Tijuana and Old Town

Tijuana

This morning, we were woken early but this noisy little finch. It turned out to be the first of many. The weather was a bit cloudy, but by the time we set off, the cloud had burnt off making way for a beautiful day.

We decided to head for the Mexican border. The southern suburbs of San Diego share the US/Mexico border with Tijuana. The Trolley (light rail) system in San Diego has a spur that runs right to the border crossing (literally). You walk out of the immigration building heading back to the US and basically step onto the LRT in picture.
The US side of the twin cities is called Ysidro. It's all very clean and westernised. The contrast accross the border was almost immediately apparent. It should be noted that San Diego was in fact part of Mexico at one point.

The photo above is taken just on the Mexican side of the border. You can see the Tijuana arch in the distance. The odd thing was that as we crossed the border we smelled an unpleasant smell. Fortunately it didn't last, but it was as a result of a storm water canal under the walkway that I'm standing on in the photo above.

 

 

Tijuana is a nutty place. It's the biggest tourist trap I've ever seen. It's a city of 2.5 Million people, but the tourist part is only a couple of streets. They are full of dodgy unregulated pharmacies, drinking establishments, Mexican restaurants and trinket shops. To be honest, I was fairly unimpressed, but it had to be done.

The many police all carried semi-automatics and looked like gangsters with their aviation glasses and military boots. It cracked me up when we saw a police dual cab utility driving down the street with a couch in the back tray with one of the cops sitting on it.
Unfortunately I wasn't quick enough to get a photo. The term "Workplace health and safety seems" not to have made it to Mexico yet.

These Mexicans are crazy.
They paint their donkeys up to look like Zebras (well partially) hook them up to a cart so you can have your photo taken with it.

The Nice Part of TJ
We asked the tourist info lady for options other than the main tourist trap of TJ. She mentioned a park a few blocks from the main street. It was a good call. The park was a nice haven from the craziness. All the local families seemed to have gone to church and then come to the park to hang out as a family. It was quite pleasant really.

After an unimpeded crossing into Mexico, the path back to the USA was no where near as straight forward. We spotted a line of traffic banked back at least to the tourist part of TJ. It was 4 lanes wide and at a complete stand still. I'm guessing it was at least a couple of kms long. (I've since seen on Google Maps, that there are in fact sets of 4 lanes for a few kms.) There were even a bunch of trinket stalls along the way with the vendors out in the traffic trying to flog stuff to unsuspecting motorists.
The Tijuana/Ysidro border sees 40 million crossings every year and is the busiest in the world (whatever world means in North America). I'd just finished scoffing at the unfortunate motorists when I saw the pedestrians lines up to cross the border. It took about 25mins, but we eventually got through without any problems.

 

To the North of Downtown San Diego is the original centre of San Diego the locals call "Old Town". It actually has many of the original buildings from back when San Diego was founded by the Spanish. There's a good mix of history, restaurants and variety stores to make it a nice place to spend some time. After our morning down in Mexico, we had lunch there & the food was excellent. We spent the afternoon having a nosy around the place as well.

 

 

For the entire stay in San Diego, we stayed at the Ocean Park Inn (our room was the one with Kerri on the balcony). The location was great. It was right on the beach next to the lovely Crystal Pier and among a bunch of nice restaurants, pubs and shops. We could easily have stayed there for the week and not to have gone more than a few hundred metres for our needs. Obviously there was so much more of San Diego to explore and we spent a lot of time away from the area, but every evening we found our way back just in time for some awesome sunsets.

 

 

 

We wandered along the beach on the previous evening and saw a pod of dolphins messing around in the waves. Tonight we were out on Crystal Pier and saw the dolphins again. They're really hard to photograph from long range in low light. Hopefully we'll have better luck in Alaska in a month or so time. We managed a much closer encounter with dolphins the next day at Seaworld. We didn't see the dolphins again after that evening.