We spent most of May in San Luis where I gave a class at the university. This is a small town, not much larger than Tandil, right next to some low mountains which form the western boundary of the pampas. We had a nice little apartment owned by the dean of the humanities department. Our place is upstairs, the dean lives on the right on the other side of the ivy. The apartment came with its own dog (a friendly German Sheppard).
Really. The dog followed us around like he belonged to us, greeted us when we came home, slept outside our door on the porch. And we didn't even feed her. Much.
The other side of the street is a Wal-Mart. I hate Wal-Mart (especially since they've started this ad campaign about how great Wal-Mart treats its employees, which we know isn't true) but the next closest grocery store was quite a hike. We ended up going there almost every day.
I was invited to teach at the university by my colleague, Julio Benegas who we met at a meeting in South Africa. This is Julio and his his wife, Ayesha who is a computer scientist.
Miriam and Ayesha seemed to hit it off .... By this point in the trip we are entirely in Spanish. Not great Spanish but we can have a conversation and understand jokes. Well, some of the time. The rest of the time we just smile politely and hope no one notices that we didn't get it.
They took us out for mate on a couple occasions into the surrounding mountains, which are really nice. There are several dikes with artificial lakes, summer homes, hiking, fishing, etc.
We also rented a car for a few days and went into the sierras near town on our own. This road wasn't finished and so wasn't being maintained. Kind of makes you stop and think, doesn't it?
This was another dike and lake nearby, about 45 miles north of San Luis. Beautiful and totally undeveloped. We finally have realized that Argentina is about 1/3 the size of the US but with only 13% of the population, half of which live in Buenos Aires. So there are lots of places where there aren't many people.
We also drove up to Sierra de las Quijadas National Park about 100 miles north west of San Luis. It is a bit like a miniature version of the Grand Canyon. There are a lot of dinosaur bones found in this area and we did a short hike to see petrified dinosaur foot prints.
The park had lots of critters. These are vicuņa, related to llamas.
On the way to Quijadas we saw these guys by the side of the road. They are called mare and are more common further south, in Patagonia (but we didn't see them there). They look like rabbits without ears but hop like kangaroos and are related to guinea pigs.
We returned to San Luis on a different road and took a picture of this Difunta Corea shrine. This is the woman who supposedly died following her husband through the desert during the wars for independence and was found with a live baby still at her breast. The bottles are full of water and are offerings (and requests for help). Roadside shrines like these are more common in the north west.
