Day 23 - Guanajuato

Day 23 – 21 Jan – Guanajuato MX

It’s 7 pm and we are just home from a day in the city. It was fabulous and really must be seen to be truly appreciated and I’m not sure I can do it justice. It was such a mixture of people, colour, smells, and so many other things.
Many of the streets are cobblestone and so narrow and winding that how people drive them is beyond comprehension. There are terraces and stairs leading to houses on upper levels of the streets and the houses themselves are in every colour of the rainbow. It was simply and feast for the eyes.
We did take the bus—50 pesos or 25 cnts each—and an hour or so after we got there, we were approached to take a city tour for $25 each. Wayne got him down to $20 but we knew that if we didn’t get on some type of tour, we’d miss have of what there was to see. Experiencing someone else driving was worth half that—sometimes there was less than a hair between cars—and we were escorted around the city for 3 hours. We went to an old silver mine and Augustine (our guide) said the oldest and the largest silver mines near the city are owned by a Canadian. The mine we went to began in 1549 when the shafts were dug by hand and men pulled bags of rock up the shafts on their backs climbing logs with notches cut out. There is lots of history here and much of it surrounds the various Mexican fights to oust the Spanish…and there are monuments to all of it. The last stop of the tour was to the top of the city and the view really showed how the city has been built in this ‘bowl’ and crawled up the mountain sides…the population is 850,000 but very, very colonial. There is no rhyme or reason to the street grids and because they twist and turn, there is no going back to anywhere. We’d found a wonderful plaza that we thought we’d go back to for dinner but even with a map, there was no way we could get back so found another spot and had a nice steak dinner.
Finding a bus home was just too tough so we taxied it for $9. The owner of the RV park, Enrique, took Wayne out to get some fresh milk. He’s about 70-something but a real nice man. He gave us his phone number and told us if we have any mechanical problems on the road to call him and he’ll relay the info to the ‘Green Angels’ for us, where-ever we happen to be. Turns out he used to work for them so knows everyone and the system.
Wayne is all excited and wants to move here..he came back from the store and got 4 bananas, 2 oranges, 3 tomatoes, and a quart of milk for $1.50. He’s happy! Gas stations here are all owned by the gov’t and gas is 70 cents a litre at every PEMEX station in the country. Good news when filling up the van’s tank although we never let the tank go below half-full. Although there isn’t a shortage of gas stations, there are areas (like the Sierra Madre mountains) where you may have to drive quite a way with no stations.A great day, sun was shining, everything is right in the world today!