27 JANUARY 2007, Page 41

Sleepless in Buenos Aires

Rebecca Tyrrel says everyone in BA is on the couch, but no one gets any rest Ive arrived in Buenos Aires, my son and I, on the day of a smallish demonstration in the Plaza de Mayo. Our beautiful blonde guide, Valeria, said that where we were, in front of the Pink Palace, was a pretty popular spot for such events. They are sometimes big, noisy, newsworthy affairs and sometimes not so big and barely commented upon. This one, she insisted, despite the gunshots and her sensible refusal to allow my son to leave the car, was 'small to medium'.

'The police fire their guns into the air to keep the protesters calm,' she explained. 'Best stay here with your mother.'

'And who are the demonstrators exactly?' I asked.

'Oh, all sorts of discontented people. One never quite knows.'

'What are they demonstrating about?' asked my son.

'Could be anything,' shrugged Valeria. 'Now, if you look to your right you will see the balcony from which Eva Peron...'.

Next we drove to the docks where we learned that the deep, black water is extremely polluted (although it is in the process of being cleaned). 'If you fell in you would be dead within minutes,' said Valeria. 'Now we will go to the cemetery.'

If she hadn't been showing us around Buenos Aires that afternoon our conscientious guide would have been seeing her therapist before spending much of the night with friends in city cafés. I know this because on the flight from London I had been devouring a book that all visitors to this city should read. It is by Miranda France, a journalist who worked in BA in the early 1990s, and it's called Bad Times in Buenos Aires. An entire chapter of it, 'A Nation on the Couch', is devoted to the Argentine preoccupation with psychotherapy and sleeplessness.

'Is it true?' I asked Valeria.

'Yes, very true,' she said. 'I am seeing my therapist tomorrow, but tonight I will be out with friends, and now I will show you the resting place of Eva Peron at Recoleta.'

Recoleta Cemetery is a pristine, ornate 'village' of the dead that mirrors in miniature the grander, Parisian-style avenues in the expensive residential areas of the city. Valeria explained to us that it is both socially important and a bit naff to be interned here while at the same time making it clear that her own ancestors were but a few aisles away from Evita.

a trompe l'oeil carving of a teenage girl opening the door of her mausoleum. 'It was a terrible thing that happened to her,' she said. 'She wasn't really dead, just catatonic, and she died scratching at the lid of her coffin until her fingernails broke and bled.'

That night, in our high-tech room at the fresh new Park Hyatt hotel my son and I both dreamed of broken coffins floating on ink. We told Valeria the following morning and she gave us an enigmatic smile.

In an other part of Argentina, another guide, Santiago, took us bird-watching and horse-riding around the Ibera marshes. Santiago is an introspective fellow originally from Buenos Aires, who knows his vermilion flycatchers from his scarlet-hatted cardinals and also, surprisingly, knows his way around the Argentine psyche. 'I have to admit to you,' he said one beautiful day in a boat on a lagoon, 'that I am a trained psychotherapist.'

Our third guide, Christian — not much more than a boy but married with a child, working weekends and evenings to feed his family — took us to see the unforgettable, multi-coloured, cactus-covered hills in the far north of the country near the border with Bolivia. Standing in this Marlboro Man country, this energetic young man gave me his very particular thoughts on therapy: that it was not an Argentinian obsession at all but an urban obsession throughout the world. Psychoanalysis, in Christian's opinion, was something for soft city types to squander their money on. Then, before ramming a wodge of coca leaves into his cheek he offered me some too, and there was something in his manner to suggest that this might well be the better, cheaper option. Which gave me something to chew over.

Rebecca Tyn-el travelled to Argentina with Steppes Travel (www.steppestravel.co.uk).