Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende and Morelia

Apologies if the quality of the next three posts is a little shonky, but I am creamed from the last couple of weeks and in dire need of some sleep. On the plus side it is less than one week until I am in Guatemala. I had left Aguascalientes in the freezing cold morning and headed to Guanajuato via Leon. The book said Leon had a pleasant main square. I said thats not good enough for a 6km round walk from the bus station. This was the first journey I travelled on Primera Plus. They give out free sandwiches which is nice. They charge more and made me watch a BBC documentary on water in Spanish, which was less nice. I decided it was a waste of time and I would not travel with them again (Since this resolution I have travelled with them at least 4 times). Grabbing a local bus at the station I was incessantly corrected on my Spanish when all I wanted was a fucking bus ticket and not a grammar lesson. Guanajuato is phenomenally gorgeous. One of the, if not the, most beautriful places I have been. It does not look too impressive from up high, which is unusual in cities and is best viewed by getting lost in its winding streets. It has the distinction of being one of only three cities I have had difficulty navigating. One other was Venice and the other was Tuxtla Gutierrez. The second does not count. While Guanjuato and Venice are difficult because they plunge round colonial, charming alleyways, Tuxtla is difficult because their urban planner was a fuckwit (every road is northwest 1 or westnorth 2 or eastsouth 5, depending on whether it is lateral or longtitudinal). Guanajuato reminds me of Venice with the winding alleyways and Edinburgh in terms of colonial cobblestones and hilly charm. Photos online don't do it justice. It even has a honeycomb of roads running like rabbiy holes under the city with tunnels to get lost in. Around every bend is charming architecture, rustic scenery or luscious parklands. It teases you anf entices you. I could have just walked around the city for weeks and not got bored. Its that good.

The guidebook had a misprint in it, which sent me off to a hostel that did not exist and was in fact a moderately priced hotel. Luckily though for me it was right next to a hostel for half the price of the guidebook one. It was populated by locals, athough there was one guy sleeping with his daughter in the bed next to me. Or at least I hope it was his daughter. She looked happy enough. On the top of one of the nearby hills was the Monument to 'El Pipila'. This guy strapped a concrete block to his back during the war of independence to absorb bullets and set fire to the garrison doors of the Spanish occupiers. Little was I aware of my impending trials as I rounded a corner. Two guys were struggling with a washing machine up some stairs. The women looked at me beseechingly and I agreed to help out, thinking it was just these stairs. Many hundreds of stairs later and 300 odd metres higher up, we collapsed over the last stone step. Fuck the Inca Trail. How hard can it be? I had just effectively carried a washing machine up 350 metres of height at altitude almost on my own. And I was a little wiped out. The climb up the last steps on 'El Pipila' after we had dropped the washing machine on a truck were excruciating. At least they gave me a towel to spare my hands. Having surveyed the view and been disappointed by the birds eye perspective, I snaked down the winding hillside to the alleyway of the kiss. This place has balconies so close together they almost kiss themselves. Rumour has it a poor boy was refused access to the rich girl he loved and so bought the house opposite so they could kiss in secret. Its in much better condition than the Verona balcony.

I set my alarm early to go to the mines and then repeatedly ignored it. On the way to the bus station (5km of rough hard shoulder walking) I stopped off in the mummy museum. When excavating some turn of the century gravesites the citizens of Guanjuato discovered that the lime soil preserved the mummified corpses of the locals and they now live on in a macabre display. I got chatting with a teacher of a local school and on walking around they had the corpses dressed up in their burial clothes. They had also put little humorous captions next to them, where the corpses described their unique features and aspirations. It was a cool place, though the adjoining torture museum did play the song 'Vienna' all the time in there, which kind of takes the edge off the exhibits. Eventually I grabbed a bus out to San Miguel de Allende for a day trip. Its a really cute town, swarming with Gringos. Its small and walkable. It must have been a really pretty town before the tourists. It still is, but there is evidence of condos being erected everywhere and lots of roads are closed off as private. Its sad when citizens can't walk freely in their own towns. Lonely Planet also sent me the wrong way for 2km with their shonky map. If you head to the viewing point it is north from the park, not east regardless of what the book says. I did discover I now have a massive hole in the base of my shoe. Hopefully it will last long enough to replace them in Canada where they will have my shoe size. You get good views over the surrounding countryside and on the way back I thought I had missed the last bus. That would have been a big problem. Only the expensive option was left. On the way out I had my own private bus to myself somehow. Ypu figured they would not bother travelling if they had one passenger but oh well. On the way back I got an interesting Tom Hanks film called 'I'll wait for you'. I was planning on heading out back in Guanajuato but I spoke to Angie online and she said I may want to rest for friday.

In the morning I headed to Alhondiga de Grandoditas, which is the old fortress burnt by 'El Pipila'. It now houses the state history museum. I knew there were no easy direct buses to Morelia, but I did not want to go to Irapuato. Seemingly everybody else did though. There were about 2,000 buses an hour to Irapuato and Leon and I had to put up with the same idiot yelling Irapuato in my face for one hour before the Morelia bus eventually turned up. It seemingly stopped in every town in all of western mexico and took forever, though it did pass through a really scenic lake district. When I got there I figured I could walk to the centre, but got lost in a council estate and had to grab a taxi. I checked into a hotel for only 95 pesos a night, which I found out later did not have any plug sockets. I met up with Angie at the cathedral and she took me to a cool little bar with live music for drinks. My Spanish was wheeled out of its cobwebbed hiding place for another dust off and we moved onto a rock bar down the end of town where her friends were playing. She told me some of the legends of town, like the girl who was locked in her basement and now her hand reaches out to grab at tourists. Also the tree that was formed from a grieving lover and the fountain that was stolen by a government official. Not sure how you steal one exactly. Its not like you can stick the lump of rock up your jumper. The barmaid in this bar was unbelievably cute and got chatting Spanish with an English teacher. We moved on from rock bar to rock bar until we ended up back at the original one, where they had a lock in and were blaring out 80s English punk music. The driver on the way back had apparently flipped a car before and one of the girls had got trapped under it halfway out the window but escaped with only some bruising. Very lucky. Morelia is a pretty little town and well worth a visit, but I think Lonely Planet may be overegging it a little by desrcibing it as the best city in the world you won't have heard of. So far this trip thats a toss up between Guanajuato and Port Gibson. We got back to my cheap hotel around 5am and I had to remove a prostitute from the doorway so I could get in.

I woke up late and arranged to meet Angie at the wrong place. I had read a text from Pamela as being from her and replied to the wrong person. This I only realised after about half an hour of waiting. Apologising profusely we headed to her place and I was treated to a feast of food. By this point I was informing people that they would have to accept a compromise. It is rude for Mexicans not to feed their guests until they can eat no more. It is rude for the English to eat all of their host's food lol. Therefore a happy compromise was a necessity. We would meet up later with Sergio and Pamela again around 6pm and Angie had to depart for a concert. It was a shame as logistics meant we did not meet up again, but she was fun company and hopefully she will come and visit me. We also concluded my eyes are green (I knew they would be in a sunny country). They are actually two seperate rings of colour and so change colour depending on the pupil size. Brown in the dark as green section is squished, green in the light where it is stretched. We ended up in a very nice cocktail bar with a great view out over the square. At night on a saturday the cathedral is illuminated and a huge fireworks display is launched, which was cool because I missed Guy Fawkes this year. Will have to have my own one in Argentina. We grabbed some dinner in an underground foodhall that is underneath a church built solely from the profits of food vendors who now operate in this basement. Afterwards we headed to Adriano's house (Sergios friend. Their marriage is frayed but they have a great energetic daughter) and drank till the early hours with his brother Ivan and a friend who works for PEMEX and has a highly dangerous job for which he gets no hazard pay.

In the morning I left with Sergio and Ivan to have a look around town. We picked up some of the legendary Michoacan ice cream and had breakfast in a cafe with a sensational waitress. None of us could work out if she was 18 or not though. It was Ivan and Adriano's cousins birthday and we went round for a massive family barbecue. My lack of Spanish was a problem but I gave it my best shot. The mother said I could visit the house any time and that I did not speak Spanish like a Mexican. I responded that no I spoke it like a book as it was technical Castillian Spanish. On the way back the kid (who is four) invited me to play nintendo the next day. I said I was travelling to Mexico City and she replied she was travelling nowhere and staying in Morelia. I love the way that kids think. A lot of Sergio and Adriano's friends came round and we drank a fair bit. Most of the conversation was in rapid Spanish which was too fast for me, but it was still good fun. We saw Sergio off at the bus station as it was his birthday the next day. Both he and his friends were really nice people and it was a good time. In the morning Adriano gave me a lift to the station and I headed back to the big daddy. The first place in Mexico I had been before.