In Mexico now!

We are in Mexico now. Tonight, we are in Ensenada in a beach resort, a hotel coupled with an RV park (park for recreational vehicles, campers like us). So we enjoy all the facilities of the hotel, restaurant, bar, pool, beach but sleep in our very confortable van with full hookup, this means we have running water and electricity in the van the whole night without pumping out the batteries and the tanks. And wifi of course. It is still a bit cold for the beach and the pool though.

So we left Chula Vista this morning at 10am to cross the border at San Ysidro/Tijuana. It all started very smoothly, almost no one at the border, a Mexican custom officer searched the van, found nothing, was a bit startled when we told him we were going down to the Yucatan and further to Guatemala but he let us in. Except that to enter Mexico properly, we need to have our passports stamped, get a tourist card and a temporary import permit for our vehicle. Without this, we might have problems when leaving the country. The custom officer directed us to an office nearby. When we got there, we were told that we actually had to go to another border post, five miles away. We tried to reach it from the Mexican side, a taxi driver offered us to guide us there, we started to follow him, but he seemed to take us to some weird places, narrow streets, slums and so on, so we made a U-turn and went back to the USA… There was a long queue to enter the US, we had a little food with us that we had to report. So we were sent to the special inspection, where we waited another half an hour, before a US custom officer looked at our food. He was very nice, we explained what had happened, he took away one apple and three peaches, but did not seem to notice the meat and other perishable we had in the fridge, said he hated to have to take this food away but these were the rules and explained to us how to reach the other border post from the US side. We found it very easily and off we went, crossing the border a second time. Same thing there, but the Mexican custom officer explained to us that the immigration office was further up in town and gave us the directions. We found it and got our passports stamped, tourist cards and vehicle registration within an hour. So now we can stay in Mexico for six months.

As soon as we crossed the border, we felt in a different country, and we actually are in a different country. The driving is a bit different, speed limits are in kilometres, not in miles and we buy gas in litres, not in gallons. And we will have to improve our knowledge of Spanish language fast; we will not go very far with only English… We had some taste of it last night already: we did some shopping in a supermarket, in the USA, close to the border and guess what: all the labels were in Spanish, no English translation and the cashier greeted us in Spanish… We are planning to drive down until the southern tip of Baja California. This should take us a week. More updates to come soon!