Three friends and I headed out of Ajijic for a three-day getaway. Our ultimate destination was León, but we traveled the back roads and visited some delightful villages and cities. The area northeast of Guadalajara is called Los Altos de Jalisco, which encompasses a zone of expansive high plateau plains. The panoramic views of the […]
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San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato & The Bajío By Julie Doherty y Meade A Moon Handbook First Edition Avalon Travel, 2011 Available from Amazon Books: Paperback I like the Moon Handbooks and I own several of them — well used, I might add. They are sturdy, easy to read, compact and therefore easily packable whether in luggage or […]
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With his parents’ permission, I took Fernando, my 12-year-old English student, to Guanajuato, the seat of the Mexican War of Independence, for two days. Fortunately, I’d been warned by a friend to avoid driving in Guanajuato because of the extreme difficulty in traversing the city streets, which are laid out with no pattern, no design, […]
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Admit it. Next to simmering on the beach or sunning poolside slathered in oil, you visit Mexico to shop. In fact, if you’re a real shopper you bypass beach resorts altogether. On at least one trip each year, you head into the interior, into cities such as Guadalajara, Guanajuato, Morelia, San Miguel de Allende, and […]
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Sometime during my first month in Guanajuato, the idea floated into my head of writing an article about the sonic landscape of the city. This of course includes a great deal of music, since it resounds in every corner. But surrounding the music is a larger sonic landscape, comprising a range of sounds, some magical, […]
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Guanajuato is, and has been for a long time, a centre of culture and education. In one way or another, it has always been prosperous, either through the richness of its farmland or its mines. There was the money to support cultural activities and the desire on the part of the rich mining families and hacendados, I […]
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The city of Guanajuato is nestled in a sort of steep basin in the Sierra Madre Mountains and spreads up around the center of the basin. Imagine a huge, terraced rice paddy such as we’ve seen in photos of Indochina. Then, imagine a city built on those terraces, a city in which there are practically […]
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The most important visual image in the classic film, ” Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” was not the alien spaceship, but the imposing stone monolith chosen as the site of the encounter. In an attempt to understand the significance of his mental image of that place the star of the film almost goes mad. It […]
Continue ReadingJudy pounds on my bedroom door, waking me from a very sound sleep. After all, it’s only 7 a.m. “Yeah.” I say. “There’s a scorpion in the bathroom.” Silence. “Jim!” “So kill it.” “Killing scorpions is man’s work.” She yells. Now that surprises me, as Judy is a very independent woman. Struggling out of bed, […]
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It was a chance thing, really. We were heading for Patzcuaro, almost due south of Guanajuato where we had spent the past several days on a photography and business junket. While we were checking out of our small hotel just this side of the tunnels that snake under old Guanajuato, the otherwise taciturn gentleman who […]
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