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.