Tijuana is one of those places that very few people have been to, everybody’s heard of and pretty much no one wants to go to. I took a trip to the sleazy Mexican border town par-excellence mainly out of curiosity. Could it really be that bad? Would the streets be thronged with college kids getting drunk on cheap margaritas and high on discount prescription meds? What about all the drug violence that the State Department has been warning us about – the daylight shootouts by rival gangs, the kidnappings? Well, it turns out that Tijuana is suffering mainly from a serious image problem. It’s not exactly picturesque, but it’s hardly any more dangerous than your average U.S. city. And despite being pushed up against the U.S. border, there’s a homegrown culture that’s distinctly Mexican. I wrote about the experience for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Good, the bad and the edgy
A lookout on the Tijuana coastline. Photo: David Peevers/Lonely Planet
Boutique wineries by day, tequila blowouts by night. Remy Scalza finds anything-goes Tijuana has shrugged off its battle scars and made changes.
THE special tonight in La Querencia, a minimalist bistro near the banks of the Rio Tijuana, is wild quail served in bitter-sweet chocolate sauce. Around me in the dining room couples cluster at brushed stainless-steel tables, chatting in Spanish above a trance-music soundtrack and moving steadily through bottles of wine from the nearby Guadalupe Valley. The energy in the room and the optimism are a distant cry from the mood during the worst of la violencia – the drug-fuelled mayhem that had middle-class Tijuanense fleeing north of the border just two years ago.
Since those dark days, Tijuana, Mexico, which lies just across the US border from San Diego, has done an abrupt – if largely unnoticed – about-face. A new, hard-nosed chief of police has worked to rein in the drug cartels and residents have turned their energies inward, cultivating a sophisticated bar and restaurant scene and reinvigorating the arts and culture circuit. Tijuana, for all its challenges, is in the midst of a mini-renaissance.
To read the rest of the article on the Sydney Morning Herald website, click here.
