March 14, 2017
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| Mexican Water Pipe Repair |
Tuesday was my last day in La Cruz for a while and I spent
it preparing to travel to Guadalajara and Copper Canyon. I ran in the morning. We had a broken water pipe on our street and
the whole neighborhood was wet. The
water company in La Cruz didn’t work like water utilities in the USA. They came and shut off the flood within a
day, but they were in no hurry to actually repair the break. Instead, they
rushed off to shut off another flood somewhere else. They didn’t arrive in an official truck. Instead, they walked to the job, transporting
their tools in a wheelbarrow. Of course,
it didn’t require a backhoe or a jackhammer to tear up a cobblestone
street. That could be done with a pry
bar and a shovel. Two days later, there
was still a hole in the street. Breaks
were common. The street trees were
interfering with the water pipes.
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| Plumber's Late Shift |
I picked up my laundry and packed everything I would need
for my trip except my toiletries. I ate
what I had leftover in the refrigerator and gave away my perishables. I spent most of the afternoon catching up on
my blog before we ventured into the Copper Canyon where we had been warned
there was no Internet.
We were taking the 7:15 bus from Mezcales to Guadalajara the
next day and Betty had ordered a taxi for 6:15 in the morning. I wanted to go to bed early, but the plumber
came to fix my toilet about 8:30 pm. The
pipe leading to the supply valve on the toilet was rusted out and needed
replacing. Nacho, the plumber, made short
work of it, but water and rust particles got everywhere in my room and
bathroom. It was quite a flood. He tried to clean up with a mop, but I had to
get some old towels to sop up the water from the cracks between the tiles. Otherwise, the white tiles in my room would
have been covered with wet, dirty footprints.
I finally got to bed about 10:00, but didn’t manage to get
to sleep until after 1:00 in the morning.
March 15, 2017
Five thirty in the morning came around very fast. I got up, showered, and packed. Then I checked to be sure that Betty was
up. She wasn’t. It took me some time to wake her and then she
only had
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| Jalisco Scenery |
fifteen minutes to get ready before the taxi was due. Somehow, she made it. Unfortunately, the taxi didn’t arrive. When he still hadn’t arrived by 6:25, Betty
ran over to the marina taxi stand to find someone, but no one was there. She had ordered a taxi from the marina stand,
not realizing that they didn’t operate that early. We grabbed our bags and hightailed it up the
hill towards the main taxi stand by the highway. They saw us coming and a taxi drove down and
picked us up at the glorieta. It had
been stressful, but we still arrived in Mezcales in plenty of time to catch our
bus.
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Blue Agave on the Way to Guadalajara
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We took a Primera Plus bus to Guadalajara. The bus was quite luxurious with wifi, leg
rests, and individual televisions. Since
we had had little rest the night before, we tried to sleep, but the road was
rough and twisty and I only slept for a few minutes here and there. We drove up the coast and then turned inland,
retracing the route I had taken when coming to La Cruz from Mexico City. We drove over mountains and through
valleys. Everything seemed greener than
it had a month before. It was a pretty
drive.
Shortly before noon, we stopped in Zapopan. Zapopan is a residential suburb of
Guadalajara where many people live.
There are residences, stores, and restaurants, but not a lot of
businesses like in Guadalajara. After
Zapopan, we continued on to the Guadalajara station and arrived there about
12:15. It was impossible to miss getting
a taxi outside the bus station. Many bus
lines had their terminals all together in what looked almost like an airport. We got a ride downtown to the Hotel Morales
for 140 pesos.
We were tired and hungry, but our room was not ready. We left our luggage with the porter and
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| Cathedral in Guadalajara |
walked down to the cathedral plaza to have lunch at the Delgollado Boutique
Café attached to the Teatro Delgollado.
We got salads and relaxed for a bit.
Tired as we were, this was Betty’s first trip to Guadalajara and that
afternoon was her only opportunity to take a city tour. We bought tickets on the Tapatio Tours bus
that offered a hop on hop off tour of Guadalajara. Then we had just enough time to run back to
the hotel, check into our room, and rush back to catch the 3:20 bus.
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| Our Room at the Hotel Morales |
Hotel Morales was a gracious hotel with a spacious lobby and
large rooms. Everything was very nicely
appointed, but the beds were still rock hard.
It was expensive by Mexican standards, but at $62/night for a double
room in a prime location, it was a good value.
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| Tapatio Tour Bus |
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| Street Art in Tlaquepaque |
Our first circuit on the bus tour took us through
Guadalajara to Tlaquepaque, a quaint city that had gradually merged with
Guadalajara. It had pedestrian streets
and squares lines with touristy shops and restaurants, although most of the
visitors seemed to be Mexicans from other parts of the country. We met a group of women from Tabasco and kept
running into them wherever we went. We
browsed in some of the stores, took a quick jaunt through the market, and
checked out the church. On Juarez, the
only street wide enough to accommodate a bus, I stopped to get ice cream at an
artisanal ice cream shop. They had all
kinds of flavors. I got a small cup of
Baileys flavored ice cream and it was delicious. Served with an Italian cookie,
the ice cream cost me 16 pesos (about 80 cents.) Betty went across the street and bought an
apple croissant.
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| Artisanal Ice Cream in Tlaquepaque |
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| Los Arcos in Guadalajara |
We got back to the bus stop near the cathedral just after
6:00. We had been stuck in rush hour
traffic and just missed the 6:00 departure for the Guadalajara circuit. We had almost an hour to kill before the next
bus, so we sat in the park for half an hour or so and then walked around the
cathedral neighborhood. The symphony was
playing in the Plaza de Armas which was half torn up to build an underground
light rail station. The construction was
wreaking havoc all over Guadalajara, making the historic center temporarily
less gracious. In the future, it would
be much easier to get around the city using the light rail system.
The light was starting to fail when we boarded the bus at
7:00 and we spent an hour and a half driving around the city, seeing the
monuments light up as the sun went down.
Los Arcos, built to commemorate the bicentennial of the revolution, were
lit with green lights that made a striking contrast with the red taillights of
the evening traffic. Guadalajara is very
modern and we drove past huge shopping malls and through a neighborhood of
former mansions turned into bridal salons and restaurants.
It was nearly 9:00 when we neared the hotel and we were
hungry. We didn’t want to wait in line
for a table, so we stopped at La Gorda for dinner. I ordered Carne en Su Jugo (Meat in its
juice) because that was the specialty of the place. It consisted of thin strips of beef cooked
with bacon and served with whole beans.
It was served with roasted onions, tortillas and some fabulous bean
soup. Betty’s enchiladas were dry, but
my dinner was delicious. We could barely
stay awake long enough to eat. We
stumbled back to the hotel and I was almost too tired to ask the concierge
about going to Chapala the next day.
Fortunately, a tour was easily arranged and we were back in our room
fifteen minutes later. We were both
asleep by 10:00. I slept soundly until
1:00 when I unfortunately woke. The room
was quiet, but the mattress was not comfortable. As tired as I was, I could not get back to
sleep until 4:00.
March 16, 2017
Betty woke me from a sound sleep a few minutes before my
alarm was due to go off. Of course, she
wasn’t aware that I had been up until 4:00 and wanted to sleep. We had to meet our driver at 9:30, but had
plenty of time to eat breakfast in the hotel and get ready.
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| Lakeside Homes in Chapala |
Our driver, Paco, was a young man from Zapopan who had lived
in the U.S.A.. for many years and was married to a U.S. citizen. They had returned to Mexico when her father
died so as to care for her mother. We
were the only people on the tour, so we had Paco at our disposal. During the hour-long drive to Chapala, he
answered our many questions about Mexican politics. He was very embarrassed by President Pena
Nieto because he felt he was ignorant and had been elected only because he was
handsome. Paco was offended by the fact
that when asked what were his three favorite books, Pena Nieto could only answer, “The
Bible, the Old Testament, and the New Testament.” He had also apparently avoided explaining his
wife’s cause of death. Paco sympathized
with those of us who were embarrassed by the U.S. president.
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| Lake Chapala |
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| Tasting Room at Los Magos |
We left Ajijic about 2:00 and drove to the Los Magos tequila distillery and tasting room out in the middle of nowhere between Chapala and
Guadalajara. Paco was a connoisseur of
tequila and he liked the produce of this distillery. We were the only tasters that afternoon and
they were very generous with us. We
tasted four kinds of tequila and then they started pouring tastes of tequila
liqueurs. I had always resisted the idea
of tequila cream liqueurs, not realizing that they were made with white
tequila. Calera made both cream liqueurs
and regular ones. We tried pina colada,
mango, pistachio, guayabana, walnut cream, and vanilla cream. They were all good and, once we decided we
wanted to buy some, had a difficult time choosing what to buy. Finally, we agreed to each buy one bottle and
share. I bought a bottle of pina colada
and Betty chose the walnut cream. We
spent quite a while there and got a little silly. I was not a tequila drinker and had probably
never consumed that much straight tequila in my life. It was a good thing Paco was driving and not
drinking. He did buy a bottle to go.
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| Paco with His Tequila |
It was 5:00 by the time we got back to the hotel. I wanted to take Betty on a walking tour of
the plazas stretching from the cathedral to the market, so we decided to eat an
early dinner (we had skipped lunch) and then go for a walk afterward. We wanted to eat at La Chata, a popular
restaurant with a line out the door at all times. I had eaten there before and could vouch for
the food being worth the wait. At that
hour, we didn’t have to wait long. La
Chata sandwiches more tables into their space than diners would normally
tolerate, but the food is good and the restaurant is a Guadalajara
institution. I had the combination plate
with chicken in mole and a chile relleno.
Betty had the enchiladas with mole poblano. My chile was not very warm, but everything
was quite tasty. It was nice to be in a
popular restaurant where we were the only gringos, for a change.
After dinner, we walked past the Teatro Delgollado and
through the Plaza Fundadores where there is a fountain depicting the founding
of Guadalajara by the Spanish. We
continued along a series of whimsical fountains and past the jewelry market, a
building the size of a large department store devoted entirely to mostly gold
jewelry. Eventually, we arrived at the
Hospicio Las Cabanas, formerly an orphanage and hospice, but now a cultural
center and museum. The museum was
closed, but there were fun sculptures in the plaza. One set was The Magicians Living Room, a series of bronze tables, chairs, and
sofas in the shape of body parts. The
legs were human and all wearing mismatched shoes. The sofa had cheeks on its backside. One wing chair had giant ears for wings. We enjoyed examining each piece.
Behind the Hospicio was another plaza and then the
market. Everything was closing, so we
didn’t go in, but we browsed a bit among the vendors on the way back and then
crossed over to a busy shopping street where every shop seemed to feature goods
from a different Italian designer. There
were fabulous evening gowns and wedding dresses in profusion. We agreed to come to Guadalajara to shop if
we ever needed a dress for the Academy Awards.
It was 8:30 by the time we returned to the hotel and we
needed to get up at 3:30 the following morning to meet our tour to Copper
Canyon by 4:15. We were tired and went
straight to bed, although I stayed up, writing, until 10:00.
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