A day on foot through the oldest part of the city. San Telmo is where tango took hold — narrow streets, antique shops, and grand houses left behind when wealthy families fled north during the yellow fever outbreak of 1871. From there into the Centro and Plaza de Mayo, where the Casa Rosada holds the president's offices and most of the last century of Argentine politics has played out. In the evening, a milonga: not a show put on for visitors but the real thing, where people have been dancing the same way for decades. A couple who have danced together for forty years leads the group.

The morning in Recoleta, anchored by its cemetery — a dense city of marble mausoleums where Eva Perón is buried, stranger and better than that description suggests. Then off to the MALBA, the Latin American art museum, on the edge of the Palermo parks. The afternoon is free; the cafés and bookshops nearby are worth the time.

North of the city the Paraná river breaks into hundreds of channels and low green islands before it reaches the Río de la Plata. There are no roads. Everything moves by boat, including the mail, and you'll spend the day on the water. Back in the city that evening, the group sits down to an asado — less a barbecue than the central ritual of Argentine social life, long and slow and built around the table as much as the food.

A mid-morning flight north. The northwest feels like a different country from Buenos Aires — adobe and colonial rather than European, Andean rather than Atlantic, close enough to Bolivia and Chile that the cooking and the music change. The afternoon is free to walk the town and let the altitude settle.

The morning at the MAAM, the high-altitude archaeology museum on the main square. Its collection centers on three Inca children found in 1999 near the summit of Llullaillaco, at over 6,700 meters, where cold and thin air preserved them almost perfectly for five hundred years. One is displayed at a time. It isn't a comfortable museum, and it's the most affecting hour you'll spend in Salta. Afterward, the cable car up Cerro San Bernardo for the view back across the Lerma Valley, and the rest of the day to walk the town.

Three and a half hours of driving, and a full day by the time you're finished. Route 68 runs south through the Quebrada de las Conchas, a gorge where wind and water have cut the red rock into amphitheaters and narrow throats — the formations have names to match. The group stops constantly. This is the drive people remember longest, and it isn't really a transfer so much as the reason to come this way at all. You reach Cafayate in the late afternoon and settle into the finca, a nine-room working vineyard just outside town.

Argentina's other wine region, and its older one. Vineyards here sit above 1,700 meters — among the highest anywhere — where fierce sun and cold nights produce Torrontés, a white that smells like jasmine and tastes completely dry. You'll visit several bodegas, most of them small and family-run, with the afternoon free.

Back up to Salta, three hours without the stops this time, then an afternoon flight south. From Mendoza's airport it's about an hour out into the Uco Valley, where you'll stay for the rest of the trip. Nothing scheduled beyond arriving.

This is the Argentina people picture when they think of its wine — Mendoza, Malbec, the Andes along the horizon. The Uco Valley is the high, cool end of it: vineyards between 1,000 and 1,700 meters, where altitude and wide day-to-night temperature swings give the wines more acidity and structure than Malbec's reputation suggests. A day spent visiting bodegas across the valley.

An hour or so back toward the city, into the oldest Malbec country in Argentina — the first appellation in the Americas, with vines planted in the 1800s still in production. It sits several hundred meters lower than the Uco Valley, and the wines show it: rounder, riper, softer at the edges. Tasting the two regions on consecutive days is the clearest way to understand why altitude matters so much here.

The longest day of the trip, and worth it. Three hours each way up into the Andes to Aconcagua, which at nearly 23,000 feet is the highest mountain outside Asia. Getting the view asks very little of you — a twenty-minute walk on an easy path — though you'll feel the altitude at around 2,800 meters. Back in the valley by evening.

Time to yourself until your transfer to the airport, which is private and timed to your flight. Book your departure out of Mendoza rather than Buenos Aires — the trip ends here.