Real De Minas De San Luis Hotel San Luis Potosí

... a video showing a Mayan birth. I wasn't expecting that!

The next day we took a tour to two of the traditional villages nearby. Our tour guide was called Carlos. He had a very impressive comb over, and would just whip his comb out mid conversation and run it through his hair. Within about five minutes of meeting him he had told us he is a recovering alcoholic. He took us to a graveyard, which could have been mistaken for the local rubbish dump. People bring offerings for their ...

... was thinking or just leaving us hanging in suspense just for the craic? Anyway we drank up their for a while and met a couple of Girls from Worcester and Sheffield, there`s not actually been that many British travellers to speak of its a bit of a novelty. Have met mostly European and American so far. Their was some good music here and at about 2am me Fred and the Canadian guy got a cab into town, the place we wanted to go the other night, and managed to get into an Irish ...

... dried shrimps, Christmas lights, raw ducks.......In the end I stopped and had some lunch from a stall as I needed the energy to carry on fighting my way out of the place. Eventually some kid on a sweet stall who had probably seen me walk past about seven times told me to go through the shoes (about half a kilometre of them) and hang a left and bingo - I have never been so happy to see a Metro station in my life.

On Saturday I decided to stay away from the smoggy city centre ...

... s beautiful former silver mining towns. Speaking of former silver mining towns, I was immediately drawn to the name of San Luis Potosi due to my memories of Potosi, Bolivia. The town in Bolivia is famous for its silver mines that once financed a good part of Spain's wars in Europe and the explorations and expansion of "New Spain". I actually crawled around in the underground labyrinth of tunnels in one of the silver mines. In the claustrophobic ...

... a dormant volcano about 100 miles from Mexico City. 4200m high, 4 steps and I was struggling for breath. Wish I had kept the running up throughout the Summer! Inside the crater there are two glacial lakes, Lagoon of the Moon and Lagoon of the Sun. There`s not much life up here, trees can't live this high and plants struggle too. That said I got to the edge of the lake and there was cow$hit! There ...

... me- sometimes both at the same time (as is happening right now with D.F.). I don´t know what it is (never been aware of anything like this before)... maybe intuition, maybe prejudice... but it´s strong and usually confusing. I just pray for honesty and strength to listen. It´s going to hurt me to leave D.F., dammit. A precursor to the big arm chopping... maybe the equivalent of a finger or 3... and I have no idea where to go from here.

Today I will be going to The Basilica De Guadalupe. I learned many things that I didn't know about it before. For example one of the things I learned and that I thought it was very interesting is that it is not just a catholic church but a central place of worship for Mexico's patron saint ...

... long de la route de sortie pour nous voir passer en nous saluant et nous applaudissant ; ce fut un moment excitant. Le passage aux douanes s'est fait avec facilité ; seul le chef de caravane s'est arrêté pour parler aux douaniers et les 22 autres ont passé sans même ralentir. Ce fut toute une expérience que d'apprendre à se déplacer en convoi de 23 véhicules mesurant de 25 à 50 pieds. Ce n'est pas facile de rester grouper, car des autos s'insèrent entre nous, des feux de circulation ...

So the guy come sin this morning and tells us we need to find another hostel. NO!! WE were finally settled. No need to move around from place to place...so we thought. I guess it ended up proving beneficial in the end since the hostel we found turned out to be wicked cool!! It is called "Hostel Amigo"...the same chain as we stayed in at Guatemala. The place was bouncing! So many cool people, with a bar, pool table, general hang out ...

... station. While our hotel room was nice, roomy and very clean - the surrounding neighborhood was a bit dodgy. The plazas and churches in the Centro were very nice, as was the shopping and restaurants. We went to a Museum that had quite a large collection of Pre-Hispanic remains, which included artifacts from the Mayans ...