I took one look around the tiny, dingy room I had rented and began questioning my sanity. It was December 2 and I was in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, after a tiring 24-hour bus ride one thousand miles south of the border. During an earlier October visit, I had rented the cheap second-floor room […]
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This news bulletin just in: Mexico considers revising history books. Another holiday proposed. Famous explorer discovers Jocotepec! Okay, maybe not in the way Christopher Columbus did his thing. It appears several somebodies previously found Jocotepec — or maybe it was never lost. But it has been mostly ignored or taken for granted far beyond politeness. […]
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I adore travelling Mexico by bus. Mexico’s bus system offers travelers an economical, efficient and effective means to explore the entire country. The routes are highly organized and the connections are timely. Busing it in Mexico offers vacationers a remarkable opportunity to see not just the prime tourist destinations including all the fabulous beach resorts and colonial […]
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Happiness is following memorable footsteps under more favorable conditions. Most of 50 years ago, outside London, Ontario, brothers Jim and Jack Young acquired an old truck and bulldozer and made a bold move up in the world. In good weather they hauled gravel and helped build roads. In bad weather they moved snow. Their little […]
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I collect old books. There’s no more fun for me than to forage through secondhand bookstores, digging up the weird and wonderful, ’50s crime pulp and science fiction, 19th century poetry tomes, books on travel and adventure. In some of those cities where I’ve lived or spent time – Amsterdam, London, Melbourne, Stockholm, Tel Aviv […]
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In the novel “Virtual Light,” cyberpunk author William Gibson envisages a Mexico City of the near future where the air is a sooted ebon and the populace wears oxygen masks. It might seem far-fetched, but with the city’s population topping 20 million, and the city’s cars about a third that number and all of it […]
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Some time ago I was exploring the Mercado de Antiguëdades de Cuauhtemoc in downtown Mexico City with my brother-in-law and an entrepreneurial young Mexican named Carlos Villasena, press officer for the Philippine Embassy in Mexico – who was at that time just breaking into the antiques game, teaching himself to spot a bargain in the […]
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Legendary Mexican artist and master muralist Diego Rivera spent so much time avidly collecting pre-Hispanic art it’s a wonder he ever got around to painting. Rivera amassed a collection of thousands of objects: pottery items, stone and jade figures of animals, gods and humans. Many of the purchases were made on the black market. On […]
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These days, for some tourists, it seems that physical history, a sense of history, a sublimity of walking in the footsteps of the ancients by the light of nature itself, is not enough – one’s senses, incapable of an exercise of pure imagination, need to be kick-started into an appreciation of one’s surroundings. Flashing laser […]
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“Slightly to the right and below them, below the gigantic red evening, whose reflection bled away in the deserted swimming pools scattered everywhere like so many mirages, lay the peace and sweetness of the town. It seemed peaceful enough from where they were sitting.” -Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano In the purest sense of things, not […]
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