Air conditioned hotel rooms are awesome. Very luxurious. Alarm went off at 6, took lots of time to do all we needed to do to take a 9 am taxi to the airport. Flight was at noon so we had excess time pouring out our eyeballs. We were incredibly early, but that is ok… lots of good people watching. And was nice not to be in kevlar or other protective/non-breathable clothing from head to toe. Plane was no frills - a few good views of some of the terrain we just rode through. Saw heaps of tuna farms just a bit too late to get a pic - dang it!
We arrived in Tijuana about 1 pm. Do we get the tourist FMM card at the airport like one website said we could? Or should we go to the border office? What if the airport immigration office marks us as coming in by air vs. land? Will we have problems in La Paz if we have motos and our papers said we arrived by air? Should we just go to the Tijuana/San Diego border crossing and wait in line for hours and get the one we know will say via land? Can we try at the airport and then if it says “air/airport” throw it away and get another?!?!? Questions the internet can’t answer and questions we can’t ask the authorities… and things that must be decided before we depart the ticketed part of the airport. We eventually decide to leave the airport without documentation and go immediately to the immigration office that is at the airport but outside the ticketed passenger area (fingers crossed). We tell them we crossed in Tecate (true) and have been in Mexico (true) and found out from amigos (if internet can be considered amigos) that we needed a FMM, so we are here to get one (true). She asked when we crossed, and we said July 3 on the road (true). She asked our next stop, which we said don’t know/not sure/Ensenada (not really true… we know we are going back to La Paz on Friday, but we did stop in Ensendana after we went through the border...).
The entirety of it took about 10 minutes. In fact, the time we spent bumbling around the airport was about twice as long as the time it took to get the actual tourist papers…. Was that really it? We landed in Tijuana at 1 pm and had our papers by 2 pm? Did we really not have to go the actual border office or some other Tijuana Immigracion Office? I asked Ernie about it about as many times as I could until I could tell he had said “no” (or “yes”) as many times as possible. SO. We are fin. Within an hour we accomplished what we flew here to do.
Checked into hotel and then went walk about. Found a super cheezy bar and restaurant downtown (only picked it because it was open) and crossed our fingers that whatever we ate was prepared well enough to not make us sick. It is the kind of place that on Friday and Sat nights has $15 all you can drink cervezas and mixed drinkes. There is probably more DNA on the floor of that bar than in GenBank. Carlos… Cheezy Carlos. We feel confident that it is his boss (and not him) that makes him scam, but who knows. We got over-charged for both food items we ordered, got charged airport prices for beer (which we deserve, as we didn’t ask and it wasn’t posted), then got charged a super steep exchange rate for paying in pesos vs. dollars. Total bill was about $1000 pesos (a two day budget for us). We went back and forth pointing out discrepancies and he kept saying “ok, $900 ok. Ok, $800 ok. Ok, $700 ok.” In fact same thing happened with the taxi leaving the airport. We asked how much for Zona Central and they said $25 USD. We said no and they said “$20 OK”. How far could we have taken that? Tijuana…
Post-Carlos we walked back to the hotel. Back to an air conditioned oasis. We are watching "King Kong" on the tele (in spanish of course - getting most of what Jack Black is saying). We have all day tomorrow/Thursday to wander Tijuana (our flight back to La Paz doesn’t leave until Friday morning).
Ernesto, what would you like to remember about today?
(Long pause)
“Crawling up the empire state building with the girl“
Te amo Ernesto.
We arrived in Tijuana about 1 pm. Do we get the tourist FMM card at the airport like one website said we could? Or should we go to the border office? What if the airport immigration office marks us as coming in by air vs. land? Will we have problems in La Paz if we have motos and our papers said we arrived by air? Should we just go to the Tijuana/San Diego border crossing and wait in line for hours and get the one we know will say via land? Can we try at the airport and then if it says “air/airport” throw it away and get another?!?!? Questions the internet can’t answer and questions we can’t ask the authorities… and things that must be decided before we depart the ticketed part of the airport. We eventually decide to leave the airport without documentation and go immediately to the immigration office that is at the airport but outside the ticketed passenger area (fingers crossed). We tell them we crossed in Tecate (true) and have been in Mexico (true) and found out from amigos (if internet can be considered amigos) that we needed a FMM, so we are here to get one (true). She asked when we crossed, and we said July 3 on the road (true). She asked our next stop, which we said don’t know/not sure/Ensenada (not really true… we know we are going back to La Paz on Friday, but we did stop in Ensendana after we went through the border...).
The entirety of it took about 10 minutes. In fact, the time we spent bumbling around the airport was about twice as long as the time it took to get the actual tourist papers…. Was that really it? We landed in Tijuana at 1 pm and had our papers by 2 pm? Did we really not have to go the actual border office or some other Tijuana Immigracion Office? I asked Ernie about it about as many times as I could until I could tell he had said “no” (or “yes”) as many times as possible. SO. We are fin. Within an hour we accomplished what we flew here to do.
Checked into hotel and then went walk about. Found a super cheezy bar and restaurant downtown (only picked it because it was open) and crossed our fingers that whatever we ate was prepared well enough to not make us sick. It is the kind of place that on Friday and Sat nights has $15 all you can drink cervezas and mixed drinkes. There is probably more DNA on the floor of that bar than in GenBank. Carlos… Cheezy Carlos. We feel confident that it is his boss (and not him) that makes him scam, but who knows. We got over-charged for both food items we ordered, got charged airport prices for beer (which we deserve, as we didn’t ask and it wasn’t posted), then got charged a super steep exchange rate for paying in pesos vs. dollars. Total bill was about $1000 pesos (a two day budget for us). We went back and forth pointing out discrepancies and he kept saying “ok, $900 ok. Ok, $800 ok. Ok, $700 ok.” In fact same thing happened with the taxi leaving the airport. We asked how much for Zona Central and they said $25 USD. We said no and they said “$20 OK”. How far could we have taken that? Tijuana…
Post-Carlos we walked back to the hotel. Back to an air conditioned oasis. We are watching "King Kong" on the tele (in spanish of course - getting most of what Jack Black is saying). We have all day tomorrow/Thursday to wander Tijuana (our flight back to La Paz doesn’t leave until Friday morning).
Ernesto, what would you like to remember about today?
(Long pause)
“Crawling up the empire state building with the girl“
Te amo Ernesto.