Monday was another vocational day and we finished it off with a little shopping in a local mall. If you were dropped blindfolded in the centre of Mexicali you could be forgiven (probably) for thinking it was the USA (Not America, as we often say; it has been pointed out that Mexico is part of america, the large country to the north is the USA). Not the whole of the city is like that, but there are obvious similarities (if you ignore the hour long queue to the USA border).
Tuesday we were off to San Luis, in Sonora (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Luis_R%C3%ADo_Colorado) . This involved crossing the state line (no passports required!) and meant a +1 hour time change.
When we arrived the weather was great. 23 degrees celcius in February! There is a local story that when one of the inhabitants was sent to hell, he returned that night for his blanket!
After being welcomed by the mayor and presented with another certificate we were given a guided tour of the town. Having started at an impressive govenment run social centre in a deprived area, it was on to the Police Station, the Volunteer Fire Station (where three of them had just returned from dealing with a serious road traffic collision on their patch, 130km away!)
We had lunch at the Rotary clubhouse during which there was a minor earth tremor, which caused the light fittings to shake slighly.
After lunch we finished the tour with a visit to the local (very small) university where spoke to a group of students.
It was then back to Mexicali, where we discovered that our evening programme had been cancelled. The minor tremor we had felt earlier had been a 4.7 scale quake in Mexicali - and we missed it! There had, however, been further quakes and aftershocks so for safety reasons our evening meeting had been cancelled. We did experience a few small (3.0 and below) aftershocks but nothing large, much to Rob & Robin's disapointment and Rao, Kerrie & Victoria's delight.
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