I’m taking a little pause from the 50 year backpacker journey that my wife and I took around the world, to reflect on my wife’s home country of Mexico.
One thing we’ve found whilst travelling is the impacts of over tourism. While Mexico certainly does suffer from over-tourism in parts, especially around Cancún, Sayulita and Puerto Vallarta, and sites like Chichén Itzá and Teotihuacán, to name a few, it also offers the independent traveler a wealth of less touristy experiences.
I’ve been travelling independently in Mexico since 2013, where I first did a Lonely Planet itinerary of some of the top twenty sites, like Mexico City, Teotihuacán, Cancún, Mérida, Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas.
I ended up in Mexico because I had travelled over with my niece to the USA as she was going over there to study in Nashville for 6 months. My sister used to work for Virgin airlines so the immediate family could get some pretty good discounts on tickets. Originally my sister had planned to travel with my niece and I over there, flying to LA and then driving across to Nashville. But in the end my sister ‘piked out’ leaving just me and my niece to take the trip together (by the way I basically repeat this story somewhere else on the Juanito’s Travels site, but I can’t exactly remember where, as I have added heaps of pages and posts over the years). My niece couldn’t get the discount on the airfares that my sister or I could get unless she travelled with one of us – short explanation they had ‘tiers’ of discounts, immediate family got super good discounts and anyone who was travelling with us could get a pretty decent discount, like premium economy for the price of economy.
So, in the end I was pretty much committed to going as we had promised my niece she’d get these mad discounts and all. I didn’t have to go, but I like to keep my promises.
So my niece and I go over the USA. But by now the plans to drive from LA to Nashville have been ditched. And my niece and I were pretty much just going to part ways when we got to LA, apart from going together to an LA Dodgers’ baseball game that I invited her along to. When I thought about what I’d like to do in the USA, apart from just looking around Hollywood and going to an LA Dodgers’ baseball game, I thought, go to Mexico!
I know Mexico is not in the USA – but much of the USA used to be part of Mexico, pretty much all those places with Spanish sounding names like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego et cetera have Spanish sounding names for a reason!
My original plans for Mexico were quite simple and based a little around my extensive knowledge of the country through watching the Herbie Goes Bananas movie. Herbie is a VW beetle car with a personality – he has kind of a ‘spirit’ and gets up to all sorts of antics like fighting bulls and stuff. Part of Herbie Goes Bananas is set in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico.
So based on Herbie Goes Bananas I thought I’d go down to Puerto Vallarta and have a drink of tequila, which I also knew was Mexican, have a taco and then come back to Australia again via the USA.
As an independent traveller, then just 40 years old, I bought the Lonely Planet guide to Mexico and started to flick through it. And then I started to discover that there was much more to Mexico than what I had learnt from Herbie Goes Bananas and other classics like Speedy Gonzales, fastest mouse in all of México!! I pretty much learnt from Speedy Gonzales that Mexicans wore big sombreros.
The Lonely Planet said Mexico had lots of archaeological sites, like Teotihuacán, the Mayan archaeological site of Palenque and the ruins of the Aztec main temple, the Templo Mayor (‘great temple’). I must admit on my first visit to Mexico, as you may have gathered by now, I didn’t have a great deal of knowledge about Mexico! In this case, thanks Lonely Planet for giving me a better idea! For instance, I thought Teotihuacán was an Aztec site (whilst it was an important site for the Aztecs it pre-dated their civilisation by a few hundred years and was built by the Teotihuacanos – as the name suggests).
So, now with Lonely Planet in hand I started stretching my itinerary beyond Puerto Vallarta, with planned visits to Mexico City, Teotihuacán (close to Mexico City), Cancún, Mérida, Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas. Puerto Vallarta seemed like a bit of a detour so I ditched the idea of visiting there.
Sorry Herbie.
My friend Kurt had also been to Mexico so he was able to recommend a few places for me to go – including Palenque, which he had missed out on as he was sick and had just stayed in San Cristobal de las Casas, which is actually not that close to Palenque which I was later to find out!
So my wife-to-be and I met up a few times and immediately hit it off. It was a short affair, just a few days in the end as I had to get back to Australia to look after my kids in Canberra as my ex-wife-to-be had to go to Sydney for some training for a new job she had started.
On that first trip I first arrived in Mexico City where I was soon to discover nobody wears big sombreros about. But they did have tequila and tacos, and many, many Herbies – that is many VW beetles, which they call Vochos. Makes sense as they manufactured VW Vochos there in Mexico for many years. And that, of course, is why Herbie was there.
On that first trip I fell in absolute love with Mexico! I loved the sites. I loved the people. I loved the food – though I did have a few mishaps like getting sick from some very cheap canasta style tacos in Mexico City. I loved the nature, the city, the art, the history. It was, and still is, all amazing!
Well that first trip started it all! My now lifelong love of Mexico had begun. Often the first time you do something can lead to a second, third, forth et cetera time.
Like smoking weed, meditation, eating and having sex. Often we do these things more than once in our lives.
So, that first trip under my belt, some years later, again using my sister’s Virgin airline discounts, I travelled again to Mexico via Los Angeles, this time with my friend Kurt, and this time going business class rather than premium economy.
That was 2015, that was the year I went to Mexico to experience the Day of the Dead – Dia de Muertos – which is at the start of November. We had been planning to go to Mexico City or Puebla to experience Dia de Muertos but Kurt’s back was playing up and he knew a doctor in Guadalajara who was good at fixing backs and so we modified our plans to go to Guadalajara instead. You can read more about that here, it also involved being delayed a few days in LA because a big Hurricane had hit around Puerto Vallarta – from Herbie Goes Bananas fame.
I was like, whatever, as long as we were in Mexico around Day of the Dead, it was all good. Kurt’s bad back changed my life in a rather major way. Now on this occasion it was definitely what I would consider a kind of ‘fate’ situation.
Mainly because when Kurt was off in Guadalajara getting his back looked at, I was meeting a Mexican woman online for the first time, someone who was later to become my wife.
So in the end I didn’t quite make it to the Day of the Dead, leaving, I think on the morning of 1 November. As it happens there’s quite a bit of activity leading up to Day of the Dead anyway so you don’t necessarily have to be there on the actual day. You can read more about that here.
And that was 2015. My-wife-to-be kept in touch for a bit and then stopped communicating for a bit at all, and I sorted out my separation arrangements with my first wife, which pretty much started the day I got back Canberra.
So, now officially single, I spent some time kind of alone, though still living with my ex due to financial restraints, and hey, my wife-to-be and I weren’t together at that stage anyway.
So the following year, my kids and my mum go to Japan, and I kept thinking about my wife-to-be and even bought her a little Snoopy notepad from Tokyo thinking optimistically that perhaps one day I would see her again. And then later in 2016 I started sending messages to my wife-to-be as I had started to plan another trip to Mexico to visit the Mayan archaeological site of Calakmul and was wondering whether perhaps she’d want to see me again for a coffee.
Well, that ‘coffee’ ended up starting with plans for us to meet up in Guadalajara, once I’d been to Mérida, and then to Calakmul. From those humble beginnings the ‘coffee’ turned into plans to visit Guanajuato, then Morelia, Querétaro, and Mexico City. After, of course, meeting up in Guadalajara.
By the end of that trip I had met my wife-to-be’s (let’s just call her ‘Jan’ from now on) family, one of her cousins, and some of her friends. After that we were more officially together and I soon started planning another trip to Mexico.
I’ll continue this Mexico focus in my next blog post as we maybe finally get to visit the city Herbie made famous (for me) – Puerto Vallarta.
But it’s worth mentioning that Guanajuato, Morelia, Querétaro, and Mexico City were all amazing experiences. Guanajuato was like a real life Disney experience with beautiful, medieval inspired buildings, and a full on romantic vibe.
Guanajuato, Morelia and Querétaro have what I’ve discovered to be a central Mexican charm, especially in their city centres. They are all bustling with good restaurants, cafes, street food, lively entertainment, often free in the town squares. You’ll see a lot of similarities in design for these smaller Mexican cities, with a central square, with a church at one end and restaurants and shops on the edges.
You also see this repeated in the big cities, like Guadalajara and the granddaddy of Mexican cities, Mexico City! Except on a much grander scale. Guadalajara’s centro area hosts a grand and beautiful Catedral (cathedral as you may have guessed if you don’t know Spanish) and large public spaces. While in Mexico city there’s an even bigger Catedral and an even bigger public space, The Zócalo, which I encountered on my very first visit to, which is also the site on which the Aztecs (also known as the Mexica) founded their capital Tenochtitlan, not to be confused with the grand site of Teotihuacán with it’s massive pyramids of the sun and the moon, which was built by the Teotihuacanos – not the Aztecs!
All of the places I have mentioned so far are pretty easy to navigate (if you stay in a central area) and to get to for the independent traveller. You don’t need an organised tour guide to take you around and, in my opinion, you won’t get to spend enough time and some of these amazing places if you go on an organised tour.
What I would recommend instead is to organise your own airfares and bus fares between places and then maybe organise day tours in some of these areas.
I’ve put in links in this post to posts and pages I’ve already done about some of these places, but in future posts I will add some more detail on some of the areas and some recommendations for the independent traveller.
I have been travelling to Mexico for over 12 years, and I have never had any particualarly bad experiences at all! I have travelled to many, many places in Mexico and all have been amazing. I will keep giving recommendations on places to stay, where to visit and what to eat in Mexico when you travel there.
My only fear is that by hopefully making your Mexican experience slightly more accessible is that I don’t aid in promoting the negative aspects of tourism and turn nice, local vibe places into not so nice places overrun by tourists. Like Cancún, Sayulita, and Los Cabos (the last I haven’t visited but I have on my wife’s good authority that it has been spoiled through overtourism.
Also some very good sites like chichén itzá and Teotihuacán (especially Chichén) have become tourist circuses. A few ways to avoid supporting the over tourism and promote healthy sustainable are to:
- NOT ONLY GO TO THE MOST FAMOUS SITES. Chichén itzá for example is just one of hundreds of well preserved Mayan archaeological sites. Sure, go visit there with the massive crowds, but perhaps plan to stay a bit longer and go visit some of the lesser known Mayan sites, like Uxmal, Calakmul and many, many others.
- do a bit of research and get on some locally run days tours where local Indigenous people proudly explain their cultural connection to sites.
- don’t go on package tours lasting for days – they will not give you enough time to explore areas and will only take you to the overly tourist hot spots. For example my kids and I visited a lovely cenote (underground waterhole/ lake/ river) not far from Mérida, Yucatán which was very beautiful but totally overrun by thousands and thousands of tourists. Whereas the day before we had visited a nice rustic cenote run by an Indigenous cooperative where we had a swim with just a dozen people.
- when doing a day trip try and get in a smaller group who can perhaps get into some of these sites a little before the big tour buses roll in. Even better hire your own guide like we did at Teotihuacán where my wife and two kids got up early and visited the site before the big crowds had made their way there.
- avoid Airbnb, especially where people are using local homes that drive up prices for locals, like has been happening in the more popular parts of Spain and Italy. Local homes are for locals. You, as a tourist, should be staying at hotels! Even if that means fewer of us tourists can visit! You have money and options, a lot of places you visit in Mexico do not have the same financial resources, so it is unfair to drive prices up and drive locals out as has happened in Sayulita.
- boycott places like Sayulita altogether! Sorry to pick on you Sayulita but you have become a magnet for gringo (USA) invasion over the last few years. There is hardly any local character to Sayulita anymore and locals are now struggling to be able to accommodate themselves at a reasonable cost in the area as new apartments and the like are practically all targeted at wealthy tourists rather than the hard working locals who support us tourists! Also, when tourism completely takes over prices get driven up and places like Sayulita find themselves with a situation where everything is twice the price of the rest of Mexico. Don’t go there! Don’t support that injustice, demand sustainable and balanced tourist options with a mixed economy that is not only based on tourist dollars!
That’s enough for today I think! I’ll have more tips and tricks on planning your independent travel to Mexico in coming posts before I get back to continuing the 50 Year Backpacker blog – though this is kind of part of that anyway!
