Tijuana without your car, part 1 of 2

• • • SEE UPDATED INFORMATION AT END OF PART 2 • • •

 Getting to and from the border

People who have moved to Tijuana from southern California all mention the same thing, that their friends don’t visit out of fear of driving across the border. Well, you don’t have to take your car across the border. You can have a much better time if you do but that’s really a question of your own comfort level. Most visitors, it seems, would rather leave their cars somewhere north of the border and proceed on foot. Fortunately, that’s an easy thing to do.

You don’t even need a car if you live close to the railroad. The train can take you all the way from Seattle to San Ysidro. Heavy rail (the Sunset Limited and the Coaster) will leave you at Union Station in downtown San Diego. Light rail (the trolley) continues on to the border. The trolley will take you from Union Station to the San Ysidro terminus in just under an hour. The Tijuana trolley is called the Blue Line even though every trolley in San Diego is painted red. There are also the Orange, Green, and Special Event lines, which go to other parts of the county, all painted red. Look for destination signs that read “San Ysidro / Tijuana” to be sure.

Wikipedia’s article on the trolley is found here. The official site is here. Both can supply you with more information.

Free parking is available at the last four trolley stations before the border as well as in Old Town. The trolley comes by every quarter-hour (during peak times, every eight minutes or so) and costs $2.50 per person one way. Vending machines at each station dispense tickets in exchange for U.S. quarters, dollar bills, and five-dollar bills. Passengers are spot-checked by the MTS police: those without a valid ticket are assessed a fine in excess of a hundred dollars.

The Blue Line is the trolley’s Cinderella – it brings in more than half of the money collected by the entire MTS and yet it is forever late and overcrowded. If you find your first trolley to be so full that its passengers are preventing its doors from closing, wait for the next trolley. Overcrowding is often caused by tardiness, meaning that the next trolley will likely show up quickly and be relatively empty.

MTS bus lines 929 (departing from Broadway and Front) and 932 (departing from the Eighth Street trolley station) also end at the international border. These busses stop at the end of Camiones Road, mere steps away from the entrance to Mexico. Both bus lines also stop at the Iris Avenue trolley station, where people who don’t want to walk over the causeway can transfer from the trolley to the bus. Be forewarned that these busses are often more overcrowded than the trolley.

You can also drive directly to the border and park there. To do so, get off the I-5 at the last exit before Mexico, Camino de la Plaza, and look for signs dealing with private parking areas. Rates vary both for price and duration – the lot behind Jack-in-the-Box, for example, charges on an eight-hour day. A much better option is the Border Station lot immediately to your right as you exit the freeway, which not only charges on a normal twenty-four-hour day but is also the U.S. terminus for the Mexicoach shuttle.

Everyone walking into Mexico passes through Mexican Customs. The Customs officer is supposed to inspect the baggage of every tenth person, as determined by the red and green lights controlled by what looks like a crosswalk button, but nowadays everyone puts their baggage on a conveyor belt to be x-rayed like Homeland Security does.

Tourists usually fly under this guy’s radar. If you make eye contact with the Customs official, just smile and keep walking. If he gestures to you, you’d better stop to see what he wants. If you need a translator, someone nearby is sure to be bilingual. But there’s really no reason to be afraid of the Mexican Customs official unless you’re carrying something extremely illegal.

You do not have to cross the border on foot. You can use a shuttle bus. Mexicoach TJ Passport leaves from the Border Station parking lot every hour on the hour from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., passing to collect more passengers from the San Ysidro International Border trolley station and then heading into downtown Tijuana. Currently tickets cost four dollars one way or six dollars round trip.

You can follow this link to Tijuana without your car, part 2, which deals with getting around once you’ve crossed the border.

You can follow this link for a map of the landmarks mentioned in the two parts of this article.

Epazote and Esquites

On its home turf, the herb is called eptitzotl, meaning skunk’s sweat. European botanists received it in the seventeenth century and named it Chenopodium ambrosioides, meaning the leaf shaped like a goose’s foot that is fit for the gods. Both descriptions are accurate. Epazote has also been called, with varying degrees of accuracy, wormseed, Mexican tea, Jerusalem parsley, sweet pigweed, and hedge mustard.

This herb is to Mexican cuisine what tarragon is to French – astonishing, almost overpowering, and indispensable. Heaven only knows what possessed the first person to have eaten the stuff because, in its raw state, it smells like petroleum or creosote or … possibly … skunk’s sweat.

The Emporium, a Tijuana tradition for museum-quality folk art

Raúl Mendiola started the Emporium half a century ago as a way to showcase the best arts and crafts that Mexico has to offer. He began in the historic Pasaje Rodríguez but quickly outgrew the place. He moved to larger quarters at the entrance to Pasaje Sonia, next door to the historic Hotel Caesar, where he’s been ever since. In that time, his offerings have diversified, he’s added two partners (a cousin and a godson), and he’s created thousands of repeat customers from around the world.

The shop looks to have outgrown its present location as well. It’s stuffed floor to ceiling with collectible items – fine Taxco silver jewelry, stained-glass windows, repoussé tin wall ornaments, ceramic birds, talavera from Puebla and Tonalá, unique stoneware from Ken Edwards’s atelier, wood carvings and black pottery from Oaxaca, fine ceramic sculptures by the artist Tlalli, pure cotton guayabera shirts from Mérida, local stained glass, and for Christmas, nativity scenes (known as nacimientos or pesebres) in a variety of media from all over Mexico.

Mendiola attributes the success of the Emporium to the philosophy of the three partners: “honesty, quality, service”. The merchandise is accurately described and fairly priced. Selection is unusually broad. Not just a piece or two from Ken Edwards, instead, the entire Collection Series is available from open stock. Not just run-of-the-mill Oaxacan woodcarvings, but rare pieces from recognized masters like Gerardo Ramírez of San Antonio Arrazola and the Tribus Mixes of Trinidad de Viguera. As for service, “if a customer is afraid because of those stories they read in their local papers, we’re happy to drive them in our own cars to a restaurant or to the border, or wherever they want to go. We want our customers to feel comfortable here,” says Mendiola.

Free Rein – The Street Is Yours

In March of this year, the city of Tijuana inaugurated an ambitious open-air program called Vía Libre, La Calle Es Tuya in which, every Sunday through October, a section of Paseo de los Héroes was closed to vehicular traffic. From 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on these days, the full width of the boulevard is turned over to families out for a stroll, joggers, skaters, dog-walkers, street performers, and pretty much anyone else who wants to enjoy the urban outdoors.

La Oaxaqueña in Mercado Hidalgo

Oaxacan cuisine is at once some of the most traditional and the most unusual in all of Mexico. The Spanish influence dates to the beginning of the Conquest (Hernán Cortés was the valley’s marquis), whence their cecina, sailors’ meat dating from Roman times.  Before the Conquest, Oaxaca was the crossroads for all Mesoamerican commerce and from that it acquired its nickname, the Land of the Seven Moles. Centuries before some desperate nuns invented mole poblano, Oaxaca had perfected el coloradito, el rojo, el manchamanteles, el verde, el amarillo, el chichilo, and el negro.

Mercado Miguel Hidalgo

• • • SEE UPDATED INFORMATION AT END OF ARTICLE • • • 

Two short blocks south of the City Tour stop at Cecut (the cultural center) is the Mercado Miguel Hidalgo, Tijuana’s historic open-air market. What distinguishes it from the traditional mercado municipal found throughout Mexico is the parking lot at its center, a holdover from a generation ago when it was the city’s market for wholesale produce.

The original mercado municipal, in the middle of heavy pedestrian traffic downtown, was a tourist attraction in its day. It has become a somnolent food court with a couple of florists on the side. If you find yourself on Niños Héroes, it’s a great place for some genteel street food. But the bustling marketplace moved east a couple of kilometers.

Mercado Hidalgo was originally built away from pedestrian traffic and, even now that one can easily walk the Zona Río, few tourists go there unless they’re driving. It’s worth visiting in any event – taxis libres are plentiful and cheap and the City Tour runs close by.

Serious mass transit comes to Tijuana

 • • • SEE UPDATED INFORMATION AT END OF ARTICLE • • • 

Many visitors have commented favorably about Tijuana’s public-transportation system because our busses are plentiful and cheap. Our current system’s greatest drawback, on the other hand, is that the routes serve individual colonias rather than the city as a whole. Traveling some distance within Tijuana can now be expensive and time-consuming and, as the city continues to expand, this one drawback will soon outweigh the existing system’s advantages.

The city of Tijuana has just opened bidding worldwide for the construction on the first trunk route of our new Sistema Metropolitano de Transporte Masivo. The plans are indeed metropolitan and massive, covering most of Tijuana’s twelve hundred square kilometers and comprising seven transit stations, eight trunk routes, ninety feeder routes, three local routes, nine suburban routes, and two auxiliary routes. According to the City Administrator’s office, this is a holistic approach to Tijuana’s public-transportation needs designed to increase efficiency, to lower costs, to reduce pollution, and to dovetail with the binational changes in store for the primary border crossing.