Taxco - a new kind of chaos

This may look like the big Jesus statue that towers over Rio de Janiero, but I can assure you we're nowhere near Brazil. This salmon-pink lookalike overlooks a hillside town named Taxco in the highlands a few hours south of Mexico City.

We headed to Taxco for a few days over the long weekend - Monday was the anniversary of the post-revolutionary constitution being signed. This town absolutely defies gravtiy, its buildings clinging to a series of steep cliffs.

A tangled maze of super-narrow cobblestone streets wind their way up the slopes, and from a distance it looks like the white-walled red tile roof houses are built on top of each other. The streets are so steep, you practically have to walk tip toe to get up them because your ankle joint doesn't allow your foot to be flat while you are leaning so far forward.

But this hillside setting and the way the houses are built gives the town a quaint medieval charm, and it looks like it has been transplanted from the mediterranean. It would be a great location to film a James Bond car chase, with the cars screaming through the steep narrow streets and tight hairpin bends.

In fact being in Taxco felt like being transported back to the 60s, because all of the taxis were VW beetles and many of the ordinary cars were too. Some of the turns are so tight that drivers had to do three point turns just to get around, and clipping wing mirrors trying to get past passing traffic.

Most of the roads were only one car width wide and had no pavements, so drivers had to wait for oncoming traffic to clear the street before negotiating the way, weaving in and out of pedestrians. Needless to say some of the narrower streets terrified me, and each time a car went past I flattened myself against the nearest wall like spiderman.

We gave up being backpackers for a few days and installed ourselves in a nice hotel that was right in the centre of town (halfway up the steep hill) behind the central plaza and cathedral. We were given a top floor room, that looked straight out to the cathedral and all of the way down the hill.

Taxco exists in this unlikely location because it is a mining town - it sights right atop a lucrative silver mine, and the ore is processed locally and made into jewellery. The town was packed with Platerias, or silver shops, full of necklaces, rings, bracelets and even silver statues of bulls and jaguars and other animals beloved to Mexicans.

The town seemed to enjoy a comfortable wealth from its silver riches, with all of the buildings well-constructed (ie actually finished - this is quite rare in Mexico from what I've seen) and freshly painted, with ornate balconies made from red tile and of course the European-looking red tile roofs.

But as we meandered further up the hill, unpainted buildings, many unfinished concrete block structures with bits of steel hanging out the top, began to dominate. Many were without window panes, with boards nailed over them instead. Right at the top of the hill there were a few mudbrick houses with makeshift tin roofs.

We discovered this part of town when we decided to hike up to the Jesus statue one day. After we'd zig-zagged up a few streets, we discovered it was quicker to walk up the stairs that connected one street with the next - although this was much steeper and involved walking up about 500 stairs and then another steep road to the statue. But the view was worth it - and from up here the town seemed strangely flat, its streets like little wrinkles the chaotic array of buildings.

Our plan was to leave on Monday to be back in time for class on Tuesday, and we were waiting at the bus stations, tickets in hand at the right time, but ended up missing the bus because it left from a different bay than the one advertised in the extremely muffled announcenent. There were two buses leaving at the same time, and confused, we joined one queue only to discover when we got to the front that it was for a local bus and our bus had left five minutes earlier.

All of the buses were full for the rest of the day, and despite having a cracker of an argument in Spanish (it must be improving if I can politely insult people!) we were only offered a 50 per cent discount on tickets for the following day. The guy's reasoning was that we were the only people that had been confused by the announcement - if there were say five or six people that had missed the bus, all would have been excused and not have to pay.

There was an upside to this tragedy, as we simply jumped back into a VW cab and went straight back to the hotel, which offered us a bigger, quieter room for quite a bit less than we had paid over the weekend, so we enjoyed another day chilling by the pool and sipping on $3.50 margaritas.