Are you planning a Mexican trip? What is best the East coast or the West coast? I didn’t know what to expect the first time visited Mexico, but now I am convinced. Why not both?
The whole month of September, I will share 30 stories with you. One story each day. You will find out how I travelled, what countries I called home and how many times I repeated a travel in the same place. But most importantly, you will get to know my comfort zone stories. Would you share yours?
While visiting San Diego, I didn’t miss the opportunity to also see Mexico. So I went on a day trip through Baja California and it was an insane adventure. I joined a private tour with another American couple. To the day I remember the best tacos I ever had and the shock to discover a piece of Titanic, the movie, not the actual ship.
Seeing the wall between Tijuana and San Diego was an experience I wish more people would see. And hopefully, understand it with an open heart. Probably because I lived away from my family for most of my adult life, it felt terrifying to me to understand some families can only see their loved ones through those rusty steel bars. And it was January 2017, right when things started to… change.
And then we continued our trip and saw all the holiday homes owned by people from other countries. Which, don’t get me wrong, I am working my way towards a holiday home too, but seeing those two things one after another, it didn’t feel right. We checked out Rosarito and Poptla too. And once again we went somewhere up top from where I could see the beautiful ocean side. And an insane sunset. That’s why I promised myself I would go back to Mexico, Jalisco being on top of my list because even as I write this caption I have two bottles of tequila in my home, both of them from Mexico.
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And so December 2021 is when I went back to planning a Mexican trip. But this time on the other coast, in Playa del Carmen. This trip was scheduled mostly as a backup plan. Since I was going to spend my holidays in the US with my partner and his family. What I mean by that was, before the borders opened, we booked a two-week stay in Mexico so I can then travel to the US. Because of the pandemic, I wasn’t allowed to travel to the US from Iceland directly. We did the same in the previous year with Ecuador. Anyway, by the time we got to Mexico, the borders were already open. However, since we paid for the holidays we decided to still go.
We decided to stay in an Airbnb a little outside of the tourist area. But close enough to one of the local beaches, Playa Punta Esmeralda. We even got to see a perfect sunrise from the same beach. And we were able to enjoy local, cheap delicious food. I love staying in a more outside tourist area just for that. It was more of a relaxing trip in which we didn’t do that much exploring. We enjoyed our walks on the famous La Quinta Avenida. But the trip was not with no incidents: from almost not being allowed to pass the border security to losing my phone. I have talked about both incidents in detail on Travelling Inside Out.
In our last few days, we also made it to Cozumel where we slept one night. Didn’t do much exploring on the island but all in all, it was a great time. And finally, we continued our trip to Florida. But that story has to wait since next time it’s all about North of Spain.
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