging it doesn’t come back with a mixy rabbit, but an infuriated armadillo. There are eagles and bright, burrowing parrots, deer and extremely badly designed ginger llama things. From the tops of bluffs, the big sky races, tracing shadow patterns over the country over a panorama of winding rivers, mice, gullies and sloping grassland, all framed by the distant, shimmering white, vertiginous Andes.

Patagonia was a late developer. It wasn’t really colonised until the late 19th century; the final, sad Indian war was in 1903. Now it’s what the North American West must have been like in the 1920s, it’s John Wayne country, thankfully without John Wayne. What they have here instead are gauchos, the last real cowboys. Extraordinary horsemen and even more extraordinary vain show-offs. Their kit is incredible, and I got so deep into the dressing-up box that an Outward Bound group of English holiday-makers thought I was a hired hand, which is the first time I’ve been mistaken for a small brown Inca on a horse.

Sadly, too soon it was time to fade into the sunset. I badly wanted to go on to see the monkey-puzzle forests at the foot of the Andes, to drive the cattle to high summer pasture. But it was time to kill something.

If you’re used to shooting in England, then dove-shooting in northern Argentina seems indecently sybaritic and comfortable. For a start, it’s bright and hot, you stand under shade trees with a boy who loads and fetches an endless supply of cold drinks. But what separates it from England most is the number of birds. This isn’t your 200 birds a day or even your 2,000 birds a day; this is a never-ending stream of millions of birds a day, and it either improves your shooting no end or makes you want to take up stamp collecting. Ubiquity doesn’t necessarily lead to competence. These doves are as tricky as anything I’ve ever fired at, about the size of jays and as fast as partridge, as acrobatic as woodcock and as canny as their pigeon cousins. And they come not so much in coveys as flurries. At the end of three days (as long as the average human shoulder can stand; the estancia had a fabulous masseur) my average after firing a jaw-thumping thousand cartridges a day was 25%. Better than the RAF, but still pathetic.

The country is different from Patagonia, lush and flat, a mixture of water meadow and marsh, with occasional weird ombo trees. In the hot afternoon we took a sackful of doves and motored on a flat-bottomed boat across the maze of vegetable rivers, sticking a breast on a hook and flinging it into the water. We idiot-fished, getting a satisfying bite every ten minutes and hauling in piranhas the size of dustbin lids, then getting all girlie about retrieving the tackle from their psychopathic mouths. They never told me fishing could be like this, and I never imagined Argentina could be like this, which just goes to show you should always pack as few preconceptions as possible.

And only once did anyone mention the Falklands, without rancour or looking for a rematch. “A silly war,” a man said. Yes, a silly war. We were joined for a moment, mano a mano, both coming from continents that had suffered an embarrassment of silly wars. “Of course, afterwards we got rid of the military and Galtieri, became democratic and pegged inflation, it’s been boom ever since,” he added. Ah well, we got a billion-pound airport in Port Stanley and Margaret Thatcher for another ten years. There was a moment’s silence, then we both laughed. If the subject ever comes up again, I’m on their side.

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