George and Deborah's Great Adventures: 01/29/14

When we last wrote we were about to leave Belize and travel to San Miguel Allende, via Mexico City. We are currently in Puerto Escondido. I know, travel to Puerto Escondido was not next up in the loose plan but plans change.

We left Belize without incident. We each paid our $25 US departure tax and enjoyed a smooth 80-minute crossing on a Water Jet passenger ferry. We arrived in Chetumal, Mexico with clear memories of drug dogs, soldiers, automatic weapons, and having to each pay what we thought was a bogus departure tax of $30 US (cash only). We expected a return visit by the soldiers and dogs but we didn’t expect to have to each pay the $30 US departure tax again, even though we just arrived. As ridiculous as it sounds, we paid because it is hard to argue with well-armed tax collectors.

Ferry Across Chetumal Bay

We had to spend six hours in Chetumal waiting for our plane to Mexico City. There wasn’t much to do. After a bit of a bag-drag, we had a great shrimp taco lunch & beers in a place recommended by a porter in a hotel. We were the only gringos in the place but it was packed with families enjoying Sunday brunch.

Shrimp Tacos - Each Prepared Differently

Long Wait at Airport

AirBus 350 - Great Planes Cheap Prices

We arrived in Mexico City just after dark. We followed the advice from various travel forums about taxi use in the city. The guidebooks warn travellers not to take cabs off the street for fear of crime. We bought our taxi fare from one of the many authorized cabs in the airport. We only paid $15 US from the airport to our city centre hotel. As well, we only took hotel-organized cabs for travel within the city. Taxi fares are very reasonable, especially in light of the Cancun experience.

Cathedral on the Zocalo

View From Our Window

We chose a hotel a little out of our usual price range but we wanted to be in the city’s core. The Gran Hotel Ciudad de Mexico is an old, five-star palace located on the city’s main zocalo. Our room overlooked the zocalo on one side and the pedestrian mall on the other. The stained glass ceiling of the lobby and the excellent services were highlights of our stay.

Old School Elevator - Iron Gates

Night Time in Lobby

Glass Ceiling of Lobby

Mexico City and its 8.8 million inhabitants were not what we expected. We will admit to being somewhat apprehensive. We imagined a chaotic, overpopulated, smog filled, dirty place that was unsafe. Certainly in the areas we visited, this was not the case. Interestingly, we did notice that we only saw six other gringos during the entire day out touring. We took a three-hour double decker open bus tour of the historic core, the financial district, and many upscale neighbourhoods. The city is a mix of very new bold architecture and the very old.

The city is on the cusp of spring and the green parks, boulevards, and tree-lined streets were too numerous to count. Most of the impressive gardens had one or two flowers in bloom but in a week or so, the city will be awash in a riot of colour. Many trees sported new lime green leafs in contrast to the year around dark green ones.

In terms of our safety, we asked the hotel staff if it was safe to roam around at night. They told us the streets around the hotel were the safest in Mexico. Police cars with blue and red lights flashing are ubiquitous. The lights are not used to send a message to others to pull over; they are there to purely announce police presence. The streets are full of well-armed policeman. We counted one policeman for every 10 meters of space on the pedestrian mall near our hotel. While many police carry automatic weapons, others carry shotguns across their chests with the barrel facing up. Since the average Mexican man is shorter than we are, it was disconcerting to be shoulder to shoulder with them in a crowd and have a gun barrel aimed directly at your face.

Suffice to say that two nights and one day were not enough to really see Mexico City. We will be back, hopefully on this trip. We discovered a two-hour guided bicycle tour offering and hope to do it on our next visit.

We are currently in Puerto Escondido because we are flexible in our travel plans. We didn’t buy our tickets or commit to a hotel in our next planned stop at San Miguel de Allende. As we began to make plans we discovered a great airfare to Puerto Escondido. We found a flight for $2200 pesos on Tuesday while our tentative Friday flight was $6000 pesos. We called our Puerto condo owner and got the okay to move into our monthly rental three days early. San Miguel will have to wait until the end of the trip.

So here we are in Puerto Escondido. Sister Rita and Brother-in-law Mike picked us up at the airport; we shopped at the local market, and are now settling into Mexican small town coastal life.