Mexico - Getting Lost In Guanajuato

Hello there!

After a short break and consolidating my first edition of my Travel Diaries, which included my travel posts to 14 different countries, here's kickstarting my second edition of Travel Diaries! For those who are keen to read my the first edition, you can find them here.

I am actually quite excited to start this new country and new series of posts, because it's something that I wanted to do for quite some time, but I needed some time to tidy up my photos and organise my storytelling and places. And this new country is Mexico!

Back in 2009, I had the opportunity to go for a summer exchange programme to spend 7 weeks studying in an university in Queretaro, a small city in Mexico and that was one of my more memorable parts of my life! Going halfway across the globe from Asia, I didn't know much about Mexico so I went there with my eyes wide open, and ready to embrace the different cultures and experiences.

A few months before the actual trip, if you are old enough to recall, there was the H1N1 virus which was quite prevalent in the world, including Mexico, and the trip was almost cancelled. Eventually, the programme was postponed, and the situation got better and travel restrictions were lifted. Even so, many participants of the programme decided not to go ahead for personal reasons. Because this trip was such a rare opportunity, I made the decision to go ahead.

So let the adventures begin!

Here's the series of Mexico posts so far:
Mexico - Flying Halfway Across The Globe
Mexico - A Journey Beneath The Vineyard
Mexico - Where Peña de Bernal Comes Alive
Mexico - A Leap Of Faith At Las Pozas
Mexico - A Garden Of Wild Wonders
Mexico - The Pyramids Of Teotihuacan
Mexico - We Scaled The Pyramid Of The Sun
Mexico - Where Colour Meets The Hills At Guanajuato

After visiting the main sights in the downtown city centre of Guanajuato, we had a bit of time, and my friend and I decided to venture further out to the outskirts of the city. And it was such an adventure, because we literally got quite lost in the city!

In the year of 2009, we didn't really have data roaming and hence there was no such things at Google Maps to help with navigation. So all we had was the map in the tourist brochure. Haha.

There were some museums...

A funeraria, which I don't think needs a translation even if one doesn't understand Spanish.

More museums.. This one is quite interesting because it used to be a grain warehouse. Back in the history, this was definitely important.

And it looked like this. Hmm, am not sure about you, but does it resemble another type of place? Oops.

They also had several places of worship, religion is always a big time anywhere in the world.

One of the "attractions" in Guanajuato is that they had a lot of tunnels beneath the city for cars to travel because most of the ground level space was meant for people to walk. This gives Guanajuato a rather unusual urban layout compared with many other cities.

Some further background from online: However, there's a little more to the story: the tunnels weren't originally built specifically to separate cars from pedestrians. Some were adapted from the city's old river channels and later developed into roads. The tunnel network is now extensive: official heritage information lists more than 8 kilometres of underground streets across 23 tunnels.

Remember we only had a hardcopy tourist brochure and a rough map? When we came out from a series of tunnels, we somehow got lost as to where we actually were.

Fortunately, my friend was quite the expert in the sense of direction, and we pushed on to this site because it looked interesting. However, it was getting late and time was running out (we were supposed to back to meet with the university and rest of the students at a certain time), so we had to travel fast.

And after an hour, yay we reached! This is Mirador de Rayas. From this point, we were able to see amazing view of Guanajuato from another high point, which was the northern part of the city.

If you were to reference the cover photo of the earlier post where we started from, this was where we ended after a few hours of walking all by foot! Even till now, I can't believe we did it!

Time to enjoy the views!

We also walked around the vicinity and there was an amphitheatre.

As much as we would like to enjoy the quieting and calming ambience of this space a little more, we had to make our way through where we came by, and through all the tunnels, back to the downtown city centre, and when we reached the meeting point, everyone was already there. Interestingly, the rest of them did not venture so far away and just walked around in the city, and only the two of them were adventurous enough to "get lost" in a foreign city. Credit to my friend for being able to navigate so well based on his sense of direction, and thanks to the locals for pointing us to the right directions even though we also struggled with the language barrier given our level of Spanish was still basic. Looking back, it was such an adventure and even though it has been 17 years, I still remembered this crazy day. Hehe!

And that's all I have today! Have you been to Guanajuato or Mexico? Let me know in the comments below!

Finally, thanks for reading my post in the community under World Map Pin!