Hotel Quinta Real Zacatecas - A Summit Hotel

Spent wonderful 2 weeks in Mexico with Nige before starting the trip for real in Peru.

Spent first couple of days in mexico city then headed north for a train ride through canyon country. Scenary was unbelievable with a few night stopovers for a bit of sightseeing and walking.

Having done a week of touring and sightseeing, second week spent relaxing on the coast in Baja California to the west of mexico. The hotel was quite impressive. We even had our own butler ...

... was terrific. The height of some of the shear rock faces was amazing, even worse some of the rocks were not that secure and there were plenty of rock falls. On one section there was a 1 metre cube rock right in the middle of the other lane, I would not be amused to come across that at night.
Spent a fair time in the clouds but when it cleared the views were magnificent!
Very slow going though (not a ...

... we had the "best room in the house". Not knowing what to expect, we went up to our room 31302 on the 3rd floor of building 31 and were amazed at what we saw. We were expecting a regular room or junior suite but what we were booked into was a 2 room suite with gorgeous ocean views, 2 balconies, separate living room and dining room and a fabulous bathroom with a separate Jacuzzi tub and shower (with views of the ocean!). We definitely had the best room ...

As a part of our Yucatan vacations we decided to drive through the Mayan jungle, there is actually a pretty good road going from Chetumal to Campeche. Approximately, 150 km into the forests we arrived at a small village called Xpujil - it's a great starting point if you want to visit several very interesting ruin sites within the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. It's off the mainstream tourist trails so it ...

... that there are about 40 places, mostly in the USA, Mexico, Central and South America, whose names have the word "Guadalupe" in it. So having the name "Guadalupe" is hardly an exclusive club. It is perhaps a common name because of the importance of the "Virgin Mary" in the Catholic system of beliefs. "Catholic belief" can make for some great tourist destinations. My best experience along those lines was "El Camino de ...

... and the affirmation - "damn, I am in a beautiful place". That is the feeling that Zacatecas elicited within us. As an aside, that same feeling is totally absent where I am living presently in Prince George, BC. So what does that say about me? With just a minimum of huffing and puffing we arrived at the "Estacion de Teleférico " which in and of itself is a striking place to spend a few moments. From here the view of the ...

... banos" caused us to stumbled upon a five star hotel located near the aqueduct. It turned out to be the "Quinta Real" which is built around the old bullring. Can there be a more majestic setting for a beautiful hotel? This must have been an architect's dream - design a 5-star hotel around a bullring. The opportunity was not flubbed as the award winning architecture features rooms and facilities that look right into the former bullring. We happened to be ...

... we ended up doing the next day despite being told by at least 4 different people to take the southern entrance to the mine as opposed to the top one and so avoid the millions of steps. Why can't girls ever work out North?! A fine Zacatecas tradition, although also involving traversing evil hills, is the Callejoneada which we were invited to by some students we met in the street. Everyone gathers in a square and dances to a traditional band ...

I meet 2 English guys on the bus and we arrive in Zacatecas at 6am after a 13hr bus ride. We hop on the local bus to take us to the city centre. I have organised to met a girl named Ale through Couchsurfing.com here in Zacatecas. I meet her for coffee the following day and she shows me around her city. Zacatecas is an elegant colonial city in central Mexico. In addition to it's fine colonial buildings, constructed of pink sandstone, it maintains a great partying ...

... pretend to understand what the person next to them is yelling into the side of their head, anyway. Most of us didn't want to go in the first place but we couldn't very well abandon Johnny this early in the game, with all parties still sober and all. Once at the bar, poor Johnny would sit for minutes at a time wracking his brain over all the Spanish words he knew until he could lean over and say something clever like "Do you like music?" or "Band good, yes?". He helped it ...