Inland trip to Tlaquepaque and Guadalajara, Mexico

Sunday, March 10, 2013

020-42.410 N
103-22.520 W

Ahoy from the crew of the BlueJacket!

This is part 2 of my logs for our inland trip from La Cruz, Jalisco, Mexico. My last log covered the trip to Tapalpa, which is the green dot in the lower left hand corner of the map. From there we traveled to Tlaquepaque, which is a suburb of Guadalajara and is the right most green dot on the map. It's a very artsy area with all kinds of galleries and shops and everyone said that it was a great place to visit.

After spending the morning exploring Tapalpa, we headed towards Guadalajara. Tapalpa is at an elevation of about 6800' and as you drive towards Guadalajara you're presented with huge vistas of much lower valleys. It was quite an amazing sight to watch huge dust devils spin in the fields below. Our ears popped several times as we wound our way downward through s-curve after s-curve.

The drive through the countryside was rather uneventful, but a bit scary when we suddenly intersected with another highway with absolutely no warning. I looked sideways and realized that I had just crossed 2 lanes of oncoming traffic! Yikes!!! Guadalajara officially has ~4 million residents, but many claim that there are actually closer to 7 million who live there. Regardless, it's a big city with big city traffic problems and arriving late on a Friday afternoon didn't help. Our sometimes trusty Garmin GPS did a pretty good job of guiding us through the major roads, but was useless when we got to there area of the hotel and it had bad information regarding which direction the one way streets ran. After running loops around the hotel, we finally found it.

We pulled into the Villa del Ensueno in what appears to be a residential/commercial neighborhood. The outside of the hotel is a blank cement wall with some rather small doors opening into it. Once you enter you find a beautiful hotel with gardens, water falls, pools and delightful little coves with sitting areas. Just wonderful! We wandered down to the central square where Sue was delighted with all of the shops and all of the cool stuff that was in them. It was getting dark, so we headed back to the hotel have our welcome drink. As we sat at the table drinking what turned out to be the best margarita of the trip, we struck up a conversation with Don, who was a part owner of the hotel and Cathy, who is heavily involved with decorating it. We talked for quite a while and then got invited to the trial night for a new chef in the restaurant that they were about to open. It was hard to turn that offer down, so that night we got to sample some of the chefs offering and some good Mexican wine. What a treat and the price was certainly right!

Sue had been corresponding with the hotel via e-mail and they had set up a private tour of Guadalajara with a guide name Lino. He spoke great English and picked us up the next morning at 10 for what was supposed have been a 3 hour tour. I was so glad to have someone else driving so that I could look around and as this was a Sunday, many of the roads were closed to allow people to walk and cycle on them. He knew his way around the city and we would never have seen much of what we saw without him. He was incredibly knowledgeable on the history what he was showing us, which provided a depth to what we were seeing that we would never have experienced on our own.

One of the things that amazed us was how many people were out enjoying the closed streets. We're talking thousand of people everywhere, either riding their bikes or just walking. Scenes like the one to the right were repeated over and over around the city. Impressive!

We visited some absolutely beautiful neighborhoods with gorgeous homes, wandered into lots of public buildings, parks, churches and ate lunch in the downtown market where we were the objects of interest. Beef tongue tacos anyone? We had only planned on a 3 hour tour, but there was so much to see that we extended it to 5 hours and we could have kept going.

After we returned from the tour we headed back to the shopping area of Tlaquepaque where we were a bit disappointed to find that quite a few of the galleries that we wanted to visit were closed (despite their saying the day before that they would be open). We found a lot of beautiful items, but most of them were either too large or fragile for us to fly back with. Oh well, it was fun looking!

The next day we headed to a town called Tonala, which is where many of the items that you find in Tlaquepaque come from. It's block after block of shops selling averring under the sun. I would love to a place like this near home, as they had anything and everything that you might want to decorate your house with. Think of a Pier One that's a square mile!

After just scratching the surface of Tonala in a brief 2 hours, we left and headed towards Tequila, but that's a subject for the next log.

-- Geoff & Sue

P.S. Photos of this area are located here.

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For the fellow traveller:

Our guide was Lino Gabriel Gonzalez. He charged us $25/hr, which was well worth it. (USA: 011 52 (1) 333-105-0827). E-mail: linogabriel@hotmail.com. Web: http://www.guadalajara-tours.com/

We stayed at the Villa del Ensueno for $1000 pesos/night. The staff was wonderful with their communication and helping use set up things. Highly recommended! Web: http://villadelensueno.com/

Log ID: 2198