Cabo San Lucas – Your guide to a pleasant trip

Medano Beach - The best place to sun bathe and go for a swim in Cabo San Lucas.

I just got back from a one week trip to Cabo San Lucas.  It was my first time in Mexico and I’m more than thrilled to be back in America.  I wish I did more research before booking my flight/hotel through expedia.com.  I think my experience would have been much better if I did.  I’m going to share with you all the knowledge I’ve gained from my first visit in case you were ever thinking of going there.

I’ll start off with my perception of Cabo first.  I imagined the entire place to look like the picture to my left.  Coconut drinks would be free flowing and it would be an inexpensive paradise.  If you’ve never been there and lived in the USA, you probably have the same image in your head.  I was in for a rude awakening.

Cabo Highway - Look both ways when you cross

The funny thing is there are no Coconuts grown in Cabo.  I did have a few pina colada’s, but what my girlfriend and I really wanted was to drink real coconut fruit.  They do grow mangoes so the mango-on-a-stick sold by beach vendors is a pleasant treat.  And boy, it isn’t cheap at all in Cabo.  The prices for everything was as or more expensive than the United States!  I paid $5 USD for a bottle of water and the average lunch or dinner bill was around $50-$60.  Oh, and try to stay away from American food there.  I suggest sticking with Mexican food, as not surprisingly, my girlfriend and I found that Mexican food tasted the best.  To really get any value on prices, you need to get away from the tourist areas, but to do that you need to travel with someone who speaks Spanish fluently and knows the area.  If you are dealing with a street vendor, remember to always haggle.  You can always get it cheaper than what they ask.  My advice on haggling is to have a set maximum price you’d pay for the item and walk away when they don’t agree.  90% of the time they relent when you start to walk.

Cabo is really a desert.  I realized this once we landed.  It looks like you are flying into Las Vegas.  There’s nice buildings along the beach, but sand is everywhere else.  There are two parts –  Cabo San Lucas and San Jose de Cabo.  These two parts are connected by a highway.  There are no crosswalks or overpasses on the highway so you need to carefully walk across while cars zoom by at 70+ mph.  As you can see on the image on the right, there are bus stops along the highway.  The bus system is probably the nicest surprise I had on my entire trip.

There are 2 types of buses.  As shown in the picture below, there is a ghetto white looking one and a nicer big city bus.  The coolest thing is all buses will stop for you on the road if you wave at them, regardless of if you’re near a bus stop.  That’s something that never happens in San Francisco.  They also drop you off at the exact spot you tell them.  The smaller bus only travels locally while the bigger bus goes all the way from Cabo San Lucas through San Jose de Cabo and to the airport.  It’s really a cheap way to travel.  It’s 80 pesos or about 70 cents to travel locally and it only costs 29 pesos or about $2.50 to get all the way to the airport.  Compare that to the flat $50 the cabs charge you to get to the airport.  It’s about 30 miles from Cabo San Lucas to the airport and it took me about an hour and a half to get to the airport via bus.  We took the taxi when we first landed because we didn’t know any better and it cost $50 and took about half an hour.

If you don’t speak English and aren’t staying at a nice hotel (which I didn’t), stick to hanging out in Cabo San Lucas.  It’s pretty much the only tourist area.  My girlfriend and I
took the bus to San Jose de Cabo thinking there was tourist stuff to do there, but we spent an hour lost and no one spoke a word of English.  It was also pretty sketchy looking and I’m glad we weren’t there at night.

If you plan on going to Cabo, 4-5 days is plenty.  Spending a week there is overkill.  As mentioned previously, it is basically one tourist area called the Marina Fiesta that has a mall, movie theater and restaurants.  By the end of the trip, my girlfriend and I probably walked that strip 15 times and were missing home by the third or fourth day.

Finally, eat before you go to the airport!!  The airport in Cabo is very small and there’s only 2 places to eat.  One food stand is Sbarro and the other is kitchen that serves burgers/fries.  Sbarro closed early and the food at the kitchen looked so unappealing that we didn’t eat until we got back at 10PM last night.

Here’s a quick recap of what you need to do in Cabo:

• WATCH OUT FOR TIMESHARES!!  These timeshare people have booths at the airport and almost convinced me to go to their presentation.  They offer all these free activities for attending, but if you google Mexican timeshare, you’ll know it’s a total scam and you can waste an entire day telling them you don’t want to buy.  On eBay, there are people trying to get rid of their timeshares for $1 just so they don’t have to pay the maintenance fees anymore.  The timeshare are only for their “target markets” so they typically go after people over the age of 30 or couples that look married.  I just got used to saying I was only 25 to get them to go away.
• Learn to take the bus or stay at a resort in Cabo San Lucas or cab rides will add up
• There’s a Walmart along the highway that you can go to stock up on water and other supplies.  If you tell the bus Walmart, they will drop you off right in front of it.
• Bring SUNSCREEN and reapply it every 4 hours – I didn’t re-apply and got sunburned twice.
• If you are with a significant other, do the Margarita Cruise on the Cabo Rey.  You can haggle down to $35 each at an activity vendor and it’s a romantic 2.5 hour ride.  Make sure it’s the Cabo Rey ship.  There are various types of “sunset cruises” offered with different boats.  All the other ships look ghetto in comparison.  $45 each is the retail price.  I heard the dinner cruise on the Cabo Rey wasn’t worth it as it retails for $89 and the food isn’t very tasty.  Most people stay on the top of the ship with the Margarita cruise people since that has the best view anyway.
• If you want to try the Waverunners, you can haggle down to $30 for 30 minutes or $60 for an hour.  They normally ask for $40 for half an hour and $80 for an hour.  I suggest only doing it for 30 minutes as I bought one hour and ended up getting somewhat bored after 45 minutes.  Also be sure to take pictures of your Waverunner before you take it out.  They make you sign a liability waiver because they don’t carry insurance on it and they will charge you for any dings.  Some of the charges are exorbitant and there are some horror stories I found on google where they people were hit with a big fee.
• Try out ATVing, it’s fun riding along the coast if you’ve never done it before.  I have confirmed you can haggle this down to $70 a person and it’s about 2.5 hours.  Unlike for the waverunners, they offer $10 insurance on these so you don’t have to worry about damages.  Retail is $85 to $100, depending on vendor.
• For nightlife, we went to Cabo Wabo, the Pink Kitty and Squid Roe.  Cabo Wabo was generally an older crowd with rock music, Pinky Kitty was a younger crowd with a more modern Vegas club feel and Squid Roe was a younger crowd with top 40′s music.  Out of the three, I would recommend going to Squid Roe as it’s the most unique.  There’s 3 levels you can see all the action from.  They have a guy in the center of the place with a microphone who’s sole job is to keep the energy alive.
• I never got to go Snorkeling or Ziplining, but I heard both were a good experience from people who have done it.  My girlfriend can’t swim and didn’t want to zipline so we didn’t do either.

My Mexican experience, as you can probably tell, wasn’t the greatest.  I missed being able to walk the street without being harassed with offers for a massage, taxi or weed every 5 minutes.  I’m going to Hawaii in a couple of weeks so I’ll be sure to share my experience there as well.  Til’ next time.