100 Days and Counting

Written by Bessie and Kyle . Feelin' thoughtful
Bessie_thoughtful
Well it wouldn't be a post about our first 100 Days in Latin America if it weren't a few days late. I had every intention of posting this at 12:01 am on Day 100 for all to enjoy, but if I'd learned anything thus far it's that sometimes life needs to get in the way of schedules. 

We've also sorted through our over 1,500 photos and picked a select group of favorites.  Visit our Flickr Photos Our Favorites set.

Here's a Two Perspectives list of some of our favorites so far.

Place: San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. I don't think any of you loyal readers will be surprised to hear that the town crawling with bugs, VW Beetles that is, was my favorite place.  More than all it's beautiful Beetles charmed me though.  It's a mix of young, hip & revolutionary + charming & colonial.  It's settled in the mountains which means refreshing temperatures and beautiful scenery.  Those cobble-stone streets will welcome me back someday.

VW Beetle In San Cristobal

Meal: This is tough, but it's definitely la birria aka goat stew in Guadalajara.  Slow cooked, savory, tasty meat.  Like most yummy meals in Mexico, it's so good because you don't just get the goods, you get all the accessories.  Every bite can taste different with a more green salsa, less red, more onion, and less hot sauce.  It's fantastic!

Birria in Guadalajara, Mexico

Journey: I fell in love with Mexico on the bus rides. They were long, long long, but beautiful. I was gonna change things up and pick something outside of Mexico, but I just can't. (There are very close runners up though.) The views that stand out the most are the dramatic cliffs and valleys in Central Mexico. They were phenomenal. They absolutely took my breath away.  I'll highlight the trip between Mexico City and Oaxaca as particularly memorable.  Despite being 15 hours, I'd do the trip again.

Oaxaca Landscape

Run-in with Locals: The run-in with someone that stands out the most was with a sweet woman named Isabella that we ran into in three different places, one of which hours from the other two. Isabella was Mayan and sold her local handicrafts to students studying spanish in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and she sold us one of our few souvenirs. Her smile was strikingly resilient and something just drew me to her. She traveled some 2-3 hours one way on a few buses from her village to sell her goods, and the least-likeliest place we ran into her was on the side of a dusty junction waiting for her bus.  (Of course she wouldn't smile for the photo, only before and after.)

Our first tourist purchase!

Picture: I love the contrasting colors in this photo, and of course the old cowboy in a baseball hat. Note that his legs are curved from riding a horse. This is Antigua, Guatemala in its truest form, and to me captures the essence of the old colonial Spanish cities all through Latin America. The yellow and orange are so vibrant against a cool blue sky, and the red stop sign pulls your attention to the choices life presents us.

Antigua53

100 Days and Counting

Written by Bessie and Kyle . Feelin' thoughtful
Kyle_thoughtful
Now that you have heard her answers, the following are the correct answers for our favorites :)  Just kidding, I love you!

Place:  Guanajuato, Mexico.  This was a no brainer for me.  It's compact enough to walk around but large enough that there are new things to do and see every day that we were there.  It is also a place that is indescribable.  If I tried to describe it, I would say it is kind of like a mix between Prague, Mexico, and the place where Fraggles from Fraggle Rock live.  Don't understand?  Well, it's not a place easily described; it's just too cool.  Go there and see why.

Street in Guanajuato

Meal:  Ugh, I've eaten so many meals (3x100 = 300) that it's hard to remember them all.  But, one that does stick out is the Oaxacan mole.  It was authentic, tasty, and it meets my qualifications for "dirty street food" by being in a market.  Unfortunately, every time that I have mole now, I have to scoff at it and say that it is not as good as the mole in Oaxaca.

Mole Negro and Mole Rojo, Oaxaca

Journey:  From Palenque, Mexico to Flores, Guatemala.  This journey exemplifies the kind of traveling that makes independent traveling so fun.  We take a bus through the jungle of Southern Mexico to a river where we cross over to Guatamala via a boat.  Then we ride in another bus for 5 hours through more jungle, mostly on bumpy and unpaved roads where there are no towns to be seen.  Did I mention that the bus broke down in the middle of Guatemala, too?  Awesome!

Kyle about to cross the Mexican boarder to Guatemala

Run-in with Locals:  It's not so much as a run-in, but a live in; I choose the host family we had in Xela, Guatemala.  The mother has a life worthy of a telenovela (kids from 3 different fathers, latest father runs off with a woman in a hospital who is having her leg amputated because she got hit by a bus) and the maid was an toothless indigenous woman who spoke barely intelligible spanish, but also knew how to say "Bye Bye" and "Bread" in English.  It was always colorful in that house.  Welcome to Central America, my friend!

Picture: I guess it's kind of cheating to have my favorite picture be from my favorite place (Guanajuato, Mexico), but who said cheating was wrong?  This is a picture of some buildings in Guanajuato and it gives you a sense of how a lot of cities are laid out and how people live.  It also represents how I see our journey so far: crowded, hectic, and colorful, but if you keep looking, you'll keep discovering new things.

Colorful Guanajuato, Mexico

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