I’m traveling along narrow cobblestone streets flanked on both sides by rows of adobe buildings washed with bright yellow and accented with white trim and large ceramic pots brimming with colorful blooms. My mode of transportation is a white “coche Victoria” (or calesa) pulled by a mule named Dolly, garlanded with flowers and a hat […]
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Though most of the town is lovely, it’s the historic section, dating back to when the town was founded in 1536 and centered around the Rafael Paez Garden, that creates a feel of wandering back into time. Rectangles of queso fresco, cheese made that morning from the milk of cows grazing on the ranches that surround Jerez, […]
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Sometimes in the evenings, after the sun has set behind the monolith that towers over the small village of San Sebastián Bernal, ánimas, or restless souls who sleep in the small graveyard near the old chapel, rise up and move silently through the quiet streets. The ánimas mean no harm. They are just continuing their daily round – what […]
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The stairs that take me down hug the curves of the mine as it twists and turns. The walls are coarse with cut stone. I have followed the narrow Carretera Panoramica (Panoramic Highway) that winds up from the Colonial city of Guanajuato to La Valencia, a charming village that overlooks the broad valley where the […]
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We follow a meandering street that twists and turns like the best of any Medieval European city. But that, in a way, is what Zacatecas is. A soft dusk has settled over the cobblestone streets of Zacatecas and we can hear the sounds of the fountain in the small garden across from our hotel and […]
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Located just east of Zacatecas city, Guadalupe’s palm-fringed Jardín Juárez has the special charm found in so many Mexican towns. Here vendors sell the local crafts that this colonial town, founded in 1578, is famous for – including tooled leather belts and soft, pliant jackets along with large carved rustic furniture and wall hangings, newly woven […]
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Someone has mistakenly put shrimp into the ice cream or else I’m reading the sign incorrectly — always a possibility as my Spanish certainly needs some work. But then again, when I order camarones at restaurants, I get shrimp and so camarón must be shrimp, right? But then what is it doing in the ice cream? The answer, according […]
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The monkeys, they tell me, are asleep in a cave across the lagoon. But other than that disappointment, my trip to Pac Chen, a micro sized Maya village in the jungle of the Yucatan Peninsula, is the perfect way to step back in time. To get here from Playa del Carmen, our home base, we […]
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