Bernie's Travels: Cuernavaca, Mexico

From Morelia I traveled 7 hours southeast to the city of Cuernavaca, which is about an hour southwest of Mexico City. In Cuernavaca I stayed with a terrific Servas family for four days. While there I saw Cuernavaca as well as a couple of other towns, Tepotzlan and Taxco. I'll write about those places later.

I arrived to Cuernavaca early on a Friday evening and made it in time to join my Servas family at their bowling league. Alfredo and Liliana and another teammate were hilariously pitted against the “herbalife” bowlers. If you have been following along you will find the humor in that. While Alfredo and Liliana bowled I took turns cheering them on and playing air hockey and foosball with their kids, Lilli and Alfredo Jr. It was a fun start to my time in Cuernavaca.

The next day we had a great breakfast lounging around the house and watching the Olympics. Later on we went to visit and have lunch with some of Alfredo's family, then toured around the Cuernavaca downtown. In between looking for backpacks for lilly we walked around the lively central park.

The following day we all took a trip to Tepotzlan, about a half-hour away. I'll write about that later. The next day, Monday, while my Servas family was a work or at their first day of school I went to checkout more of Cuernavaca. When I made it to the downtown area the streets were blocked from traffic and there was a huge protest. The public school teachers from the state of Morelos were marching in the streets, shouting for change. The line of protesting teachers, who strategically decided to strike on the first day of school, stretched about two miles down one of the main streets of Cuernavaca.

In the afternoon I met up Irene, a woman from Spain who I met hiking to pyramid in Tepotzlan the day before. She had just started working with an NGO near Cuernavaca for a month. She had the afternoon off so we toured around the city together. She was a shutter-bug as well and has a similar sense of adventure so we had a great time together.

Cuernavaca was impressively historic with a church and palace built under the supervision of Cortes himself. Known as the “The city of eternal spring” for its mild climate all year round, it was overall a very pleasant city. The best part of Cuernavaca was spending time with my Servas family, but the downtown architecture and parks were also great. One of the last places I visited before leaving Cuernavaca was the Borda gardens.