| Silver city - Taxco. The spaniards mined silver here, and it is still a city that survives mostly because of silver. Of course, nowadays it is tourists coming here to buy it that keeps Taxco going. Despite the influx of tourists, Taxco is great. It is built on the mountainsides and every street is steep, twisty and cobblestoned and narrow. The locals whizz about in modified Volkswagen beetles (which is about the maximum sized car that can negotiate the streets). We stayed in an ex convent that had a lovely internal courtyard and big rooms with heavy wooden shutters. The food is good in Taxco too - there is a supply of funky cafes, some with live music (the one across from our room had about 10 drummers one night, which was great while we were in the cafe, and bad when we wanted to go to sleep!). From Taxco we took a collectivo to Ixcateopan de Cuauhtemoc - a teeny village built out of marble whose claim to fame is as the birthplace of Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor executed by Cortes. There is a massive sculpture of him outside the village, and a miniscule museum inside an old church. The museum contains copies of the codices in which the Aztecs described the coming of the spanish and well worth a look as their writing system is based opictograms. The other thing of note in Ixcateopan is the rough-and-ready caff in the main square where the Senora will make you chicken soup with a great big hunk of chicken oozing yellow fat out of it, and the MOST SUBLIME tortillas we ever tasted in Mexico! |
