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Published: July 21st 2006
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Taxco And so on with the travelling. Leaving Mary to explore Mexico city (I fear for my lungs and had seen all I wanted already) I headed to the small, colonial, mountain town of Taxco about 3 hours south of Mexico. The views on the road into Taxco are amazing, as are the views from almost anywhere in the city but on arriving at the bus station I discovered the downside of this. On asking for directions to the centre the replies did not include the standard right / left / straight on, instead, there are 2 directions in Taxco: "arriba y abajo" - up and down!
So I gave my failing knees a bit of a workout and headed up and down the city, checking out the silver, which is a speciality of the area, and spending money like a tourist. Originally the town had grown up as a colonial silver mining city but the silver ran out and the mines closed years ago - just the silver-working and selling remains, the metal itself pulled out of the ground in other parts of Mexico and Latin America. It is still a pretty little, narrow-streeted hill-side town through which
the only vehicals moving are VW beetles (the originals) and all the buses are converted VW campers - everything else is too wide to fit around the corners.
I ate Guacamole and Totopos (nachos and avocado to the uneducated) in a restaurant where the waiter wouldn´t let me have a table with a view because I was on my own and it was a table for 4, even though there was almost no one else in the place and there weren´t actually any small tables. Luckily I could argue better in Spanish than him so I got a good table and it saved me having to pay a tip. The evening and I did my usual trick of eating whatever I ordered extremely slowly and then moving to another cafe before ordering my next item - this maximises time spent in the warm while minimises cost of additional unwanted drinks. In this manner I was able to make my way through the best part of my novel. Back to travelling on my own after so long with Anne and the other volunteers is strange, nice in some ways, but in others not, I´m glad I´m going back to Mary
in Mexico in 2 days time.
My second day in the town, and having exhausted both my knees and what the place has to offer I took a bus to the nearby caves. The bus abandonned my with 3 others on the side of the road and so Guy and Diggy from Israel, Berta from Mexico City and myself set off down a hill in search of the site. After a short walk we found the ticket booth and paid up our $40 entrance and $10 non-optional donation for conservation. We were then herded around the massive cave complex. The tour lasted 2 hours during which time we were shown such formations as the elephant, the kissing lovers, the Dante´s head, the corn-on-the-cob and other such things - needless to say they all just looked like rock formations to me. The caves, caverns is a better word really, are massive, between 50 and 70m high. The are pretty impressive and had some amazing formations, although I remember Cheddar in the UK being a lot more beautiful - these are a lot less delicate-looking than the ones at home.
Back in Taxco and it struck me that one of
the reasons Mexico´s old colonial hill side towns are so pretty is that firstly there isn´t alot of space in the tight allyways to stick up massive concrete structurs. The other is that they don´t cover everything is lit-up coloured plastic - HSBC for example just had nice little black letteringabove its door. No white and red to be seen anywhere.
I accidentally did some more shopping (seemed to have forgotton that i am carrying whatever I buy from now on) and then decided that I really should leave early the next morning and so at 10 o´clock on Tuesday I found myself eating breakfast, one state over, in Cuernavaca.
Cuernavaca Cuernava is pretty and the palace and cathedral are really different from others in Mexico - built in the style of miliatry fortresses by Cortes himself. However, I had been biten by some sort of flesh-eating insect on my arm and the antihistimine needed to make it deflate to a near-normal size made me groggy and not really in the mood for sightseeing. I did walk down the pretty little man-made canyon though and have a look in the photography museum where I was guided
around the 10 square meters by 2 guides who pointed out the obvious. I just nodded along - for all they knew I couldn´t understand a word they were saying. I attempted to find the waterfall which I either didnt find or was a lot less impressive than the guide book suggested and napped some more. I slept so much that at 6am the next morning I was up and raring to go, back to Mexico to meet Mary where after a short panic involving mis-printed airline tickets (which did at least pass an ootherwise empty hour) we headed for the airpoprt and to hot and sticky Puerto Escondido, the beach on the south, Pacific coast.
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