Trees, fast streets, tango and meat sum up Buenos Aires. The streets are European - shaped at the turn of the century by a wave of immigrants, including seven million Italians. Narrow Italian streets and wide Parisian boulevards were filled with lilac blooms of feathery jacarandas and pink-flowered palo borracho, "drunken stick", whose tall bottle-shaped trunks lurch drunkenly in Palermo Park, amid lakes, Japanese gardens and dog walkers.
The venerable Hotel Bristol was our home, right by The Obelisk, on Avenida 9 July, the world's widest boulevard, which was modelled on the Champs Elysées but is bigger. Crossing the 20 lanes was a daily challenge. A good stride would get us three-quarters of the way across, racing the blinking red man. The cars and bikers, with their helmets hanging over their arms, would be straining at the leash for the off.
To feel the true headlong rush, take the colectivos, buses that race around the city carving up everybody. We regularly hurtled over to the peeling streets of San Telmo for the Sunday market, and to relish the spot on Defensa where in 1807 the locals, porteños, chased out the invading English with boiling oil. Plaza Dorrego was full, the sun burned down and tango dancers arched and twisted for the crowds. Tourists sweated and bought gaucho and tango memorabilia.
We ate meat regularly in El Viejo Bazar, one of a thousand Buenos Aires parrillas (barbeque grills). Meat, salt and fire, very simple, and tops anything you know. You can taste the grass, for that is all the animal has eaten. No hormones and no antibiotics. Every cut of beef tastes different. We would start with matambrito, "hunger killer", a tasty flank to chew on while deciding what meat to eat next - steaks and ribs, sweetbreads and black pudding. The meat is so succulent that vegetables seem an irrelevance. Grilled peppers are an exception.
My favourite haunt was La Estancia (Lavalle 941), where a meal costs $20-$25 a head with wine. Two rent-a-gauchos sweat over a big fire with ribs and goats on spits. Inside, the walls are covered with exuberant murals of gauchos on the ranch rounding up happy steers. Gloomy-looking waiters brought good wine and mountains of hot meat. Twelve hundred people stuff themselves silly late every Saturday night. When we left after midnight, grannies and their grandchildren were still pouring in to eat more meat. Be brave and try the offal: the black pudding is smooth and fine, the mollejas (thyroid sweetbreads) are sweet and rich, and chinchulines (intestines) are delicious if cooked very crispy. Trust me. I am a doctor with a high cholesterol count.
Spettus (Avenida Alicia Moreau de Justo 876) is smart and stylish, with London prices by night, but a staggering $15 all-you-can-eat lunch that's hard to recover from. Darkly handsome tango waiters come round with various meats on long skewers. An astonishing salad bar taunts you. Flan and dulce de leche, Argentina's caramelised condensed milk, is the sweet treat.
In the end, there isn't a bad restaurant in Buenos Aires. As you get sucked deeper into meat addiction, your pulses quicken every time you see the sign "Parrilla". Go with it, you can't go wrong. After all the themed holidays - trekking, fishing and the rest - there's an argument for a meat-eating holiday in Argentina. Do yourself a favour, fly to Buenos Aires and just eat meat for two weeks.
But tango is the lifeblood of Buenos Aires, which even has a 24-hour FM tango station. It's in the air, old-fashioned music that won't go away. Carlos Gardel is the porteños' favourite son, the personification of tango. He came from the back streets, wrote and sang impassioned tangos, and was laughably handsome. He had a seductive smile. He died in 1935 in a plane crash, but his records still fill the music shops. They say, "Carlitos is singing better and better every day." It's true. Visit his grave and believe.
The taxi driver sped down Chacarita cemetery to Gardel's corner. There stands a lifelike bronze Carlitos in his tuxedo, hair slicked back, smiling, with red flowers stuck in his crooked arm and a cigarette inserted by loving fans between his fingers. Two old men were repainting the tomb downstairs. "You want to see Carlitos?" I went down and touched a massive mahogany coffin with a wooden rail and solid silver handles. Underneath was a smaller coffin for his mother. After living with her all his life, Carlitos has come back to mama.
We took the Subte to Carlos Gardel, to walk in the Abasto, Carlitos' run-down barrio. His and his mum's little house was wrapped in corrugated iron, ripe for restoration. Gardel Alley was a hive of activity. Tomorrow, a statue of the "Creole Thrush" would be unveiled. Tango would be sung. Down the alley boys finished spray-can pictures of the famous smile. Carlos looked impressive and spooky wrapped up in his shroud like a body about to be offered to the sea.
Played by true "tangueros", tango is dark, dangerous music. Hear Ruben Juarez at Club Homero (Cabrera 4946; $30 cover charge per person). Standing with his foot on a chair, his bandoneon - the big black German concertina that is the plaintive sound of tango - on his knee, he hunches over singing, sweat dripping from his forehead. He battles with his bandoneon , stretching and squeezing it and beating it against his knee. He has more passion than is medically safe.
It is not surprising that tango clubs should feel like New York jazz clubs in the 1950s. Jazz and tango both came from brothels and low life, booze and drugs. Other great players? Sexto Mayor with Nestor Marconi. In March, Buenos Aires had a tango conference packed with devotees from all over the world. Delegates tangoed in the salons for 10 hours a day, retiring to their hotels to put their feet in ice. Not everyone tangoes, though. It is still vulgar and lowlife, and, even now, smart young porteñas can dance the Gay Gordons but can't tango.
In La Boca, the garish painted port area, people tango regularly in the streets. Some of the raucous canteens on Necochea still pump out loud tango. Full of tourists, Caminito's gaudy pastel walls are worth seeing. The port itself is a graveyard, rotting hulks entombed in a mattress of diesel sludge. If you want to visit this funky waterside setting and still pay London prices, go to Patagonia Sur, an intimate and expensive restaurant serving delicious Argentine-French nouvelle cuisine with large portions and bills.
Despite the urban sprawl, an hour or two from the heart of Buenos Aires can see you riding over the pampa. San Antonio de Areco was the frontier between the capital and the unknown. Its bridge was the toll bridge to the interior and the Indians. Now it is a ranching town and the centre of the cattle culture that built Buenos Aires, out here because the city mistrusts the gaucho, symbol of Argentina more than the cowboy is to America. Every November, they hold the nation's biggest gaucho celebration here.
Ricardo Guiraldes from Areco wrote Don Segundo Sombra, a dreamlike rites of passage into gaucho life. Before the whirlwind success of Don Segundo, Guiraldes' work brought critical scorn. I went to his estancia, La Porteña, to see the well where he had jettisoned his earlier books. Some have been saved and are on show in the excellent museum (Museo Gauchesco Ricardo Guiraldes, tel: 0054 02326 455990, admisssion $3).
As well as gauchesque art and memorabilia, they have Walter Owen's manuscript of his translation of the epic gaucho poem Martin Fierro. This is the world epicentre of cowboy literature.
Areco silversmiths like Juan Draghi make exquisite silver and gold daggers, stirrups, bridles and matés, for the wealthy horseman with gaucho yearnings. Cowboys have a passion for flash, but gauchos lead the pack. They wear a rastra , a wide belt clanking with silver and gold dollars, chains, horses, flowers, eagles. Stuck in the back is their facon , an all-purpose knife, ornamented with cattle and flowers. Draghi's matés and bombillas for drinking maté tea are richly embellished with leaves and flowers. It is an ostentatious art, tasteful in its vulgarity.
Many estancias like Guiraldes' La Porteña take guests. We stayed at La Bamba (c/o Ricardo Aldao, tel/fax: 0054 02326 456293, www.la-bamba.com.ar), with wonderful old colonial rooms and a story-book terrace. Romantic and unruffled, indulged after the mad pace of Buenos Aires. A siesta after lunch, a ride out on the pampa afterwards. Expensive at $260 a night for a double room with full board, but heaven. Great for honeymooners. You can even do a daytrip, go to the museum and visit an estancia for an afternoon ride.
We took a bus pilgrimage to Lujan. The Historic Museum has more gaucho and colonial history. In the Transport Museum (tel: 0054 02323 420245, admission $2, open Wed - Sun noon to 6pm), we saw the stuffed carcasses of Mancha and Gato, the horses who walked Tschiffely's Ride. Their transcontinental journey from BA to Washington was a legendary 1930s true-life adventure. Now two heroic horses, saddled up forever, stare blankly with glass eyes out of their glass case.
The cathedral's gothic spires modelled on St Pancras station, incongruously rising out of the pampa, shelter the miraculous Virgin of Lujan. Outside, in deference to Her, a sign says "No Shorts! and No Cameras!" Inside, at the head of a long queue, pilgrims in shorts are being photographed prostrating themselves in front of the miraculous Virgin. She is Argentina's Guadalupe, her most important Virgin. Her miracle was to get stuck here and refuse to move from this spot. With perfect irony, she is the patron saint of Argentina's moribund railways.
The practicals
Hank Wangford flew to Buenos Aires with British Airways (0345 222111), which offers return fares from £445 + £47.50 tax for a minimum stay of seven days. He stayed at the Hotel Bristol (tel: 00 5411 43825400, fax: 43823284, www.hotelbristol.com.ar, e-mail: reservas@hotel bristol.com.ar), where a room costs $75 for a single, $90 for a double. Tourist information from Argentine Consulate, London: 020 73181340.
• Lost Cowboys by Hank Wangford is published by Orion at £6.99.
