Hi
I made my last trip in a group about twenty years ago with an italian adventurers agency named Avventure nel Mondo, Adventurers in the world and it was in Mexico and Guatemala.
We arrived in Mexico city via New York where we had a lot of problems owing to a strike!
As italian I am used to strikes but that was american.
We lost our connection and had to sleep some hours one hundred kilometers far from Long Beach airport, guests of Pan Am Airlines that went to bankrupcy after some years....
Anyway in Mexico city we northern italian (four girls and me) met the majority of the remaining group, about twenty people from Naples, inclued the guide.
We visited the Atzeca Museum that remains in my memory as one of the most interesting museum in the world as it displays all the central America civilzations with a lot of explanations and pieces of art.
We walked on the Zocalo, the central square and the close by old and new cathedral.
We visited also a park with gardens and and went down some channels on a boat with musicians playing guitars and singing tipical mexican music as at Piazza Garibaldi, the italian heroe of the two worlds, where the mexican groups play in honour of the fiancees and drank our first tequila in the nearby cantinas.
Mexico city was fantastic before the Spaniards came, a lake with channels with gardens and flowers everywhere but nowadayas it is a giant metropoli, maybe the greatest in the world with about 20 millions people living inside that big area that it takes a couple of hours to get through by train.
We visited the Teotihuacan pyramids of the moon and of the sun and remained astonished for the grandiousity of the buildings and knowing that they are older than the Egypt pyramids.
We then went to Cuernavaca, a residential city at bout 100 km from the capital, on the hills, fresher than the hot and polluted metropoli and could appreciate particularly the old palace of Cortes, the spanish conqueror, where also the former emperor of Mexico, Maximilian of Austria lived coming from my home city Trieste until he was murdered by the revolutioners.
There were some paintings of the famous mexican painter Diego Rivera as in the palacio of bella artes in the capital.
We also visited by car the nice town of Taxco famous for the silver mines.
We enjoyed a mexican fiesta in the middle of the town.
I remember some men suspended from the top of a greasy pole with their head downunder, a lot of music, colours and tequila.
We arrived by air on Yucatan peninsula where we found our rented cars and started our tour round the maya archeological sites of Tulum (stone castles close to a white sand beach where we beached out), Uxmal (the Governor's Palace and the House of the Magicians) and the amazing Chichen Itza with its high pyramid.
We also visited a cenote, one of the 3,000 sink holes of which Yucatan is rich and bathed inside its fresh and clear water admiring the sky above us.
We then went to Chiapas the nice Province of Mexico where we visited:
Palenque the rich maya archological site with its Castillo and the Pyramid of the Diviner
San Cristobal de las Casas a nice tipical city with orthogonal streets, low and broad houses with nice gardens surrounded by walls
the marvellous Canon de Sumidero by boat to admire its 1,000 meters high stone walls
the waterfalls of Agua Azul
GUATEMALA
We arrived by air in Guatemala city, big central America city of more than 3 millions of inhabitants and soon left this modern and not interesting metropoli to visit instead the beautiful country inside which there is Tikal the capital of Maya empire, in the middle of the forest.
We arrived in Tikal by bus after 10 hours of exhausting run along a white road in the middle of the forest with the danger to be assaulted by the revolutioners.
We arrived destroyed at the lake of Flores but fortunately after a shower could admire the beauty of the green site of the close by Tikal full of castles, ruines and pyramids.
Another highlight of Guatemala was the lake of Atitlan with its nice villages on its banks, each one different and with different colourful clothes and the high volcanos all around.
Then we saw the old capital of Antigua, partially destroyed by an earthquake where we could visit its old and baroque churches and palaces.
The highlight of Guatemala was anyway Chchicastenango, located about 140 km and 2-3 hours drive northwest of Guatemala City, home to what is surely the most colorful native market in North and Central America, perhaps in all the Americas.
We arrived there on the Market day of Sunday and could see all the indigenous people coming there to sell their handicrafts, multicoloured clothes and praying and dancing, many of the men drunk inside the church of San Tomas, very simple with enlighted candles on its floor.
Guatemala remains one of the most beautiful country I have ever visited
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