Jon: Ok, so we've had a few travel adventures since the last post, a little more interesting than describing our normal crazy working week. We are living in a new house, complete with cockroaches, bedbugs, mosquitoes etc, but I guess its a case of "you get what you pay for!" heheh, well whatever doesn't kill ya makes you stronger, eh .... anyway, so we decided on a whim, hey lets go visit Guachimontones, home of the oldest pyramids in Mexico ... and they are round, so a little different to all those big, square, tourist covered, pyramids, and only an hour by bus from Guadalajara! So, complete with our super amigo, Tina, the four foot tall dynamo, off we went ... had to pay a whole 50 centavos (0.4 cents) to enter the bus station, keeps the beggars and bums out ... so we bought our tickets and off we went ...ok so our bus driver looked like a gentle old grandpa, but he drove like it was a formula 1 car!! Imagine a huge bus, on a narrow, two lane, pot-holed, crumbling street, passing huge sugar cane trucks at a reckless speed, forcing cars off the road since he's bigger than them ... oh yeah, and horn honking, for bursts of 30 seconds or so ... for real! ... crazy -- yes, fun oh yeah!!
So we arrived in the quaint old town of Teuchitlan ... the bus station ... what bus station ... a dusty little room with one desk and a stack of old papers ... computers, none ... pen and paper the whole way ... so anyway, off the bus, time to hike up to Guachimontones ... along comes a pickup truck, and ever the adventurer, Tina runs out into the cobblestone street and hollers "Guachimontones!" and as luck would have it, they were headed to Guachimontones, so we jumped into the back of this pickup truck with people we'd never seen before, and rode up to Guachimontones. The pyramids are neat, but not spectacular, and not crawling with American tourists, so we had a few stares as though we had two heads! What are these white people doing here ... and then somehow we turned into celebrities of sorts ... people heard us speak a little spanish and all of a sudden everyone wants pictures with us! The little kids loved us, so we made many friends that day.
After a few hours of wandering around the site, it was time to head back to catch our bus. SO we were walking back into town, down this long windy hill, and what do we see, but the same white pickup drives by, stops and opens the back ... "jump in" they say, and so we do ... this would be highly illegal in Canada, but in Mexico, no worries ... they didn't speak English, we speak only limited Spanish, but as luck would have it, they were headed back to Guadalajara, so forget the bus, we're riding back in the back of an old pickup truck! We were a hit on the highway too, driving through traffic jams, people would gape at us, wondering what are these people doing in the back of a truck, instead of on some luxury bus? We passed by a cheering mob of 13 people in the back of one truck! We made it safely back to GDL without falling out of the truck, so that was a rather good accomplishment!
Michelle: Finally a bit of an adventure worth sharing! We had two whole days in a row off of work and we took advantage of it by going to Tehuchitlan and Guachimontones. Tehuchitlan is a cute little Peublo of about 4000 people and is nearby the archaeological site of Guachimontones, known for its round pyramids that predate all the other pyramids in Mexico! More than 2000 years old, we thought it'd be a fun adventure to go and see these. And what an adventure it was!
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