What things cost in Mexico -- 2026 edition.

 It's always interesting to find out what things cost when you travel.   Here are a few random observations from our two weeks in Mexico, where $1CAD = 12.6 MXN Pesos as of today:

• Cost of two hours in a cheap hotel, as per signs posted out front:  150 pesos ($12 CAD) in Xalapa, 100 pesos ($8 CAD) in Papantla, Veracruz..  Papantla is a small city, gateway to the ruins of Tajin, and home to the astonishing Voladores. I suspect that in Papantla (pop 160,000) you might want to budget an additional 100 pesos to bribe the desk clerk to keep their mouth shut about your illicit tryst. In a place that size everyone knows everyone (or at least, knows someone who knows you).
  
  Los Nichos, the most distinctive pyramid at the ruins of Tajin
  
  
• Nightly charge for the best hotel in Papantla: $831 pesos ($65 CAD).  The Hotel Tajin has seen better days (perhaps in the 1920s?) but is centrally located and has a lovely patio.
  
  
  
• Cab fare to the bus depot from the Hotel Castropol in Mexico City: $48 peso ($4 CAD), as booked through the DiDi ride-sharing app in 2026.  In 2022, we paid $250 pesos for this same trip using a cab called by our hotel.  I don't mind paying tourist prices for things (what else are tourists for?), but 5X the going rate seems a bit extreme. 
• Enchiladas Suizas: outside of the capital, typically $90 pesos ($7 CAD) a serving. Enchiladas Suizas is a dish of 4-5 tortillas wrapped around shredded chicken, bathed in salsa verde, and then baked with a topping of cheese.  A reliable and tasty choice for a meal.
• Fancy meal in the best restaurant in Papantla: $600 pesos ($48 CAD) The meal included an artesenial beer for me, a fancy smoothie for Harvey, and Harvey's delicious entree of a whole fish baked in a savoury vanilla cream sauce (and a less memorable entree for me). The restaurant had live entertainment and at one point the the whole staff sang the local version of 'Happy Birthday' for someone celebrating with her friends and family.
  

Vanilla is native to the area around Papantla

• Two Chicken Schwarmas, two lemonades, and Babaganoush: $600 pesos ($48 CAD) at a low-end Lebanese place in the fancy Mexico City neighbourhood we stayed when we returned o the capital for a few days before leaving for Bogota.
• Freshly made yeast donut: $20 pesos ($1.60 CAD) in Xalapa and in Mexico City. Both donuts were super-fresh, and very tasty. In general I find most Mexican pastries kind of dry, but donuts are a different story.
• Mexico City Metro or Bus Fare, unlimited distance: $5 pesos for the Metro, $6 for the bus ($.40/.50 CAD).  No transfers, but who's complaining at that price?
  

The metro does get a little crowded at rush hour

• Private taxi from central Mexico City to / from Teotihuacan (1.25 hour trip): $323 pesos, plus $110 pesos for road tolls each way from the DiDi ride-sharing app in non-peak hours). ($35 CAD total) We've done this trip by public transit in the past for far less, but our CDMX hotel was inconveniently located for transit, our backs were bothering us, and we're richer than we were in when we first visited the archeological site in1995.  
  

We really need to up our selfie game. (Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacan)

• Our most expensive meal in Mexico: $1027 pesos ($81 CAD) Sadly, this is what we paid for the the perfectly-okay-but-nothing-special tacos and lemonades that we had at the airport while we waited for our flight to Bogota.  I’d almost forgotten about price-gouging in airports, given that most Canadian airport authorities have taken measures to eliminate ridiculous prices. Thank you Canada!

Anyway, that concludes my blog posts about our two weeks in Mexico.  I intended to write more often, but life is busy when we’re travelling, and it’s tiring to operate in Spanish when your fluency is as low as mine (A2, according to both the Babel and Duolingo language apps). 

On to our next adventures in Colombia, where I expect we’ll be birding from dawn to dusk most days!

When travel doesn't feel like an adventure

 You could say that we are old hands at at travelling around Mexico.  This trip is our 7th.   We stayed in an all-inclusive resort once on a family visit, but we made the other trips independently, travelling around the country by car (once), but mostly by bus and combi (shared taxi) the other times.  On one of those trips we stayed with a family while studying Spanish 4 hours a day, on another we studied Spanish for a week while we lived in our own rented house for a month. Twice we've rented our own place and at least occasionally shopped and cooked our own meals.

And yet....on pretty much every trip there comes a moment. For me that moment was the day we arrived in Papantla, shortly after we arrived.  I was hot, discombobulated, weighted down by carrying all of my valuables on my person because our hotel room seemed sketchy. We'd just had the oddest pizza of our lives in the busiest pizza restaurant in town (roast cauliflower, carrots, peppers, and onions with a whole lot of melty cheese on a decidedly non-thin crust) when we were accosted by a stranger with a small child that he insisted we kiss.  I couldn't understand a world he said other than "besar", but Harvey could and apparently it was a shakedown for 50 pesos.  

I was done.  All of this was too strange, too overwhelming, too hard to understand. I wanted to be home, where I knew how things worked and I could follow more than 20-80% of conversations (depending on the speaker, the subject, and the context).

But....there is no quick retreat from Papantla!  Here you're at least an hour from the nearest small airport (I assume there's one in Poza Rica), and 5 hours from Mexico City. And besides, we had another week in the country before we were scheduled to move on.  So, return to the hotel room, lighten the backpack to the essentials, have a drink, relax for a few minutes on the lovely deck attached to our room....then venture out again and suddenly the world looks like a different place.  

We finished the day by touring the local art museum that features the works of honoured son of the city Teodoro Cano (artist and creator of the frieze that adorns the city square, former head of the art department of the University of Veracruz in Xalapa). And then listening to the Jarocho music and watching the Friday night dancing in the city square. Sometimes all you need to find adventure again is a little time.

Xalapa Veracruz

 Huh.  I just checked out my blog entries from 2022, and it looks like I didn't write a single thing about the two days we spent in Xalapa (pronounced Halapa) on that trip.  Surprising!  It was one of the highlights.

Xalapa is located in the mountains between Mexico City and the Gulf Coast, is the capital of the state of Veracruz, and is home to the University of Veracruz. All of that makes the city of roughly 800,000 a bustling place with a moderate climate.  The historic centre of town is pretty, there are a lot of parks and greenery all over, and, as Harvey likes to say "the town is clean and the people look happy".

Parque Juarez -- Xalapa's central square

Central church getting a touch-up

Historic State Government Building

Busy downtown street in the evening

Random residential street

Courtyard with restaurants near our hotel

Honestly, while the city has some things to offer tourists, mostly Xalapa just feels comfortable -- not too big, not too small, lots of cultural events, some appealing-looking bookstores (if only I read the language more fluently), a big central library, posters for yoga classes, lots of coffee shops and bakeries, and a superfluity of pizza restaurants.

Biblioteca Carlos Fuentes

I don't know how to capture this visually, but the number of Italian restaurants in the centro is truly ridiculous!  We kept searching google maps for places to eat, particularly for dinner in the evenings, and most of our choices were coffee shops, Mexican places that closed by 5:30pm, and pizza places. Honestly, there are at least 3 within a block and a half of our hotel.

Despite the restaurant issue, Xalapa feels like somewhere that I could imagine living (if I and the world were different).

Somehow we're in Mexico again

It all started with the idea that we travel to Colombia to go birding.  As we started to make that idea into a plan, we discovered that our best flight to Bogota included a change of planes in Mexico City.  Suddenly our plans included two weeks in Mexico.  Bonus feature of this plan -- the elevation of Bogota is 2640m and we live at sea level.   Spending some time in CDMX (elevation 2240m) beforehand would give us some time to adapt.

We've been to Mexico City before, and looked forward to spending some more time there after our last abbreviated visit. But.....

Mexico City is big, it's crowded, and it's a little overwhelming.  Don't get me wrong, we saw some amazing things in our first two full days in CDMX.  

  

Palacio Bellas Artes.

 

Museo Vivo del Muralismo

Museo Nacional de Antropología

But we were also a little over-confident about travelling to Mexico after having been here 6 times before, and we neglected to refresh our memory on a few practicalities.  So we got ripped off on our taxi fare on arrival (we paid about double what we should have), messed up the activation of our Mexican SIM cards, and ended up eating some mediocre meals.  Oh, and I didn't spend enough time on my Duolingo listening exercises and had trouble understanding what anyone was saying.

Nothing terrible, but I wasn't displeased to leave for Xalapa on Day 3.