Arrival in Guanajuato (Oct 31)

The "air-bus" to Guanajuato

This bus company is trying to be as similar as possible to an airline, complete with the driver being separated by a door and barrier from the passengers and a safety video demonstrating the safety procedures and emergency exits. The seats were extremely comfortable.

arrival in the empty Guanajuato bus station at about midnight

After wandering around the city for 2 hours trying to barter with hostels operators charging 200 pesos per person for dorm rooms we settled on a sleezy hotel situated above the loudest nightclub in town. Although we felt like we were inside the nightclub at least we were able to lie horizontal which is more than we can say about
night buses.

Halloween kids parade

Jose was also able to recover our videos!

Saved!

Our hero, Jose*, outside of his cyber-cafe. He was able to recover all 597 photos (all our pictures from Mexico) from the renegade memory card for $5! Unfortunately not the video, but we are still hopeful about recovering this as well. Thanks Jose!


Here are some of the photos of Zacatecas that we had lost:

A Day of the Dead display (a tribute to cowboys)

Halloween day

The aqueduct

Museo Rafael Coronel

*not his real name

Last Day in Zacatecas

We left Zacatecas on Halloween Day, which is not so important as a holiday in its own right here, but as a part of the larger and more important celebration of Day(s) of the Dead (Nov. 1 and 2). Kids sort of trick or treat, but we saw them out and in costumes on the 31st, 1st, and a few die-hards on the 2nd. Unfortunately we spent Halloween night on a bus, with a frustrating stop-over right at dinner-time.
These are the pictures from Halloween morning before we left Zacatecas. We lost all our aqueduct pictures with the rest of the photos on the little camera (as described in last post). :(

Parade of costumed schoolkids

Storytime at a public square, in front of an elaborate Day of the Dead altar. It sounded like the teacher was telling a moderately scary story, but for all we know it was a happy story.

the altar

a Day of the Dead (mock) sugar skull

A typical Zacatecas hillside

The Museo Rafael Coronel

There were lots of cats living in the museum courtyards.

The museum of masks

Zacatecas Day 3, Las Ruinas

On this day we made a one hour bus ride and half hour trek out to "The Ruins," as it was known in town, also called La Quemada.

Josh unsuccessfully trying to hitchhike. 100% of the cars drove right past...but there was only one car going in our direction. It gave us a very wide berth.

These plants smelled really good. Not sure what they are.

Unfortunately we "lost" a whole memory card full of photos and videos from the little point-and-shoot camera. The card just suddenly decided to stop working and is saying it needs to be reformated every time we turn it on or plug it into a computer. So we lost quite a few photos and videos from the rest of our stay in Zacatecas, as well as from Day of the Dead in Guanajuato. Hopefully we will be able to recover it at some point, but for now at least we still have photos from the D200 (and lots of them).