Que Le Vaya Bien

I’m a firm believer that the best way to finish out a difficult and challenging year of metamorphosis is to go traveling. And what better place to travel than a country where people typically say this when parting: “Que le vaya bien.” Loosely translated, it means “May you travel well.”

I traveled very well the last week of 2007 in Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. When describing Guanajuato, it’s easy to fall back on this simple description: “It’s such a European city.” What does that mean, exactly? To me it means cobbled streets that are so narrow the buses look like they’re being squeezed. There are slim footpaths called callejones that meander up and down the hills of the nearly 500-year-old town. There are outdoor cafes with chairs you can lounge in under colorful umbrellas, and church bells echo across the city, marking each quarter hour and reminding everyone of God’s omnipotence. Fountains, sculptures and gardens are kept neat and groomed, orderly for the visitors from all over Mexico. The hum of Romance languages is everywhere you go: sure, there’s Spanish, of course there’s beautiful Spanish, but I also heard French and German, a smattering of Italian, and surprisingly very little English among the many international travelers.

I met Paul at the Casa Mexicana, where a room is more Mexican than European, but the beds were clean and comfortable and the water was hot. It was cheap and sort of quiet and the location was excellent, a very short stroll from the Puente del Compañero, a little bridge over the callejon. Around the corner was the Don Quixote Museum, with hundreds of depictions of the famous character in paintings, sculptures and kitsch. There were great restaurants: the Café de la Paz, Truco 7, La Venta de Sancho Panza and even an Italian Coffee Bar. Truco 7 was a favorite, cozy, low ceilinged with oodles of atmosphere, dark wood, leather seats, paintings by local artists, cheap and delicious for salad, soup and a black, fragrant mole sauce for chicken and enchiladas.

There’s a major university in the city and therefore a lot of young people smoking cigarettes and wearing black. The baroque Teatro Juarez and “cheese wedge” shaped Jardίn Unión were great places to hang out. Clowns performed spontaneous street theater for crowds who would sit on the steps of the Teatro. In the nearby Jardίn, carefully pruned Indian laurel trees form a canopy around the plaza and people sit on iron park benches or stroll in the shade. You can take a funicular or better yet, climb to see el Pίpila. The climb is steep and scenic and you get winded easily by the 7,000 feet of altitude. This gives you ample opportunity to stop and breathe while photographing the brightly colored houses and the narrow, winding callejones.

At the top, el Pίpila is a massive statue of Juan Jose de Los Reyes Martinez, the miner hero of the War of Independence in 1810. The story goes that he snuck into the Alhondigas de Granaditas, where the Spanish Royalists hid, and set the door ablaze. This allowed Father Hidalgo’s army to capture the Spanish troops in the first major victory of the war, and now el Pίpila stands proudly overlooking the whole valley, his torch held high.

Ninety minutes away by first class bus, San Miguel de Allende is the slightly western, slightly arty, muy Mexicana counterpart to urban intellectual Guanajuato. The streets are lined with houses the color of desert sunsets, and the outdoor pursuits are plentiful. For gifts and visual splendor, shop at the Mercado de Artesanias; for people-watching on par with Guanajuato’s Jardίn Unión, go to the center called Plaza Principal or El Jardίn, where the magnificent 19th Century Parroquia stands. La Parroquia is a towering Gothic Revival parish church, the most memorable building I’ve seen in Mexico, a gorgeous pink-hued sandstone confection, like a wedding cake. We climbed for 30 minutes from the city center to a botanical garden on the town’s rim, a place called El Charco del Ingenio, blessed in 2005 by the Dalai Lama as one of Mexico’s five zones of peace. There were winding trails to hike (or mountain bike) inside the 180-hectare park and over 120 species of agave, fascinating varieties of cacti and rocks to climb and canyons to yell in and listen for your echo.

One day we took a 20-minute taxi ride from downtown San Miguel to La Gruta, a sort of spa and hot spring where you can lounge in the sun, swim in a geothermal outdoor pool, then navigate a long narrow tunnel of increasingly warmer water into a great enclosed cave, a hot underground steam room. In the afternoon, the hottest spring water pours into the cave through a huge pipe and people take turns being massaged and cleansed under its powerful flow.

We ate several times at a fonda in the central mercado, where the smiling girls giggled at our questions and made the best milanesa tortas – breaded chicken or steak on a flat bun toasted with mayonesa and enhanced with lettuce, tomato, avocado and pickled jalapeños. Twice we split incredible platters of fresh fruit for 20 little pesos: artfully arranged papaya, banana, guava, strawberry, pineapple, orange and cantaloupe with yogurt, granola and honey on top. Once we ate at an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood of San Antonio, sipped copas del vino tinto and shared a bland pizza with a thin, tasty crust.

New Year’s Eve we returned to Guanajuato and paid way too much money to stay at the first hostel we could find with a vacancy. We strolled the callejones all afternoon, buying Talavera gifts in a bright shop so crowded with the pottery that it was difficult to turn around. We drank micheladas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelada) at La Oreja de Van Gogh on Plazuela San Fernando. Eventually we caught the last funicular of 2007 to the lookout at el Pίpila. We listened to the church bells and watched the twinkling lights of Guanajuato. Every now and then a halfhearted firework went off and fizzled out.

We wandered down along the dimly lit callejones, through the Plaza de la Paz, back to the Jardίn Unión, where vendors of balloons on sticks and sarapes and cigarettes and beach balls on rubber bands and chicle and art and nothing, nothing, milled around or sat. We gave pesos to every poor person we saw, whether it was an enshrouded woman holding a baby in the crook of one arm, the other dirty hand extended (and – oh! – this was how she would spend her New Year’s Eve!) or the solo harmonica player, the guitarist who sang “Honky Tonk Woman” in a heavy accent or the young father on accordion whose toddlers danced and held out dusty plastic cups to passersby.

We tagged along with about 100 others on a callejoneada for three songs and a few jokes. On a callejoneada you follow a band of about 15 strolling minstrels who are dressed in medieval attire. They tell stories, dance and sing songs while playing bass and guitar and mandolin. These lively musical shows meander through the narrow streets of Guanajuato at night and we followed until they asked us for the money we’d already given away. (http://www.guanajuatocapital.com/ingles/Acallej.htm)

We both had flights to catch early on New Year’s Day, so at 10:00 p.m. we said “It’s 2008 in the Bahamas” and headed back to the hostel. I don’t know if I slept at all, though I must have, though it doesn’t feel like I did. Through the night I listened to the insistent boom of fireworks, the blasts increasing in strength and frequency as midnight approached. Eventually I dozed, waking abruptly to a heavy artillery-like burst from the street and shouts of “Feliz Año Nuevo!”

And now I’m back in Corpus Christi on the 2nd of January, 2008, resolving to stay in the present. As I continue this journey through my mid-life transformation, I’ll remind myself what it feels like to be traveling. I’ll strive, the way I do when on the road or abroad, to live in the moment and accept things being the way they are. “It is what it is,” I’ll try to say. “We are who we are.”

Happy New Year! Que le vaya bien!