Muchos Gringos!

San Miguel is a great example of a picturesque Spanish colonial town, and lots of tourists know it! It’s a great place to come to buy art, ceramics, and just about anything else you might want. It feels much less “Mexican” than anywhere else we’ve been; nevertheless the attractions and the fantastic food kept us in town for a full week.

The town’s centerpiece is the Parroquia, with it’s soaring towers which were added on to an older church in the late 19th century.

Brightly colored buidings and narrow cobblestone streets are part of what gives San Miguel its appeal.

Part of the reason for our extended stay is the very nice RV park that is walking distance to the center of town. Our first day was spent exploring the town and hitting a couple of the museums, plazas, and cathedrals.

The next day we headed out to Cañada de la Virgen, a pre-columbian site nearby. Our guide was an archeologist who participated in excavating the site. We learned a lot about the history of the region, including a colorful local landowner and her involvement with the development of the site. The people who built the site had an amazing knowledge of astronomy, including some that would seemingly be impossible to acquire without telescopes. It remains a mystery how they acquired that knowledge and that’s where the theories of extraterrestrial encounters come in. I won’t go any further into that, but rest assured that we weren’t visited by any aliens. At least not that we know of.

On Saturday we went to a nearby hot spring where we met with Katie and her family, who we spent some time with in Guanajuato. We enjoyed a relaxing day and Quinn got some much needed pool time.

The temple at Cañada de la Virgen

One of the benefits of a tourist town is that there’s lots of touristy stuff to do, and on Sunday I got to go mountain biking for the first time since leaving Colorado in November! I went with a local guide who took me and 3 other guests on a 40km ride through the countryside near San Miguel. One highlight was a visit to an unexcavated pre-columbian ruin. It was fascinating to see one in it’s natural state and to know that there was probably at least one or two people buried beneath our feet 500 or more years ago.

This is what one of those temples looks like before it gets excavated and restored.

I rode with Michael, a Swiss guy we met in Guanajuato. He and his wife are traveling to South America in a Land Rover similar to the one we had in Africa.

We stopped in a tiny village for snacks.

The ride took us through some farmers’ fields

Warning: Pictures of Quinn below:

Yum! Grapes!

San Miguel has a great, modern playground. It’s even equipped with soft surfaces rather than packed earth. And there were no re-welded joints on any of the equipment!

For our second week in Guanajuato we moved into an apartment next to the Plaza del Baratillo in the center (El Centro) of town. For $25 per night we had a really nice place with a full kitchen, a breakfast bar, dining area, living room, bathroom and lofted bedroom. We also had terrific views of town from our new digs, the use of a beautiful terrace and superfast wifi. We were amazed at how quiet it was there (with the exception of ringing church bells 2-3 times a day).

The best part was that we were within easy walking distance to just about everything. Within our little plaza, for example, we had access to about 4 different coffee shops (with wifi), 2 internet cafes, a place where we could get freshly-squeezed fruit juice, and a produce vendor with an incredible selection of fruits and vegetables (and where they will chop up any combination of veggies for you to take home for soup or a stir fry). In addition, there were numerous excellent restaurants and sidewalk vendors nearby offering a wide variety of delectable treats. It was always hard to decide whether to buy fresh food at the market and cook in our kitchen or sample the wonderful food on offer on the street and in restaurants!

The university campus in Guanajuato

We had about a 5-minute walk from our apartment to Escuela Falcon for our second week of Spanish lessons. With the help of the wonderful instructors at the school, Quinn has really increased his vocabulary and can now understand random conversations that he hears around town. His pronunciation of words is much better than that of either Witt or I and he corrects us when we don’t say things quite right.

Witt & I focused on learning past tense of verbs (Pretérito and Imperfecto for those of our friends that are already familiar with Español). We found that topic to be fairly confusing at first and we definitely need more practice with it. However, our ability to communicate has improved tremendously, and since the number of English speakers around us is likely to decrease as we go south, speaking a passing version of Español will become more and more important.

We also spent quite a bit of time on our first Spanish installation of KA Lite. We plan to dedicate a separate blog post to this topic, but our volunteer work added something special to our visit here. We were able to meet so many amazing people through our volunteer effort. We even got to the point where we would run into one or more of our new friends while walking around town. We’ve started to feel like an authentic part of the community.

Guanajuato is a fabulous place to wander around. There are numerous plazas with beautiful fountains, trees, flowers and green plants. Here also there is about 500 years worth of interesting architecture to admire. (That is not an exaggeration – this is one of the oldest cities in México – started in 1520 – and there are buildings here with 15xx written on the side of them.) The university here – Universidad de Guanajuato – dates back to 1732 and is known for its outstanding academics, research and outreach. There are several large theaters where plays, musicals and symphonies are shown. Dozens of museums are sprinkled through town, both historical (this was the site of the first battle of independence from Spain) and artistic (this was the birthplace of Diego Rivera, for example).

One of the many pleasant plazas in town.

Since “La Comida” – the big meal of the day – is usually held from around 3-5pm, evenings are the time for families and students to walk around town. Entertainment is everywhere here in the form of very good street performers. We were lucky enough to be in town for the annual street entertainers festival, and saw comedians, jugglers, mimes, musicians, and several people pretending – rather convincingly – to be statues. We had a blast just wandering around and taking it all in.

Mmmm. Enchiladas.

A couple of evenings were spent watching street entertainers.

Quinn got a big kick out of them!

Quinn has made a few friends here too. He especially enjoyed admiring and playing with all of his new friends’ toys. Our landlord this week has a young son (~3 years old) who has a brand new full-suspension mountain bike with training wheels! Of course it was his train set that really got Quinn’s attention. The two boys played really well together and it was a teary farewell when the time came to move back into our van.

Quinn and Reuben busy playing trains

Today we are (reluctantly) leaving Guanajuato for San Miguel de Allende, which is about a 1-hour drive east of here. I think though that the city of Guanajuato, with its sunny, warm days and cool, clear nights, has earned a special place in our hearts. It might only be a matter of time before we return.

To reward Quinn for studying hard all week, we got him a little toy helicopter.

Guanajuato is a pretty crazy town. It started out as a mining town, and is built into a narrow valley with steep sides. After the whole city flooded out a couple of hundred years ago they dug tunnels under the city to divert floodwater. After they built a dam to control runoff, they didn’t need the tunnels anymore and converted them to roads. So a lot of the traffic is underground. Hop in a cab, ask the driver to take you somewhere, and you’ll disappear into a tunnel and pop out on the other side of town. The surface streets are few, and the best way to get around is by walking the convoluted alley ways that wind up and down the hillsides. We’ve definitely been getting our exercise! You can read more about it on Wikipedia.

There are a lot of very old churches in Guanajuato

… And the same one by night.

The streets have a very European feel to them.

Looking over the city.

We stayed with the Hortensia family during our first week here. We had our own room with a bathroom in a separate building that the family built to make extra money from housing students. Señora Hortensia made us breakfast each morning, and “La Comida,” which is the traditional large meal in Mexico, eaten with the family at around 2-4pm. It was great to sample Mexican home cooking and we all really enjoyed the food, especially the sometimes picky Quinn!

Anni, Señora Hortensia’s daughter, brought her 7 year old son to lunch at the house most days, and he and Quinn had a great time playing together.

Quinn and Victor playing on the patio at our host family’s house

The downside was the 20 minute walk up and down some steep hills to get from the house to our Spanish school each day. The walk was good exercise, but after we got home in the afternoon, we really didn’t want to go out exploring. So for our second week here we rented an apartment closer to the school and downtown.

Spanish classes have been very good (especially after we changed from four to three hours per day of classes) and we are all learning a lot. The school coordinates activities, and we got to make traditional Mexican kites one evening.

Making Papalotes

We also met with Katie, the volunteer coordinator who works with Do Good As You Go, the volunteer organization we’re working with. She has connections with a girls’ school here in town, and we’re planning to install KA-Lite there.

On Saturday we made the big move, hauling all of our stuff to our new digs, and moving the van to a less expensive parking place. Katie invited us to a mural-making party that afternoon that she had arranged to decorate a wall along one of the alley ways. Quinn had a great time painting!

Mural painting

We slept in Sunday morning and took advantage of our real, full-size kitchen to make pancakes. In the afternoon we went to a local park and paddled a boat around the small lake feeding bread to the ducks. We sampled some local street food, then went back to the center of town to hang out at a bar and watch the superbowl. No need to say any more about that.

Our new digs

Feeding the ducks

After our tequila tasting adventure, we spent a couple of nights near Lake Chapala. On Saturday we stopped in Aijic (Ah-hee-heek) for breakfast. It’s a quaint little town on the lake and home to a large population of gringo retirees.

One thing about traveling with your own vehicle is that big cities are tough. You don’t really want to drive a big camper around in them, there’s no place to park, and if you want to stay more than one day you have to pay to park and pay for a hotel, since there are no campgrounds anywhere near the attractions in the city center. The other choice is to camp outside the city, then take an expensive taxi or a long bus ride in.

This time we decided to brave the big city and drive into Guadalajara for lunch. With the aid of Pocket Earth (on her iPad) Jen did a great job of navigating us around the city, and we were able to find a place to park the van that was walking distance to the city’s central plaza. We walked the plaza enjoying the people, the music, the fountains, and the architecture. We had lunch and by 2pm were headed out of town.

Crazy chair sculptures in Guadalajara

The city’s main cathedral

What a great business. Rent out little battery operated cars. Q loved it so much we did it twice.

More street scenes from the city…

The route out made us appreciate the difficulty and value of effective highway planning. We were on the ring road around Guadalajara (a major highway with 3 lanes in each direction). We needed to exit onto another major highway leading away from the city. Signs directed us to an exit that emptied onto a two-lane residential road. The road wound for a few kilometers, then entered a tiny village and became narrow and rough. A sign pointed toward Guadalajara and the highway we needed, but we wanted to go in the opposite direction, away from the city. We continued on, but the road dead-ended at a fenced yard full of chickens. We turned around and followed the sign for Guadalajara. The dirt road turned into an entrance ramp, and we were back on the tollway headed for the city. Soon there was a “retorno” that took us up an exit ramp, over the highway, and back in the opposite direction. The entire structure had no other purpose than to enable U-turns on the highway.

The highway toward Guanajuato was smooth and fast, at least until we hit the peregrinos. Not penguins, but pilgrims. One lane of a four lane highway was blocked off to allow people to make an annual pilgrimage on foot to the church in the town of Lagos. Traffic slowed to a crawl, and it was after dark when we finally pulled into the campground outside Guanajuato.

Peregrinos on the highway

Since we were having such a great time hanging out in Sayulita with our new friends, we decided to stay on a few days longer. On Sunday Witt and Quinn took a bus to the water park in Puerto Vallarta and spent the day sliding on water slides and playing in the pools. We even got to get in the pool with some dolphins and play with them!

We charged the kids 2 pesos each for entry into the “youtube theater”

The next day, Monday, we decided to splurge on a day trip to the nearby Marietas Islands. It was on a sailing catamaran with probably 20 guests on board, including our Canadian friends the Rempels and their 3 kids. The 1.5 hour trip out to the islands was the most amazing whale watching trip Jen and I have ever been on. We saw pods of 6-8 humpback whales, whales slapping their tails in the water, whales mating, and two breaches (where they leap all 50 tons of themselves almost completely out of the water).

Quinn on board the Ally Cat

The kids quickly took their posts on the trampoline at the bow

I used to think tail shots were rare.

Here’s a short movie of some of the whale antics.

At the islands we went snorkeling and kayaking, then headed back to the boat for lunch and the trip home. The whole trip was open bar and the crew kept walking around the boat taking drink orders. It’s a wonder we didn’t get completely wasted, but we were glad that the company provided a taxi back to Sayulita from the marina.

Q didn’t want to snorkel, but we paddled around for a bit

Enjoying (one of many) fine beverages on the way back to port

On Tuesday we reluctantly packed away our camp and said goodbye to our friends, who will be heading back to cold Manitoba in a couple of short weeks. We headed inland toward Guanajuato where our next Spanish class is due to begin in a week. Along the way, we stopped for the night at a small crater lake and drove 16km up a cobblestone road to the top of a volcano for a short hike.

Laguna de Maria del Oro

The very bumpy road up the volcano

One can’t drive through Tequila, Mexico, without stopping. On a whim we picked the La Cofradia distillery which neither of us had ever even heard of. But it just seemed wrong to go to Jose Cuervo! The distillery was amazing and provided an excellent English-speaking tour guide. We learned a lot about how tequila is made (not too much of a stretch when you start from zero) and some of the history of the drink and the region it comes from. We got to taste 8 different types of tequila and they made us an amazing margarita in their underground restaurant.

The blue plants that look like Yucca are blue agave.

A mural depicting the making of tequila. Notice that the Virgin Mary oversees the process, presumably to ensure quality.

It takes the agave 6-8 years to mature, at which time the leaves are hacked off, leaving the “piña” which is baked to extract the raw agave nectar. The nectar is fermented and distilled to make tequila.

The aging cellar and tasting room