When four girls visited Zacatecas and Real de Catorce

We had the best weekend trip! The 4 rubias (four blonds as we are known here) packed their bags on Wednesday night and hopped on a night bus to Zacatecas, around 5 hours south from Monterrey. Well it can also be around 7 hours from Monterrey, depending on which bus company you take :)

Happy girls heading to a night in the bus. We had packed all necessary equipment, such as inflatable pillows and blankets.

When arriving to Zacatecas on Thursday morning, we checked into another dirty-cheap (not dirty, but cheap) hostel, and headed into town. Zacatecas is known for its silver (we bought a lot of that) as well as its very cosy down-town area. There are "only" half a million inhabitants, of which almost one in ten are students.

A picture from our hostel roof terrace, behind you can see the Zacatecas cathedral. If you still don't know us, its Marjo, me and Alex from the left.

We took a cable-car up to one of the hills surrounding Zacatecas, and the view was magnificQent! You could see the whole town in the middle of desert. I mean after the town borders, there was nothing for hundreds of kilometres.

The city had a very European feeling to it, and had quite nice parks. Here we are enjoying the sun in one of them. (Naturally we got burnt during the day, since "it was too cold for sun-lotion".)

Windyyyyyy! The weather was really perfect during daytime, sunny but cool. In the evening it would have been chilly in the room, if we would not have packed our hairdryer. God, I love that hairdryer!

As Zacatecas is in the middle of the desert, there are a lot of cactuses, so we decided to carve our names on one. My name is there as well, but Eeva didn't fit it on the picture :P

Huipulla tuulee.. We were fooling around with our cameras at the top of Cerro de la Bufa, mainly cause we had slept very little the previous night..

As I said, we did not get tired of looking at the view in the city, it was magnificent!

We took a ride in to the Eden mine, an old silver mine where you could walk from one end of the mine to the other. We were really deep: 200 m under the top of the mountain. The conditions where mine workers had worked there around 100 years ago where horrible, long work days and dangerous conditions. Lucky we had the helmets..

Four happy girls in the park and the sun shining. Alex and Eeva bought their hats from Zacatecas, almost all the men there were wearing cowboy hats.

There were many pretty churches in Zacatecas, I especially liked this one since it was completely white inside.

The "we are about to be a famous girl-band" picture.

After enjoying the food and sights in Zacatecas, we moved on to Real de Catorce. The two towns are really quite close to each other, but it took us 10 hours on the bus to change place.

Real de Catorce is a "ghost-town" with 1500 inhabitants, really small on a Mexican scale. The people there only live on tourism. This is the town where the Mexican with Pitt and Robers was filmed. Basically the town was 4 blocks time 4 blocks, you could walk around it in 15 mins.

We took a horse ride to an old silver mine up on a hill next to Real. It was my first time to ride a horse alone, on cobbled alleys up a mountain. Not an easy task I must say, but the view was splendid! Here we are Marjo, Alex me and the guide on a donkey=burrito.

My white horse was called Conejo. I was allright until the horses started going into trot, and even galloping. I don't think I've ever been that scared in my life. The rest of the riding trip my horse went after the guide's horse, so that I could hold on with two hands :)

We did another riding trip on Sunday morning to another hill by Real. From the top you could not see anything but desert and hills, it was great!

At the top of the mountain, there was a ritual place for Huichol indians. Apparently some still go there to do offerings when they have holidays.

Although the sights were great, I think the best part of the holiday was again: the food. We had great homemade fettucini, excellent enchiladas, good breakfasts with eggs and gorditas, crepes, and so much more.

Actually, the one night we spent in Real de Catorce was quite scary. We were in our hostel room, ready to go to sleep when there was some huge bangin on the roof. We didn't really feel like checking what was going on, but there was a lot of noise. A while later there were some noises outside our door, so that it seemed like someone would come in any minute. We never found out what it was, but one night definitely was enough for me..

During our four day trip we ended up with over 500 pictures. To see some more, check Alex's and Eeva's blogs from my links.

Well, no we are back at home and back to reality. Wish there was no school, and only time to travel..