La Cantera

Here’s a particularly Mexican way to run a tour- we had to be ready and downstairs in the hotel lobby to meet the tour guide at 8.30 this morning. At which time we boarded the empty mini bus... shuttles around the city for the next hour collecting the other passengers - only to drive right past our hotel on our way out of the city!

Our guide- Gabrielle - is a very shout-y Mexican with difficult to understand English, and has to repeat everything in both Spanish and English as this is a bi-lingual tour. Whilst this is reasonably good for my Spanish (which is rapidly returning), it’s pretty annoying to listen to.

It took about an hour and a half to get to Cuernavaca - a charming little village on the way to Taxco - and the drive would have been very pleasant but for the fact that after Gabrielle finished shouting her Aztec history lesson at us, she began blaring the worst Mexican music at full volume over the stereo. At that point, the kids gave up trying to play their word games and Mitch asked to borrow my headphones to stop the torture.

The highlight is the town’s Cathedral - which has an interesting history as it was built by missionaries who had to adapt the building to accomodate the pagan beliefs of the indiginous locals - for example creating an additional unenclosed chapel as the Aztecs were unfamiliar with indoor prayer. They also objected to entering the Church with reverence, so the Christians built a step into the entrance door of the Church to force supplication.

We had a little time to wander around - and whilst it was picturesque, in truth there’s not much to commend it for more than a brief stop.

The rest of the drive was up and across the nearby mountains, and we stopped on the outskirts of Taxco for a buffet lunch (Charley ate nothing), followed by a short lecture on how to recognise true silver - (would you believe the main message was ‘buy it from an authorised retailer’)?

But I didn’t know that ‘Sterling Silver’ is named after William Sterling who discovered silver, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

I always book these tours with a degree of hesitation - an easy way to make short visits to nearby attractions, but you are both held hostage to the specific retailers tied to the tour, and always at the mercy of the most interested shoppers.Read more