After the business of Mexico City, we travelled North to the small holiday town of San Miguel de Allende, full of Mexican families and retired couples from the US. With a few plazas surrounded by shops and food, the pedestrianised streets were bustling with people day and night. Mariachi bands wandered around and kids were entertained by a host of different balloons. We stumbled across a concert one evening, with a few musicians playing some instruments we’d never seen before. Safe to say there was music in every corner here.
The really exciting thing about this stop is that we finally found the church on the front of our Mexico guidebook! Parroquia San Miguel Arcángel stood proudly in the plaza, surrounded by vendors of all kinds of crafts and foods. We ate plenty of corn-on-the-cob and tacos, as well as trying molcajete (a boiling hot ‘volcano bowl’ full of meat, cheese and peppers). One night we went for Peruvian food which brought me back to pisco sour and lomo saltado!
We visited the botanical garden of El Charo de Ingenio, which is more like a National Park as it consists of 100 hectares of land, including wetlands, canyon and arid mountain ground. There was an incredible amount of cacti dotted about, many were the species we were used to seeing but some were endangered and protected in greenhouses. It was amazing to be amongst the fresh air after the smokiness of Mexico City. We wandered for hours and soaked it all in, the canyon and the reservoir, as well as the amazing view of the town below.
We went and explored the nearby hot springs at Escondido Place, a huge park with lagoons (full of terrapins) and different temperature pools. The hot one was more like a tunnel with various sections and shoots of water. The cold one was open-air which meant you got some sun too. It was all very relaxing! We had an interesting time getting back to town after hitching a lift on the back of a truck with some other travellers, but we made it. San Miguel was fantastic.
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