Mexico Guadalajara The Tequila Land

Guadalajara, Guadalajara!

Story and photos by Rich Grant
With more than 4 million people, Mexico’s second largest city can be modern, sprawling and congested, but it also offers a wonderful, colonial, pedestrian-friendly downtown worth spending a day or two exploring.
Start at the Cathedral de Guadalajara. Begun in 1561, this is the heart of the city, surrounded by plazas, shopping and incredible architecture. The balcony of La Antigua Restaurant and Bar at Morelos 371, overlooking Plaza Guadalajara and the cathedral, is a great place to grab a local amber Victoria beer, eat some delicious garlic shrimp and plan your tour of the city.

Plaza Liberacion, to the east, has the most colorful activity with everything from balloon vendors to Aztec dancers and drummers performing their ancient ceremonies beside a wild statue of revolutionary leader Miguel Hidalgo.
The Mercado Libertad is “deep Mexico,” with hanging pig’s heads at the butcher shop, herb and spice stalls, acres of produce and windows filled with mystical interpretations of devils and ghouls, no doubt to ward off evil spirits. Don’t miss the songbirds for sale in cages in the back courtyard.
Plaza de los Mariachis is a bit disappointing mid-week, but on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons it jumps with mariachis bands for hire for official functions, parties, weddings and the like. The very first mariachis began right here in the 1860s as cowboy troubadour groups.
The Instituto Cultural de Cabanas is a Unesco heritage site and architectural gem, approached via a long pedestrian mall lined with shops, restaurants, fountains and statues. The rest of the square mile historic district has pocket parks and churches, museums on history and art, colonnaded walkways, courtyard cafes, and all manner of shops and department stores. It’s not as uniformly historic as the zocalo of Mexico City and there are many tasteless modern buildings mixed in with old treasures. But there’s a relaxed and friendly vibe to the city – and certainly no hint of danger. Guadalajara feels safer than most American cities.
There are horse-drawn carriage rides for the tourists, but you’ll do better on foot…and the horses look like they can use the rest.
Among several interesting places to visit outside Guadalajara is a shopping mecca a short ride away, and a nearby city where Mexico's most famous brew is produced. Day-trips to these spots can be arranged at the tour desks of most hotels.
Tlaquepaque
Besides being fun to say (tlah-keh-pah-keh), this is Guadalajara’s Beverly Hills, a truly pleasant pedestrian street a little over four miles from downtown. Lined with upscale artisan shops, cafes, parks, hanging walls of brilliant pink bougainvilleas and quiet courtyards, this is a lazy, tree-shaded town with a gleaming white basilica and plenty of cast iron benches to while away an afternoon. Marimbas are popular and several groups hustle around town playing them. El Parian, at the end of the mall, is an open courtyard shared by a half-dozen bars and restaurants. Here, you can sip a beer watching the street action, or sit quietly in the center court listening to live music.

Tlaquepaque is known throughout the region for offering some of the finest arts and crafts in the nation; many of the galleries represent artisans who work on-site. Like Beverly Hills, the stores are not cheap, but with its compact shopping area and more than 200 shops, restaurants and boutiques, this is the shopping destination in central Mexico and more fun, traffic-free and relaxed than any shopping district in Mexico City.
Tequila
The town of Tequila is less than an hour from Guadalajara and offers a quiet village of cobblestone streets, all surrounded by a sea of rolling hills covered with blue agave. Tequila was first introduced here in 1795 by Jose Cuervo, who received the exclusive government contract to distill it. Tours of the Cuervo distillery are available in English and Spanish (www.mundocuervo.com), and offer a variety of tasting options. The grounds and shops are beautiful.
In the central town square, don’t miss the bubble machine man, who pushes a cart dispensing bubbles, followed by a small army of kids. There’s also the National Museum of Tequila and any number of shops specializing in tequila and tequila souvenirs.
Staying in Guadalajara

Lobby of the Intercontinental Presidente. Photo by Bob Schulman.

Expedia's Hotels.com lists some three dozen tourist-class hotels scattered around the city. Among top properties is the recently remodeled 14-story Presidente Intercontinental, located near the Exposition Center and across the street from a mall-like shopping center loaded with restaurants and stores. More info: Visit the Mexico Tourism Board at www.visitmexico.com (click the Destinations button at left, then Guadalajara) or the Guadalajara tourism office at vive.guadalajara.gob.mx/indexi.asp.

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Mexico Merida: A Rich Mayan-Spanish Stew

Merida: A rich Mayan-Spanish stew

Story and photos by Bob Schulman

Monument in Merida tells history of the Mayans.

The Mayan town of T'ho thrived for centuries out on eastern Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula -- until 1542, when the Spanish conquistadores ran the Mayans off, ripped their city down and built a new one for themselves on the spot. The bearded foreigners called it Merida, after a rich city of the same name in Spain.
After awhile the Mayans started to drift back, at first to work in the fields, ranches and kitchens of the great haciendas of their new Spanish landlords. In the mid-1800s, thousands more came out of the jungle to take jobs on the area's henequen plantations, planted to help meet the world's need for rope and twine (made from fibers of the cactus-like plant). When the debut of synthetic fibers took the wind out of the henequen market in the early 1900s, many of the workers moved into town.

Humberto Gomez gives regional tours.

Today, it's estimated that well over half of Merida's million or so residents speak both Mayan and Spanish, a good number with Mayan as their primary language. Tour guide Humberto Gomez knows every inch of the city. He's been showing visitors around for over a half-century, traipsing up and down the steps of colonial palaces and the grand cathedral, wandering through block-long museums, driving by the swanky mansions of the henequen barons and checking out other landmarks in the city's rich stew of Mayan and Spanish cultures. Merida, he points out, has the country's second largest historic district after Mexico City.
Gomez also takes customers to the famous archaeological sites outside the city. One is the famous Mayan city of Chichen-Itza, about two hours away, where the signature pyramid – one of the New Seven Wonders of the World – is the  picture-postcard Temple of Kukulcan. The temple grounds are particularly packed during the two equinoxes when the setting sun creates the shadow of a feathered serpent winding down a staircase of the 365-step pyramid.

Temple of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza.

Gomez himself is something of a legend here. He's recognized as the first man in modern times to see the secrets of Balankanche, a Mayan ceremonial center set in network of enormous caverns. The site, a few miles from Chichen-Itza, was discovered by Gomez in 1959.

Temple of the Magician at Uxmal.

Also among his most popular tours is the magnificent Mayan city of Uxmal. Here, in another eyepopping sight straight off the postcards, the distinctive oval Temple of the Magician (according to legend it was built in a single night) looms over acres of other temples, government buildings, ballcourts and the like. In the evening, the entire city becomes a stage for a spectacular $2 million light and sound show explaining the history of the site. Another must-see spot on Gomez' tour routes is a colonial town full of yellow buildings called Izamal. Its main feature is the 450-year-old Convent of San Antonia de Padua, also painted yellow, which is used at night as the backdrop for the area's third historical light and sound show (Chichen-Itza has one, too).
The tours usually get back to Merida in time for the city's traditional street festivals. You might find crowds watching folkloric dancers on one block, strolling minstrels on another and salsa bands on still another. Hungry? There are lots of food stands around the festivities selling Merida's classic lime soup, suckling pig in pipal sauce, stuffed cheese meringues and other tasty dishes.
 Everyone on the people-packed streets (vehicle traffic isn't allowed on certain nights) whoops it up together, locals and tourists alike, playing out a feast for the eyes and the palate that's been going on as long as anyone here can remember.

Sound and light show at Izamal.

But while the Meridian stewpot still boils over with the flavor of its mixed heritage, modern times have added new spices to the gumbo. For example, Volkswagens now mix with “calesa” horsedrawn carriages on the city's cobbled streets, youngsters dressed in hip-hop clothes sip coffee with others in old-time Mayan garb, and bargain-seeking passengers from cruiseliners docked at the nearby port of Progreso periodically flood Merida's shops. And new names such as Costco, Sam's Club, McDonald's and Burger King have popped up around town. Gomez' customers have kept up with the times, too. “I remember when tourists wouldn't dream of going out in anything but suits and long dresses, even during our hot, humid summers,” he recalls. “Today, anything goes.”

Entertainment at a street festival.

Gomez puts group tours together, so you could wind up climbing pyramids with anywhere from a few to a lot of other sightseers. His phone number from the U.S. is 011-52-999-927-1530. In Merida, it's just the last seven numbers.
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Mazatlan Mexico Great Places to Development or Investor

Riviera Maya Part 1: Tulum is still Tulum

By Bob Schulman

The clifftop city of Tulum stands like a silent sentry over the sugary beaches of the Caribbean 45 feet below. In the morning, when the first rays of the sun began bouncing off its crimson colored temples, shrines and towers, the city must have lit up like a fireball – perhaps explaining why it was originally called Zama, or City of the Dawn.
The ancient Mayan city must have been a show-stopper at night, too. Had the Spanish sailors who first spotted it in 1518 arrived after sundown, they'd have been treated to the sight of its buildings shimmering in the glow of torches atop  pyramids and ceremonial towers.

The city might have looked much like this at night. Photo courtesy of the Mexican Tourism Board.

It was renamed Tulum (roughly meaning “wall”) when a wall was built around the three sides of the city not protected by the cliffs.

For hundreds of years, Tulum thrived as the main trading port for the mega-city of Coba some 25 miles inland. It was home to as many as 75,000 people, mostly farmers, and it could have had 6,000 ceremonial, government and residential buildings spread over an area the size of Denver.
Historians say Tulum's beaches were usually packed with 30-foot-long canoes paddled there by merchants from across the Mayan empire as far away as Honduras. No wonder Tulum was a kind of Port of New York among the smaller Mayan ports – places such as Xel-Ha, Xcaret and Xaman Ha (now Playa del Carmen) – running down the Caribbean coast of eastern Mexico.
Fast forward to today, and the 70-mile-long strip of Caribbean beaches stretching from Cancun down to Tulum is the country's largest resort area, the Riviera Maya. And Xel-Ha, Playa del Carmen and the other old-time Mayan settlements along the coast have been turned into upscale hotel zones, ritzy residential enclaves, huge amusement parks and sprawling cities.

As many as 5,000 visitors a day wander around Tulum.

But Tulum is still Tulum. Well, almost. As an archaeological site it's spared from commercial developments, but chances are you'll rub elbows with thousands of other tourists wandering around the site's 60 or so roped-off temples, shrines and the like. Among favored spots for snapshots is a magnificent 40-foot-high temple called El Castillo (the castle), the Temple of the Descending God (featuring an upside-down figure of the Mayan god of the bees) and a cliffside sanctuary named the Temple of the Wind.

El Castillo is straight off the travel posters.

It costs the equivalent of a little over $4 to get into the place and another $40 if you want a guided group tour. For just $1.60 more you can take a trolley ride (both ways) along a quarter-mile walkway from the entrance of the park to the archaeological zone. A tip: Take the trolley...it's blazing hot out there.
Things are a lot different outside the site. Tulum City, centuries ago home to a few hundred farmers and temple builders, is now a modern-day city of 25,000 (and growing every day). Many are expatriates from the U.S. and Canada along with a good number of transplants from Germany, Spain and The Netherlands.
Visitors to Tulum typically arrive in tour groups from the 500 hotels in Cancun and along the Riviera Maya.
Staying there: Tourists who opt to spend a few days in the Tulum area have a choice of some 45 hotels either in town or on nearby beaches. They range from modest inns with rates as low as $60 a night to luxury resorts priced as high as $500 a night.
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