More Cuernavaca

We decided to skip the archeological site of Xochicalco, and stayed in Cuernavaca instead. After a nice breakfast in a neighborhood cage, the first thing we did was to visit the Robert Brady museum. The guy was an artist and lived over 20 years in this house which he decorated with his 1200-piece art collection together with his own art. The house itself is also very impressive with an internal courtyard and a pool. But the way he designed his environment, fit colors, art to the inherent architecture of the building was the most interesting part.

Next we visited Jardin Borda, which is just around the corner. The garden with its pools was built in the 18th century. A quite getaway from the noisy streets of the city.

A small exhibit on the side was dedicated to Yolanda Quijano, who I never heard of. Quijano is a 96-year-old Mexican painter and sculptor, who was influenced by magican realism. Her motto "Everything is magic. Life without magic is not life.” was really expressed in her art on several levels:

Taxco to Cuernavaca

Since neither Didi not Uber are available in Taxco, the best one can do is either to flag a taxi or try to pre-arrange one, which is what we did. We communicated everything perfectly, no doubt, pickup at 10:30, at the exact location, everything was perfect, except that the car did not show up. 10 minutes after the agreed time we started pulling our suitcases, luckily downhills. At the end we found a taxi which took us to the bus station. From there we took the bus to Cuernavaca. Cuernavaca is a much larger city than Taxco. Our 110 sqm (ehm? yes!) apartment is located at a very central place, walking distance from the main square and also from the bus station. After settling in we went to exlpore the Zocalo area, markets and the cathedral-monastery compound.

Spelunking Grutas de Cacahuamilpa

In the morning we tried to find our way to the bus station that would serve buses and Combis (similar to Sherut in Israel or Marshrutka in Gerorgia). It took us some time, information on the Internet was contradictory, and even locals pointed us to different directions. At the end we took the bus service Costa Line which put us about 500 meters away from the entrance to the National Part Grutas de Cacahuamilpa. We opted for a Spanish speaking group tour to explore the caves. Grutas de Cacahuamilpa is one of the world's largest limestone cave system "live", which means that the groundwater is still filtered through it and stalagmite and stalactites are still being formed. The part of the cave that is accessible to the public is very well maintained, mostly very accessible, even for wheelchair users. Gigantic sized halls, interesting formations and even mountains inside them. People here love attributing known figures and characters from legends to the rock formation. Look, it looks like a cute dog, Virgin Mary, dog again, a couple kissing, Virgin Mary again and again, and dogs, goats and horses one after the other.

We finished the tour in approximately 2 hours and found decent public transportation backl to Taxco. Decent, but maybe not for everyone:

Doors are soooo... 2025 after all.... Nah, we don't need them...

Taxco

Today in the morning we checked out from our AirBNB in CDMX, took an Uber to Taxqueña bus station. We easily found our bus to Taxco, checked our luggage and 2.5 hours later we were in a totally different lanscape, culture, colors, food and smells. On the way:

Taxco is in Guerrera and is an extremely hilly town famous for its silver and jewlery industry. This is also the overwhelming part of it, in the center it's difficult to quietly walk without people trying to pull the visitor into their silver shop. Even official looking tour guides tell you some information and immediately afterwards recommend a silver shop. So we're learning how to ignore them. Sellers of all kind of touristic objects are also sticky. But this is mainly on the main square and its vicinity. Other things that were not as expected: no Uber or Didi in this town. You have to waive a taxi, negotiate the price and go. Address as a concept doesn't really work here either, the driver just looks an the Google Streetview on my phone and understand where to go. There are extremely lot of very old VW Beetle cards, all somehow manipulated to have automatic gears. It's really impressive how these operate in these very steep streets.

We visited the church on the main square:

We visited the pre-hispanic mine. This was a really interesting site. The mine was already operational when the Spanish arrived. Since there was significant amount of silver, gold and other metals mined there, they decided not to let the Spanish know about it and sealed its entrance. It was accidentally discovered in 2013 during some construction works. We descended into the mine with protective helmets, listened to some stories in Spanish and climbed quite a lot of stairs down and up.

For dinner we went to a restaurant where locals eat and had the local speciality of Pozole: a corn-chicken souped with avocado and crispy pork-belly (chicharon).