Group trip

Today, after my language class, I wanted to buy a ticket to CDMX. I told my language teacher, Miriam, about it and asked her if she knew where I could buy bus tickets here in Guanajuato. We googled together and she spontaneously offered to go with me during our 3rd language class so that we could practice shopping in Spanish together. That was our current topic.

I thought the idea was cool, so we both went out of the classroom and got some fresh air 😁.

Unfortunately, as often happens, Google wasn't up to date and this ticket sale had been discontinued for a long time. We tried it at the next Oxxo shop. The saleswoman could actually show me the departure times for Primera Plus (from the Terminal Central de Autobuses de Guanajuato), but the trip started on Saturday at 1 a.m.! 😮 No, that's not for a morning person like me! After all, I'm on vacation 😎. The next trip was in the afternoon... not for me either... I want to see a little bit of CDMX on the day of arrival.

So Miriam advised me to take the local bus to the Terminal Central de Autobuses de Guanajuato and check it out again at the Primera Plus counter. Why not, I think to myself, from the local bus (by the way, each ride costs only 7 Pesos, no matter where you get on and where you want to go) I can have another look around the area and then I'll know where this bus terminal is.

By the way, in Guanajuato there are fixed bus stops 😀, which was not the case in 99% of Yucatan. There are just no departure times.

So you stand at any bus stop and wait for the next bus that goes to the desired area. How do you know that? Very simple, on the buses there are white handwritten signs on the windshields and on the side, indicating which sights or neighborhoods are being served. Sometimes there's also a crier. They sit next to the driver, get off at the stop, and loudly announce the destinations 😁. But you should know exactly where to get off 😬 or simply ask the bus driver or the person sitting next to you.

Oh yeah, Guanajuato is basically one big one-way street. A suitable bus is guaranteed to pass by! I often thought how glad I was not to be driving a car or scooter. Because if you take a wrong turn, you can't just turn around. Then you have to keep driving, leave the city and drive around on the outside, and then come back in on the other side. And be more careful 😁. Or you're lucky and you pass one of the numerous entrances to the underground tunnels. Under certain circumstances, you can use the underground routes to turn around more quickly.

Anyway, right after class I went to the nearest bus stop at Plaza de La Paz, opposite the Monumento a La Paz, waited about 20 minutes in the blazing sun for my bus to the Terminal Central de Autobuses de Guanajuato for only 7 Pesos. That's about 0.35 cents. A taxi would have cost about 80.00 Pesos for the same journey, which is equivalent to €4.

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Off topic:

I just talked to a young Colombian woman from my dorm who has been working as a digital nomad for a year. I took the opportunity to ask about the safety for solo female travelers in Colombia. As long as you don't stay in lonely areas or in certain neighborhoods of a city, and follow the general safety recommendations, it's no problem at all!🙂 The media always exaggerate and are partly responsible for the bad image of some cities. The same goes for Mexico.

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The bus terminal looked familiar to me, it was the one where the taxi driver wanted to let me out prematurely when I arrived in Guanajuato. You can find the story in Guanajuato 2.

Now in daylight, the area didn't look so bad anymore, but I'm also not tired and don't need to go to the bathroom 😁. Well, I bought a ticket from my favorite bus Primera Plus and went back to the local bus.

But it was on a break and signaled to me with a generous gesture to wait at an unspecified bus stop. Well, a break is necessary, I'm always in favor of that. So I walked around like a lost chicken and tried to find out where the bus stop was.

Brave, open-minded, and lazy as I am, I asked a couple after 2 minutes if they knew where the bus stop back to Centro Histórico in Guanajuato was. The young woman smiled at me and asked if I didn't want to take a taxi. She and her companion were still looking for other passengers to minimize the cost. I thought about it for 5 seconds and thought, why not? I haven't done that yet. Give it a try. The taxi cost then also 80 Pesos, divided by 3 that was 26.66 Pesos for each of us. That's equivalent to €1.34. Yeah!🥳

Because with Columbus Day (Día de la Raza, roughly translated as Day of the New Race - referring to the birth of the Mestizos, the offspring of Indigenous people and Spaniards) on October 12, 2022, the International Cervantino Festival also began in Guanajuato. The two of them wanted to go there and it was not far to walk to my accommodation.