What Lies Beneath

I am in yet another colonial mining town, Guanajato. You know though, I never get tired of these places. Besides their obvious beauty and history and quaint charms, there is always something lurking below the surface. Something you just don't see every day! In Guanajato for instance, there literally is something lurking below the surface: Tunnels. Yes, that's right, tunnels. Lots and lots of tunnels. The town is built in such a narrow, steep ravine, that to allow the smooth flow of traffic, they just dug a bunch of tunnels under the city. They wind and stretch in serpentine coils through the hills, popping out every so often into the upper streets. Riding through the town in a cab is quite fun, because you'll be zooming along the nice ol' cobblestone roads, past cathedrals and what not, and suddenly your driver will take a sharp turn down a one-way road leading STRAIGHT UNDERGROUND. You crash down into gaping darkness and then you're tearing every which way through narrow, dimly lit tunnels, twisting and turning, and again suddenly you take a steep turn up a hidden incline and emerge back out next to some historic builing in another part of town. And so on. I didn't feel like paying for a taxi, or explaining that I just wanted to drive around through all the tunnels (stupid American tourist...), so I decided just to walk a few of them. It was fun, until I got lost. It's really hard to tell direction underground. I thought I'd be coming up by my hostel but instead I emerged clear on the other side of town! Guanajato also has other skeletons in the closet, or mummies in the closet I should say. Yes, it is the home of the infamous "Mummy Museum." From the little Spanish I could understand, their cemetery got full, so they dug up a bunch of corpses and decided to make a little profit off the whole thing by displaying them in a museum. The dry climate here acts as a natural preserver, so you have all sorts of corpses (yes, corpses, not mummies like in the horror films) in various stages of decay. And I do mean all sorts of corpses - men, women, children. I'm sure that's descriptive enough, but for those of you as morbidly interested as I was (and hey, we all are, because this museum is pretty darn popular), I've included a few of my favorite photos. Yes, Guanajato, charming little town!