Ensenada, Mexico

Last time we wanted to go to Mexico we sneaked out the back door, saying that there will be too many American tourists on an official US holiday. This time we just went anyway and were very positively surprised! It was really fun. We drove south to Ensenada, Baja California. This is on the Pacific coast of the north part of what is called Baja Norte... The whole peninsula is one enormous desert more than 1000km long. The first experience is driving, but after one year in San Diego it is not much different. Speed limits are to be ignored and 4-way stops everywhere. We took it slow (...) and arrived in Ensenada after a 2.5 hours drive. Before we had to buy insurance for Mexico, as the American car insurance does not cover border crossings.

For the rest of the day we explored this growing town (pop. 280'000) with some American and hundreds of Mexican tourists. The northern towns of Mexico are famous as party places for the Americans. I guess everyone has heard about Tijuana. Ensenada is not that bad at all. There are a lot of bars and nightlife but not too much for the Americans and we just decided that we should take advantage of that! So let's start the evening with a Margarita. Come in, come in, two for one! Ok, let's go in here, looks kind of authentic at least and two for one sounds good. The thing is that you don't pay only one of the two Margaritas you order but you get two each. Ok, we can handle that. Then the barman prepared another kind of Margarita for someone else and as we were such nice guests, we got the leftovers... another one! So we ended up with 2.5 drinks in the colors of the French flag and two Swiss slightly drunk, looking for a place to have diner. Seafood! Was good. After diner we played pool in a very local place, which reminded us of the good old days in Basel. Despite all the drinks we didn't sleep that well with Mariachis singing all night and "noisy" neighbors in the room next door. I will post picture soon. For the moment you have to be happy with Selina's thumb, which looks already much better.