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Amid Drug Violence, Can You Still Travel To Rosarito Beach?

Posted December 14, 2010 by Ted Hesson

This article originally appeared in The Expeditioner, an online travel magazine.

From the car in the outlet mall parking lot in southern San Diego we could see a winding stretch of the border fence; beyond the fence, tawny hills and tough shrubs, terrain that was wilder and more natural than Southern California’s artificially landscaped residential neighborhoods. A giant tri-color flag — green, white, and red — flapped in the breeze. Mexico.

My friend Will and I sat in the bed of his Toyota pickup truck on a Wednesday morning in late July, searching on our phones for information about crossing the border without a passport, since Will had forgotten his documentation at his apartment in San Francisco.

Passport issues aside, we also had some concerns about safety. Will and I were in the midst of a week-long trip to Southern California in late July, and before reaching San Diego, we had spent some time in Los Angeles and the San Diego suburb of San Marcos. At each stop, I sounded out my friends about a possible day trip down to Rosarito Beach, the 130,000-person Mexican city 30 miles south of the U.S. border. Each friend gave me the same response: Don’t go.

I wasn’t surprised. Back in New York I report on immigration issues, and I had read article after article about the brutality of the drug war in Mexican border cities and towns, and how the violence has escalated in recent years. When I Googled “Rosarito” and “crime,” I found articles about beheadings, executions, and kidnappings.

A decade ago, California residents — gringo and Latino alike — would day-trip down to Rosarito and Tijuana in search of good fish tacos and cheap booze, as well as illicit pleasures, like drugs and prostitution. But over the past few years, increasing news reports about violent crime, occasionally against Americans, caused tourism to plummet. The H1N1 flu scare in 2009 didn’t help matters, either.

After reading so much about the border, though, I wanted to draw my own conclusions.

A taco truck in Rosarito, on the way to the beach.

So, in spite of Will’s passport situation and warnings from friends who said that we “shouldn’t even go through the turnstile” into Mexico, we found ourselves sitting in front of a Ralph Lauren outlet store nearby the border, contemplating whether or not the trip would be possible.

Will’s white Toyota pickup truck is actually decorated with black vinyl stickers so that it resembles a spotted cow (just for decoration/general amusement), and it wasn’t long before a white-haired, white-mustached mall security guard approached us on a golf cart.

I told the guard about our plans to visit Rosarito, and, as it turns out, he actually lives there and commutes to work in San Diego. Hearing the security guard — a staid-looking, retiree-aged gringo — speak about Rosarito, the trip seemed perfectly feasible: Will didn’t need a passport, a California driver’s license would do; we could take Federal Highway 1D along the coast in Mexico for some nice scenery and to avoid the frenzy of Tijuana; and we could buy daily car insurance at a place near the outlet mall for as cheap as $5.

I asked him about the violence. “Yeah, there are killings, but that’s only between the cops and the cartels,” he said. “If you’re not part of that, they’ll leave you alone.”

With that, we thanked him, bought some insurance, and drove towards the border.

Click here to read the full story on The Expeditioner.

Tags : border security, border violence, cartels, drug crime, mexico, rosarito, rosarito, the expeditioner, tijuana, tourism, travel