After two nights in Guadalajara, we headed to Guanajuato. South of Zacatecas, we headed back north and then west to reach this city. Like Zacatecas, Guanajuato is a mountain silver town of about 70k and somewhere over 2000m altitude. Unlike Guanajuato though, this city gave us a very weird vibe. The city is tucked into a steep hillside of impossible terrain made possible only by the presence of substances with arbitrarily assigned value in the area. Some years ago, the city was flooded by the river running through it and it was decided that it would be diverted. In its place a road was built to relieve some of the traffic. In addition to this riverbed road, the city now has a labyrinth of underground roads, streets, walkways, parking, etc. There are portals that take you to the surface world every now and then. In general the surface roads are one way East to West and the subterraneas are one way in the opposite direction. Finding our way around this city to look for hotels was a particular challenge.

Our level of exhaustion and the congested streets (by people transporting themselves by an assortment of means) made it unlikely that we would receive well the masses of people offering their services to tourist (in English no less) via the hard sell any time we slowed down. One guy actually jumped on the back bumper to offer himself as a guide. Once we finally found a hotel with parking, things kept getting weirder and weirder. The hotel staff was primarily shady-looking guys in their mid twenties to early thirties. In fact, it wouldn't be difficult to conclude that they didn't really own the hotel at all. By its looks, they might as well have found (or taken over) the place and started using it as their base of operation for whatever it was they were up to. The hotel was not a colonial building, but was old enough to just look run down. It did have spacious, comfortable rooms with balconies that offered a pretty good view of the city. In the room next to us, however, was what I have now come to consider a pack of young boys around 15 or so. By the sounds coming from there I reached the only possible conclusion, they were occupying themselves by dismantling everything in the room and dropping (or throwing) the parts about at random. During their breaks, they would come out to their balcony to hurl insults at the guys standing downstairs on the corner. It had all the makings of some bizarre David Lynch film. The next morning we decided we would eat and get out of town as soon as we could.

Guanajuato must have been a cool place at one time, but its a prime example of what happens when a town gets taken over by people like us: tourists.