The Empanada Awakening
I arrived in Buenos Aires with a vague notion that I'd "find myself" somewhere between Recoleta and the River Plate. What I actually found was butter under my fingernails and a crisis of confidence in a stranger's kitchen.
I'd signed up for the Empanada Making Class in Buenos Aires Empanada Making Class in Buenos Aires on a whim—the kind of decision you make at 2am in a hostel when someone's playing Vini Vici and the wine is cheap. The idea was romantic: learn the old ways, connect with a local abuela, emerge enlightened and carb-loaded.
What actually happened was I showed up to a neat residential home in a quiet barrio with a woman named Rocio who had the patience of a saint and the withering gaze of someone who'd seen plenty of gringos murder dough before.
"You're holding it like a dead fish," she said, watching me fumble with my first ball of pastry. She wasn't wrong. Three and a half hours later, after rolling, filling, and folding what felt like eight hundred empanadas, I'd managed to produce exactly four that weren't lopsided disasters. Rocio ate one without comment. That was basically applause.
But here's the thing nobody tells you about old-school travel: the magic isn't in becoming good at something. It's in the moment when a local person—someone who doesn't owe you anything—sits down with you over the results and shares a meal anyway. We drank terrible instant coffee and ate my mangled creations with her homemade hot sauce, and she told me stories about her grandmother who'd taught her, and her daughter who couldn't be bothered.
"The old ways are dying," she said, without bitterness. Just fact. "But you came to learn. That's something."
It was. It really was.
North to the Mountains
After a week of porteño excess—late nights, steak, more wine—I needed altitude and pine trees and the kind of exhaustion that only comes from your legs hating you. Buenos Aires is a beautiful city, but it's not why people used to hit the road.
I took a flight down to Bariloche and booked myself onto a Trekking day in the mountains close to Bariloche Trekking day in the mountains close to Bariloche for the next morning. This is the kind of move that separates the "I came here to find myself" crowd from the people who actually just need a hard walk and some views.
My guide was a bloke named Sergio who'd moved to Patagonia in 1998 because, and I quote, "Buenos Aires had too many people who wanted to talk." He assessed me with the eye of someone who'd shepherded plenty of desk-jockeys up mountain slopes, took one look at my trainers (terrible choice), and set a pace that suggested he was testing my character.
The trek climbed through beech forest into proper alpine country, the kind where the wind tries to physically relocate you and the views of the lake below make you forget that your calves are staging a mutiny. Sergio read my fitness level perfectly—hard enough to hurt, easy enough to survive—and spent the day pointing out birds I'd never heard of and telling me about the old backpackers who used to trek these routes with no guide, no phone, and apparently no fear.
"Different time," he said. "People weren't looking at their phones, so they looked at the mountains. The mountains are still here."
It was the kind of moment that would've felt cliché if I wasn't genuinely destroyed by endorphins and altitude and the kind of honest tiredness that no amount of yoga in London can replicate.
The Delta and the In-Between
I'd booked myself back through Buenos Aires for a long weekend before heading west, and I'm glad I did—because the Tigre Delta isn't actually a place you hear much about on the trail anymore, but it should be.
A private Tigre Safari delta private boat tour Tigre Safari delta private boat tour took me through a maze of waterways that genuinely feel like you've slipped into a different country. The broad rivers narrow into tree-lined streams, and the delta settlements hang over the water like they're only held there by stubbornness and rope. Four to five hours threading through those channels, no phones, no crowds, just the sound of the motor and the guide pointing out birds and explaining how the locals live in what amounts to suburban Venice.
I met a bloke named Mateo who ran cargo boats through those waterways—moved goods, people, supplies, whatever was needed. He'd been doing it for forty years. When I asked him if he ever got bored, he looked at me like I'd asked if grass ever got tired of being green.
"The water's different every day," he said. "Why would I be bored?"
This, I realised, was the hippy trail thing nobody talks about anymore. It's not about spiritual awakening or finding yourself or any of that marketing nonsense. It's about people who are genuinely, unselfconsciously good at living where they are. Rocio with her empanadas, Sergio with his mountains, Mateo with his rivers. They're not performing for anyone. They just showed up and stayed.
Mendoza and the High-Altitude Redemption
West to Mendoza, where the air gets thinner and the wine gets better and I somehow convinced myself that horsemanship was a skill I possessed.
I'd booked the Horseback riding and barbecue in a private ranch - La Carrera, Mendoza Horseback riding and barbecue in a private ranch - La Carrera, Mendoza through a recommendation from a bloke in a wine bar who assured me I'd "definitely not fall off." (Spoiler: I didn't, but only because the horse had more sense than I did.)
El Pico Palma sits at two thousand metres in La Carrera valley—proper high-altitude cowboy country, the kind of place where they've been running cattle and horses through Pre-cordillera peaks for generations. I spent a full day in the saddle with a gaucho named Juan who spent most of it looking vaguely disappointed in my posture and my life choices.
But there's something about riding through that landscape—the Andes folding away in all directions, the silence so complete it feels engineered—that strips away the nonsense. No phones (no signal), no pretence, just you and an animal that doesn't particularly care what your Instagram bio says.
We rode back to the ranch in late afternoon and they roasted meat over an open fire. Juan's family appeared—wife, kids, grandkids—and we ate until I genuinely thought I might split. Someone passed around wine that tasted like rocks and sunshine. Nobody asked me where I was from or what I did. They just fed me.
The Valley That Says Nothing and Everything
I had one more day in Mendoza, so I booked myself a Private Tour in Valle de Uco Private Tour in Valle de Uco and just asked the driver to take me somewhere real.
He drove me through Andes foothills, past vineyards and olive groves, to villages that barely register on tourism maps. No winery tasting-rooms, no sommeliers, just old family operations where they pour you wine in a kitchen and treat it like something you drink, not something you perform.
This is what the trail actually is, I reckon. Not the destination. Not the moment you post about it. It's the parts in between—the drives through valleys, the conversations with people who were never going anywhere else, the understanding that the hippy trail wasn't ever about finding yourself. It was about getting bored enough with yourself that you stopped looking.
I flew out of Buenos Aires three weeks later with empanada flour still under my fingernails, legs that ached when I climbed stairs, and a genuine sense that Argentina had essentially ignored everything I'd come looking for and given me what I actually needed instead.
Which is, I suppose, exactly how it's supposed to work.
