Sierra de las Quijadas Queso Crisis

It's not a bad photo, is it? It's a bit dark and contrasty, but then so are most of my photos. Sadly, its resemblance is coincidental, as I didn't take the damned thing.

Because of pizza.

Well, possibly. Cheese is about the only possible candidate for whatever knocked me out of action on my Quijadas focused trip to San Luis.


I'd made up my mind, at last, about what do do with that precious time between Mendoza and my flight to Iguazu. Although keen to visit Cordoba, I'd worked out the practicalities, and it was easier to pop to San Luis and go for a rock formation adventure in the Quijadas.

Now, San Luis is not somewhere that I would recommend. It's not that there's anything wrong with it, as such, it's just there's not a lot to recommend it when you could go practically anywhere else. The cathedral in the pretty little plaza is just fine, and its bell ringers were, I swear, ringing out popular hits from the 60s at one point, but on a Sunday it might as well have been the opening episode of "Day of the Triffids". There were more House Martins than humans, and I sat outside in a cafe watching them swirl and dive until the darkness blotted out their intricate ballet.

San Luis Cathedral: Don't get too excited

And that was when I ordered the pizza. And chips. And a beer. One of these things was a mistake; possibly all of them, like the combining poison used by The Joker in the first Tim Burton Batman movie. Whatever it was, I awoke early the next day with stomach cramps and a worrying sense of impermanence to the contents of my bowels. I'd never had diarrhoea before, but its symptoms were rather unmistakeable.  I had to dash to the hostel toilet (that was nice - such good timing that I wasn't in a comfortable, plush hotel at this point), where I had plenty of time to ponder the disruption to Plan A.

Not Quijadas

I refused to give up. But firstly I needed to sort out the problem at hand, especially with a 12 hour bus journey ahead of me. A bit of crowd sourcing on the internet gave me the language required from the chemists and having translated the rest onto my iPad I, er, trotted off to locate a Farmacie. San Luis seems so quiet it wouldn't say goo to a boose, but the shop staff almost rugby tackled me as I walked into the Chemists with a shoulder bag. I was firmly directed to a burly security guard who dropped my bag into a bigger, blue shoulder bag, but with a zip and lock mechanism, and then handed back my sealed possessions, this intricate process doubtless preventing me from making off with an illicit haul of Lemsips. "Um," I said. "I actually need something in there". So the whole shenanigan was repeated while I retrieved my iPad. I think he hated me at that point.  I managed to communicate my needs to the pharmacist without too much graphic pointing, grabbed my drugs and a Gatorade and escaped. I popped my pills in the plaza, pondering my options.

These were rather limited, for the following reasons:

• I had arrived on a Sunday. San Luis is not the sort of town that does anything on a Sunday except give Gringos poisoned pizza
• Said poisoned pizza aftermath had now occupied my time till 11am
• None of the travel agencies in town spoken any English
• The hostel tour people didn't do Quijadas on a Monday. 
• Public Transport can get you there, but with something like a 4 hour round trip. 
• I had a bus to catch at 20:30. 



Still not Quijadas

• I still felt like shit. 

Having trudged round town failing to communicate with the agents, I retreated to the hostel where I then got into a long running dispute with the receptionist who, no matter which words from the phrase book I used, couldn't grasp that I'd been told that I could pay half a day for a late check out (£5) and that I wished to avail myself of said option. She tried to usher me out of the hostel about three times before I managed to explain to her why I wasn't going anywhere. And I'm sure I just used the same words as before - maybe my pronunciation was evolving. 

So, no Quijadas for me. Still, I've seen quite a lot of pointy red rocks in my life, maybe a day sitting on my bum was a better bet. I was quite exhausted by this point. I thought about a mini photo project of sleeping dogs in San Luis (of which there were a phenomenal amount), and then thought better of it. I would save my energy for Iguazu. 

Spot the Difference