YOLO backwards from San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato and Ajijic Jan 2023

 Chiles on the ground, for sale just outside the massive market on the outskirts of San Miguel de Allende, a huge expat community in central Mexico.

The market is only on Tuesdays, and you can find anything here.

Huge piles of clothes, shoes, tools, food, animals, and assorted junk lined the rows of the massive flea market here.

Metal hcicken sculptures on a corner in SMA.

Fresh octopus displayed for sale on ice in the supermarket here.  Food was pricey in the expat supermarket.

This portable police light stand flashed blue and red 24/7 above the parking lot of the sports complex where we stayed for a few days.  Jason is taking his backpack with us on the way into town to cart back food items.

Karen holding the hand of a tall carnival lady on the sidewalk.  Jason's two tall lovely ladies.

The peach and green stone used for this ancient cathedral was so pretty in person in the late afternoon sun in Guanajuato.

The orange walls made a nice contrast to the pink church spires.

Another big woman skeleton on the sidewalk.

An interesting door knocker in Guanajuato.  I saw this design in several places.

A nice view of the cathedral from a distance.

A busy mural on a wall inside a building in town.

The doors in town are just huge and tall.  Jason looks small as he passes through a doorway.

A set of old wooden canoes in a lobby area of a local hotel in San Miguel.

The avocados we've had in Mexico so far have all been perfect!  An amazing situation considering how the supermarket staff literally throw them onto a huge pile display.  We're loving my quacamole often here.

Anyone remember Petticoat Junction?  This water tower reminded me of the opening sequence of that old sitcom.

A colorful scene in the market in Guanajuato.

A vendor in the market was cutting up a cooked pig in his stall to make carnitas.  He just handed me one for free and pushed the bowls of salsa and limes for me to add to my treat.  Messy to eat, but so tasty,

Bins of chiles and spices at a stall in the market here.  So many kinds of chiles to choose from andIi don't know the differences well enough to choose.

More market stalls from the top of the staircase.

Looking down at a couple of tunnel exits.  This town is built on a network of underground tunnels that funne traffic under the city. They were originally built to carry the floodwaters away under the city, but now they are used for cars.  You can walk in them if you don't mind breating toxic fumes from all the vehicles.  There are even intersections of tunnels under Guanajuato.  We avoided them as much as possible.

Buildings are so close together that there isn't much room to walk between them.  This one is at the bottom of the Alley of the Kiss, where two buildings are so close together that you can kiss someone across the balconies.  This is the line waiting to go up and kiss their partner.

This couple is kissing across the space from two different buildings.

Jason making his way down the Alley of the Kiss.  A tight squeeze.

A wall of locks lines the tiny alley.

Tiny figures for sale on the steps of the cathedral in the middle of town.

A cool statue of Don Quixote in front of a shop in Guanajuato.

An ornate front of a church in Guanajuato.

Another church in town.  There are always lots of churches and cathedrals and chapels in these towns.

Tour guides dress up in outfits that remind me of Vatican Guards.

The huge arched entrance to the big marketplace in town.

Cylinders of artisanal ice cream in tubs of ice for sale along the street.

Frog statues along a watery landscape feature as we walked to town.

There were many frogs in different mediums and poses in the park.

One of the most interesting and bizarre attractions we visitied was the Mummy Museum in Guanajuato.  At the end of the displays is an open coffin for photos.  Jason barely fits.

I had no problem fitting into the coffin.

These mummies were removed from a crypt in the ground.  The high dry air at this altitude, the low humidity, and unique mineral content in the soil mummified the bodies instead of decaying them.

This person still has a lot of hair on her head.  The leggings and shoes remained intact, too.

Halloween masks could take after this man.

Pretty gory, I suppose, but we found it fascinating in a macabre way.

This woman still has a full head of hair and her dress on.

This man was the start of the museum.  When the families didn't/couldn't continue to pay the 'death tax', the people were exhumed and cremated to make room for more bodies.  There isn't a lot of room in this mountain town for burying people.  But when they dug this man up, they discovered he was mummified and not decomposed.  He was one of the first they found like this.

The recovered mummies are protected behind glass or plexiglass now.  Many or most seem to have been put into the crypts in a standing fashion rather than laid flat.  Another room-saving tecnique

Children were also among the mummies here.

The woman on the left here was thought to have been buried alive.  The position of her arms and injuries to her head led folks to believe tried to fight her way out.  She must've been in a catatonic state and was thought dead when buried.  The man on the right has a huge hole in his chest, discolored by his blood. 

A mother and her eight-month old fetus were an unusual display.  The fetus is the smallest mummy ever found.

A photo on the wall in the museum shows many bodies lined up.

Cute sign by the door, using skeletons instead of normal figures.

Guanajuato is a colorful town on the side of a hill.

The horn of a cow, cut off and tossed onto the side of a sidewalk. No idea why and it was there all day.

The tunnel into the town of Guanajuato we couldn't avoid.  Thankfully we fit through it ok.

These tires on a semi trailer were horrifically worn.

You can see the tread is worn all the way through on these tires.

Huge patches of rubber missing on this one.  There wasn't a decent tire on the entire trailer and the spare was smooth and bald.  And this was on a double trailer!  I'm glad we weren't on the road with him.

This skull tile in Ajijic has the name Aurora scrawled into the top of it.  Each tile in the wal had someone's name on it.

Jason in front of a wall of skull tiles.  A famous artist, Efren Gonzalez, is from Ajijic and creates the tiles, used for decorating walls around buildings.

Another mural at his studio is a detailed town scene.  Skull tile molds lay in heaps beneath this painting.

I couldn't believe this sign along the street in Ajijic.

Part of another wall mural along a street of chickens in a bus.  All the figures in the mural featured chickens.  Note the old spelling of Axixic.

A clay frog on top of a roof gutter.

A sunset view from our van along Lake Chapala in Ajijic.  It's the biggest lake in Mexico.

A cowboy teaching his son some tricks on their horses next to our parking spot along the Lake Chapala in Ajijic.  The paint pony could jump sideways and the dark horse pranced in place.  Such well trained and groomed horses.

A local casting his net to try to catch fish in Lake Chapala.  I don't think I'd eat anything out of these waters.  The sides of the lake were bright green with growth.

Horses and dogs roamed the lakeshore at will.

Another mural on a town wall.

A funky painted tree stump in the town square in Ajijic.

Another artistically carved tree trunk.

Jason next to a bas relief wall with aquatic plants and animals.

The big letters along the malecon.  You can see the mountains on the other side of the lake in the background.

A statue of Chac Mool along the malecon of Ajijic.