Mango Deck

After 3 meals at Mango deck , I feel like it deserved a special place in my blog. We arrived and had our first meal at Mango Deck. Since then, we figured out that we could eat much cheaper if we ordered domestic drinks, which included margaritas, tequilla sunrise, long Island ice tea etc and shared our main dish. Drinks were 2 for 1 all day ( $4 each) and serving portions were huge. The most entertaining part of Mango deck were the contests! While it is not suitable for young children, high schoolers would surely be OK. We saw push up contests, arm wrestling and beer drinking contests. Winners usually got beer for their whole party. The place has great ambience and is right on the beach. The food was one of the best we had eaten and so we went there one last time just before leaving for the airport.Good place to end up on your last day.

If you have an hour before leaving, where do you go??? Mango Deck :))

Mexican Coffee: The greatest show in Cabo

You can't leave Cabo without seeing the greatest show.....Mexican coffee! And there is no better place to see it than at Romeo & Juliet. Mexican coffee is a heavenly mixture of coffee with tequila, kahlua sugar and cream. The alcohol in the coffee is served flambe style which creates an impression of a fire waterfall. When done in the correct ambience, it is a visual delight.

Romeo and Juliet serves italian food with live music. You can dine al fresca or inside the Ac comfort ....no prizes for guessing where I was:) One of the things this restaurant is famous for is its Ceaser Salad. It cost $20 and serves two!!! I was curious to see how good could it be that everyone who ate here suggested I try it.

Just like the coffee, the preparation of the salad was also a presentation. The chef created the dressing from scratch and served it to perfection. Not being a great fan of Ceasars salad, I must say that this one was one of the best ceasar salads I have ever had, but with no meat in it...I still think $10 is too much for a salad.

The music here is interesting. An old gentleman, who looks like he owns the place played away on the piano. If you have a birthday, he will take requests and play you some of the old classics. Overall , great place to spend a nice quiet evening.

La Princessa: the ultimate party boat!

Returning home without snorkelling in Cabo is a sin. There is so much fish in the waters of Cabo that you could stand on the beach and watch the fish frolick. One of the best snorkel tours in Cabo is on a Catamaran called "La Princessa" While there are cheaper snorkel tours available, this one is a class apart. This departs at noon from Dock D in front of Luxury Mall.From the moment we stepped on board till the time we got off, it was one non stop party. For those of you that drink, there is an open bar through out and I was quite amused to see the amount of alcohol consumed by people on board. At last count, the person next to me had already downed 9 beers, 6 cocktailsand was reaching out for more:)

While this may sound like a group of college kids on spring break, most people on board were with families of little kids. Unfortunately, lady luck did not accompany us on this trip and so when we reached Santa Maria Bay ( close to Chilleno bay) we found the water infested with jelly fish! Snorkelling here meant that we would have to take the risk of being stung and so most of us decided not to snorkel.

Fresh lunch of tuna sandwich, tortilla chips with guacamole with soft drinks was served on board after which the party boat returned to Cabo marina. The music was awesome, company was awesome and the service was awesome, so in spite of not doing what we had boarded the boat for, we all left happy leaving a fat tip! This was the first 3 hour boat trip on which I wasn't sea sick!!!!!!!!!!!

Day trip from Cabo: To do or not Todos Santos

If you are tired of the ocean and would like a change, one hour away from Cabo lies the sleepy artsy town called Todos Santos. While there are many tours that will take you there for a mini fortune, you are better off renting a car for a day ( ~$70 with insurance for a compact) . Make sure you take food and water with you if you are travelling in the summer months.

The drive to Todos Santos is an interesting one. Having been to Cancun before and seeing the orads there, I was unprepared for the drive to Todos Santos. The entire way , you are driving through desert and huge cactii. Mirages are common and often the road completely disappears to give way to paved roads where crazy people drive at 70kms an hour!!

At the risk of offending some people, I would say that there is really nothing much to do here. There are a multitude of galleries filled with highly priced handicrafts. Hotel California is a majot tourist point which caters to tourist by having them believe that this is what inspired Eagles to compose the song! Reality is much different. The walk around the city took us no more than an hour and so we ventured to find the beaches. There are 4-5 beaches, but none of them have swim access and road access is pretty bad too. The lady at the restaurant said that if you are worried about damaging your car, I would caution you against the trip! So we returned without ever seeing any of the beaches. Overall, it was a disappointing trip with not much happening and not much to do. Maybe, this is a place to return too in high season....

The Perfect Arch

El Arco- Cabo's greatest tourist attraction

From the time you start approaching Cabo, you begin to see the " Arch" or El Arco. A trip to Cabo is not complete unless you see this gorgeous place. There are a zillion tour operators who will try to sell you their tour. Make sure you see the boat before you buy. Most boats going to the arch will boast glass bottoms, but smaller boats hardly have any viewing area. We chose Baja tours as they started from Medano beach and have tours operating every hour. You could go on a trip, stop at the arch and then take a boat trip back an hour later on any of Baja's 4 boats.

El Arco marks the point where the sea of cortes meets the pacific ocean.The arch is usually not visible as it is underwater. Every 5-6 years the water shifts and the arch becomes visible over a beach. This is a unique phenomena which usually lasts no more than a week. Once again, we were lucky enough to see it and photograph it like all postcards in Cabo!

The landing on El arco happens on the Lovers beach. Ons has to cross that to go to Divorce beach to get to the arch. Why it has this name, no one knows but divorcing life from you is a very high probablity on this side of the beach! The pacific is furious here and people have drowned just standing on the beach!! While it was scary crossing that beach to get to the arch the results were so worth it.

On the way to the arch, the boat stops at Pelican rock to see the fish. Believe me, you dont need a glass bottom boat! The picture you see is a picture of the fish taken from the boat while holding the camera above the water. Carry some tortillas or bread to watch jump out of water to come eat it. If you are sea sick, you might want to take some medication before you get on to the boat....the ocean is very choppy on the Pacific side.

Scuba, jet skii, parasail, snorkel anyone?

Activities in Cabo are endless, and if you have an endless reserve of cash saved for activities, you could be doing something everyday and still not run out of things to do. While we like to be active on vacation, we are on vacation....so we try and limit our activities to something that would add value to our experience. Cabo was described as "Aquarium of the world" by the famous marine biologist Jacques Costeau. So snorkeling was a given. The boys wanted to try out scuba as we had missed our shot at it in Thailand . Cabo adventures is the best agency to go scuba diving for the first time . They have a 1:4 instructor student ratio. All three men in my house were totally impressed by their trip. The trip is a bit expensive ( $175), but if you shop around and maybe attend a timeshare presentation you can get it all discounted 50%. The scuba experience was excellent. All apprehension disappeared in the first few minutes and the amount of wildlife observed was way more than what they had seen on land in Alaska!

SHOPPING ON THE BEACH

So what do you do for your sweet tooth?

What is food if there is no sweet to end it with???? Mexican food is great, but ice cream shops are far and few in Cabo. Given how how it is this time of the year , you would expect ice cream shops everywhere instead all you see are tequila bars :( Part of being a Bengali also means that sugar is hard coded in our genes ad so began the quest for the perfect Mexican dessert. I remember a trip on the east coast when I sampled clam chowder from boston all the way to Maine in search of the perfect clam chowder.Then last year I repeated this quest for the pad thai in Thailand. This time it was time for flan!! For those of you who don't quite understand what flan is...it is what we Indians call caramel custard at home. Prices for flan ranged from USD$8 to as low as $1.50 depending on where you ate it. Tacos Locos had superb flan and so did Mango deck. In general, with an exception of the place we ate at in Todos Santos ( where the flan came out of ice age and had to be nuked to serve a customer who was foolish enough to ask for it in low season ) most flan I ate were fabulous. Can't go wrong with milk, sugar, eggs and caramel:)

If you crave gelato or other fancy desserts...Senor Sweets is the place you want to go to. Ideally located on the marina this is a great hang out place to eat as well as people watch. In addition, most cocktails will take care of your sweet tooth as they must be loaded with a minimum of 700-800 calories, but I don't like my sugar adultrated with alcohol.

La Ricazon

If you get sick of mexican food.....

Considering we are a pretty well traveled family and are used to sampling different cuisines , Cabo can get quite monotonous as far as food is concerned. Tripadvisor seems to be blocked so we bypassed it by logging in to tripadvisor.com.in :)) One of our original places to eat was a Patagonia steak house. We started on our ( by now ) ritualistic trip to the marina in search of the steak house. By American standards, a steakhouse always conjures up a vision of a nice fancy restaurant. This was neither fancy nor big! More importantly it was closed!!! Luckily the owner had dropped by to pick up something and so we left promising him that we would return the next day. True to our word we showed up and ordered steaks, and vegetable soup. The bread starter was absolutely delicious, served with chimichurri and a mayonaise sauce. The steak portions were humongous and the cooking style was unlike any I have seen before. In fact it was served on a dish which had coal on it so the steak continued cooking while we ate it. As for pricing, that wasn't fancy either. For four of us we spent less that what we had spent on lunch at Mango bar!

Another great find was La Ricazon which was walking distance from our hotel. This served authentic mexican food like you could expect to eat at home. The ambience was warm, welcoming and beautiful. We tried the ceviche along with the camerones diabla and sea bass. Melts in your mouth. The Mojito was also probably the best cocktail I have had at Cabo. The chocolate cake at the end of our meal put the great wall of chocolate ( our personal favorite @ PF Changs) to shame....A must visit if you want to try something other than tacos!

Tacos Locos

After spending a small fortune on lunch we decided to walk up to the marina and check out the highly recommended Tacos Locos which is right in front of Cabo Wabo and Giggling Marlin. The walk itself was barely a 15 minute walk, but the major challenge was warding off the time share agents and restaurants waiters who insisted theirs was the only place worth eating at.Once we got past the marina and moved towards the town, we were now hounded by the different handicrafts and jewellery store owners.Their ad campaign was unique and just stopping by to look at some of their wares was really an interesting experience. Tacos locos was as good as the reviews it got. Tacos were well prepared and my favorite was the Taco pescadaro. The flan was to die for! The most interesting experience however was a grandmother traveling with her 6 teenage grandchildren. She was such a character and it was amusing to see how the grandchildren had to constantly keep an eye on her. Overall, Tacos Locos kept its promise of good tacos and cheap drinks, but I think Mango Bar had better taste.

In search for the perfect mexican food

Prior to arriving at Cabo, both of us spent considerable amounts of time pouring over trip advisor to figure out the best places to eat. One that stuck was the Trappers list, Cabo. Once we checked in, our first thought was food! Mango Bar was visible from our patio and against our concierge's advice we decided to venture there. Tacos for the four of us and drinks( mango smoothies) set us back almost 90USD! Even by US standards, I thought that was very pricey!! Could not help miss Tijuana in Sunnyvale while signing the check. Mango bar was entertaining though and we later found out that it was more a hang out place than food place and our bill would have been much less had we opted for alcoholic drinks, since alcohol was buy one get one free all day!! The contests were very entertaining and mild compared to what one can expect as the day progresses. Baywatch seemed quite harmless compared to the sights we saw on this beach.

Why Cabo?

Junior year for Ahon officially got over on June 2nd, but it felt like we had all finished junior year and so.... we all needed a place to escape to.None of us wanted to spend too long travelling, but wanted to spend a week relaxing doing nothing. Given our criteria Cabo San Lucas in Mexico turned out to be our perfect choice. We exchanged our week in Cancun for a week at Casa Dorada and that turned out to be an excellent choice. Lady luck favored us as well....unlike most time share properties, this one was right on Medano Beach walking distance from practically everywhere one could want to go. Our last worry was the room itself. We wanted a room with an ocean view and away from the noise of the pool...look at the picture to see what we woke up to every single day for the one week we spent at Cabo :)

Getting to Cabo

You can fly directly to San Jose, Del Cano directly from San Francisco. Its a short 3 hour flight. Cabo, San Lucas is a sister city almost 50 minutes away and so airport transfer is something you should plan before you leave. Most hotels will arrange transfer, but they are expensive. You are better off researching on line and finding a round trip transfer before hand. We chose Impala and were very pleased with their service. Landing at San Jose, you are going to be literally assaulted by travel agents and time share agents. Some of these will pretend to be your drive to the hotel( yes, they steal your name card) so beware!!