A New Chapter: Embracing a Gap Year at 65
Some might turn to yoga or alcohol to cope with divorce. After 28 years of marriage, I booked a gap year. My first was in 1978, when I got spiritual with a backpack in India, then rattled over the Khyber Pass to Istanbul on a battered bus. Forty-seven years later, I was off again, this time to Argentina.
I am part of a growing cohort of older, mostly female, solo travellers who hit the road once the kids have gone or the marriage is over. On that 1978 trip, my flight was a 32-hour bucket-shop special with chlorine tablets and hippie trousers. This time, it was an Avios upgrade with two overweight suitcases packed with Hermès, Belstaff parka and “miracle” face creams.
At 18, I was escaping exams, leaving home alone for the first time and broadening my horizons. This time, I was reassessing my life and reinventing myself for the next phase. I had a vague four-month plan: to start and end in Buenos Aires.
At 65, freshly single and wary, I was less gung-ho about arriving in a faraway country where I didn’t speak the language and knew just one person. Work trips aside, this was my first solo journey in three decades. So I organised my first week with specialist tour operator Journey Latin America, and happily upgraded budget guesthouse stays for safe airport transfers and the kind of hotels I would have entered only to steal loo paper on that formative trip.
Landing in Buenos Aires softened the blow. The capital’s Parisian-inspired architecture, wide boulevards, patisseries, passion and psychoanalysts were perfection for this grown-up gapper.
Sportier than my younger self, I joined a four-hour city highlights cycling tour with languid twentysomethings and a 60-year-old who had recently cramponed across a glacier. We peddled through aristocratic Recoleta (past its 1822 “Cementerio” with Eva Perón’s mausoleum) groovy Palermo (buzzing cafés and boutiques) and Plaza de Mayo (where the Mothers of May Square still protest weekly over their “disappeared” children from during the 70s military dictatorship) and its pink Casa Rosada, the president’s offices.
I also had a private guided walking tour with Porteña (Buenos Aires native – literally meaning “port city person”) Laura Telias, who introduced me to street food in Palermo, including £2 empanadas and fainá (chickpea flour pizza) in the restaurant La Guitarrita.
Afterwards at Club Villa Malcolm, a milonga music hall for locals in the Villa Crespo barrio, we met Fernando Barrios, a “taxi dancer” whom punters can hire as a dance partner.
Next day, I unpacked the Hermès and settled in for an evening of red velvet seats, opulence and the soaring notes of the Orquesta Filarmónica de Buenos Aires in the Teatro Colón opera house.
I also took an hour-long one-to-one tango lesson (£36) at Congreso Escuela de Tango, an experience so authentic that my teenage gap-year self didn’t roll her eyes. My teacher, Cristian Trinidad, had a gaze that could blister varnish but couldn’t help with my five left feet.
After a week in Buenos Aires, I headed north-west to the Pampas and La Bamba de Areco, an 1830s estancia (cattle ranch) outside San Antonio de Areco – think Ralph Lauren in overdrive, with polo fields and equine décor.
After an asado Argentine barbecue and pancakes theatrically seared with a branding iron, I watched a gaucho horse-whisper, coaxing his horse as if man and steed were doing synchronised gymnastics. He stood atop his untethered steed, performed headstands on it and lay down while the horse placed its hoof on his knee.
The younger me piped up again while browsing the town’s artisan silver and leather workshops. She wanted to buy everything, but I’ve reached the decluttering stage of life. I resisted my inner teen’s instructions.
From the grasslands of the Pampas, I flew south to Patagonia, which felt like tumbling off the map with its the white steppe seemingly stretching to infinity.
At the Xelena Hotel in El Calafate, on the edge of the southern Patagonian ice field, I awoke to gluttonous buffet breakfasts and sunrises over icy blue-grey Lake Argentino.
From the lake’s southern shores, I boarded a Solo Patagonia cruise in the swish Captain’s Club – at £229 it cost half as much as my entire teen gap year – for a better view, comfier seat and Patagonian snacks followed by guanaco goulash (game stew) on land amid scenery nicked from heaven. It was worth every peso to see my first, heart-stopping icebergs and the Upsala and Spegazzini glaciers.
I told myself this was the mother of all gap years, until the next day, when I was driven to the Perito Moreno Glacier. This turned my trip into the grandmother of all voyages. A transcendent, 180ft cliff of blue-white ice, it groaned as giant chunks crashed into the water. It was otherworldly in its unforgettable beauty. Guide Alejandro Capelli explained that the snout has visibly retreated in just months, moving by as much as 26ft annually. In 1978, I wouldn’t have considered climate change; now it is impossible not to.
I made friends everywhere I went. Back in Buenos Aires, I told everyone I could that I was newly single, and soon had dates with men aged 38 to 75.
I filled one evening with MeetUp’s SpeedFriending in the hip Buda Bar. There is no entry charge (you just buy a drink) and you meet multiple nationalities and break the ice with organised table-hopping and conversation-starting card games (“What’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you?”).
I reflected on my journey. This gap year there were no tattered guidebooks or poste restante letters. Instead of missing rendezvous in cafés, I dropped WhatsApp pins and ordered Ubers. I had moments of loneliness, fear (one Porteña dubbed me a “walking pudding” for phone snatchers) and frustration (paying a dentist took all day since they wouldn’t accept cards).
But I’d chased new thrills, discovered passions for dancing and three-hour lunches, and reset my life. The 65-year-old me looked back on my formative adventures and raised a cup of maté to our shared future.
How to Get There & Around
The writer travelled with Journey Latin America (journeylatinamerica.com), which offers a 10-day holiday to Argentina, visiting Buenos Aires, Patagonia and the Pampas from £3,885pp. The price includes flights, transfers, excursions, good-quality hotels including stays at Estancia La Bamba and Xelena, breakfast daily and full board at the estancia.
More information
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