The Top Five Things I Love About Mexico

1. Mexican people. Without fail, these people are friendly and kind. I don’t think I’ve ever met a grouchy Mexican in Mexico. I understand that tourism is what pays their bills, but that is true in many places and you don’t see the unparalleled positivity in all of them, like you do in Mexico. Maybe it has something to do with living in paradise?…
2. The weather. Duh. 
3. The way nothing closes if there is even one possible customer. In the U.S. it’s all about volume. Here they are happy to provide services anywhere if you are buying, no matter what time it is. Sometimes things close earlier than you expect them to…but they NEVER kick you out and they NEVER make you feel like you’re keeping them from something more important. 
4. The spelling in English-translated signage. Endlessly charming. I am a total grammar and spelling Nazi (a quality I don’t really love that much in myself) so I notice every little thing, and the way some words are morphed is just entirely amusing and entertaining to me. Sadly, I have no examples of this. Next trip… 
5. Pina coladas for breakfast. Ok, I know you can get that in many places. But it’s so cool, I had to mention it. 

Timeshare Heaven, Part 3 (the last one haha)

On entering her “office”, Patty informed us that whenever a deal was struck, you’d hear a champagne cork popping, and traditionally everyone dropped what they were doing and cheered the lucky buyers. OK, this seemed fairly innocuous, but this actually was our first clue that we were possibly dealing with aliens. She started off the hardcore sales pitch time with a high-tech glowing wall map tour of the developer’s various properties around Mexico (6 total, all on the Pacific side except one in Cancun) and then walked us through some large screen survey designed to show us the shocking amount of money we will spend on vacations over the next 30 years. I bet you can see where this is going, huh?

She then escorted us out to the deck. We were on the 6th floor and the deck had a sweeping view of Cabo bay - we could see Finisterra (Land’s End) all the way around to where it curves up towards San Jose del Cabo. Really amazing. See our sunny faces here in the picture Patty insisted on taking. She led us back inside and sat us down. Call this “the beginning of the end”….

Just a few moments later a waitress came over and offered us mimosas. We accepted, and she popped the cork (but wait…Patty said the corks were when someone bought something….huh?). All of a sudden everyone in the room who looked like they worked there dropped what they were doing and started clapping. It was freaky. Like some sort of south of the border stepford wives moment.

Patty dove into her stuff. Showed us the network, showed us all about how we could trade points for places around the world, etc. During the process she frequently called upon the assistance of her manager, Chris, who was incidentally also from Seattle area. We were like yeah, right, but then he described where he’d lived in Issaquah and where he’d worked and stuff so he seemed legit. He was really pretty straightforward. He basically said, honestly, I was a guy just like you - came to Cabo for vacation, ended up buying a timeshare, now I sell them because it’s lucrative, I am done by 2pm every day, and I get to live here.

Pop goes another cork in the distance. Auto-clap initiated. Someone shouts from the corner “Hey we need a new owner’s packet here!” Every once in a while some guy who mysteriously resembled a used car salesman would walk by Patty and tell her to “take another thousand points from the pool”. She seemed fairly annoyed by these cheesy interruptions, something that elevated her in my points scale because, well, they were cheesy.

Now I could lay down a hundred more words here to describe the various goings on during the rest of the morning. Yes, we were way past that 75 minutes at this point. But instead of belaboring you with tales of ever-decreasing offers and more alien applause I’ll just tell you.

We are timeshare owners now. :) We took the honeymoon deal. One week every other year in any of the 6 properties, plus membership in the discount worldwide hotel network. We’ll be helping them christen their new property in Loreto, on the Sea of Cortez, sometime in 2011. Pop goes the champagne!...

Timeshare Heaven, Part 2

The taxi dropped us off in front of Villas del Palmar in an area that was obviously the corral for the sheep whose herd we had just joined. We were deposited at a café table and as we watched the other confused-looking couples get swooped in on by young, good-looking English-speaking salespeople, we began to wonder what we’d gotten ourselves into. But the cheapskate in me was determined to get that $40 back.

Eventually a sweet-looking little girl came over and confirmed our identity. She brought us to a counter where another sweet-looking slightly older girl confirmed the details of what Hiram promised us - tickets for 2 to the Cabo Adventures zip line, a sunset dinner of steak and lobster, and a tour to the arches in a glass bottom boat. I didn’t even know about any of that except the zip line so I was thinking hey, maybe this is even better than I thought!

Once we were officially signed up, our card came up with the line of professionals - sales level two had now been reached. Enter Patty, a beautiful 30-something Mexican woman who spoke flawless English and happened to be massively pregnant. Right off the bat she told us that if we didn’t buy a timeshare she would go into labor before our very eyes and we’d have to help deliver the baby. Turns out her husband is from Seattle, a guy who moved here after just one vacation and now did timeshare sales as well. There are so many people with a Seattle connection here, we have run into them over and over.

Patty was really great. Funny, sparkly, and clearly everyone we walked by LOVED her. She encountered no less than 3 separate groups of people who were here using the timeshare they’d bought from her and she knew all of them by name, regardless of how long it had been since they first bought. This was pretty impressive to me, because it would have been a feat of amazing proportions for that to have been staged in any way.

Patty loaded us onto a cute little trolley that hauled us over to the opposite side of the property. Villa de Palmar was the first of these 3 big resorts located on the one swimmable beach in Cabo - Playa Medano. The middle resort was Villa La Estancia, all owned condos, and the one we were being taken to was Villa del Arco. The minute we walked through the lobby we looked at each other and started laughing - this pool was one of a handful that has a webcam that we have been OBSESSED with for the last few months. We looked up and located it immediately, solving a great mystery for Patty who was always being told by clients they could see her at work. Patty led us through the pool area, across the under-construction pirate ship bar that sits in the middle of the pool, and into the beachfront restaurant. She instructed us to load up on breakfast (way too American breakfast buffet) and she sat us down and commenced quizzing us about our vacationing life.

It was obvious the kinds of information she wanted and pretty clear where she was going with it, but her manner was so friendly and engaging that we just went right along with it. Patty is a serious professional. Turns out she was literally due in 5 days, but she has a 2 year old at home as well and said she had begged her boss to let her work as long as possible before she had to fully dedicate herself to new mommy domesticity. We finished up breakfast and she took us on a blissfully short tour of a couple different units - the big fancy 2 bedroom and the cheapie (relatively speaking) “Junior Suite” which is basically a hotel room with a very small kitchen.

This whole event was billed at 75 minutes tops, that was the commitment we made and everyone we ran into promised no more than 75 minutes and we’d get our free things and go. So far we were on schedule, which we were happy about. Patty escorted us back to the trolley and we returned to Palmar. She got off the trolley and started walking. And walking….and walking. Through the lobby, out to the pool, around the end of a building, in a doorway, through a hallway, up an elevator, down another hall. I wasn’t completely sure we were even still in Mexico, when we rounded a corner and Patty opened a door and said “This…is my office”.

It was a giant room full of tables, which were correspondingly full of couples each with their own Patty. The first thing you see upon entering the room is the very active bar. Bottles of champagne are being opened all over the place. Uh oh…….

Timeshare Heaven, Part 1

We began our stay in Cabo as many American tourists do - by becoming hapless victims of the timeshare sales vultures at the airport. They make it seem like you will not be able to secure transportation to your destination unless you talk to them first. We were sort of half committed to listening to a timeshare thing because we heard so many rumors about the perks that came along with it, so we allowed ourselves to be dragged over to the counter where we were supposedly arranging our taxi. For those of you who don’t want to endure the pitching, the secret is to walk through the pit viper nest repeating the words “I’m already an owner” and they will leave you alone.

I was really kind of intrigued by the whole process, because clearly it’s the lifeblood of this town. The volume of people dedicated to selling you one-fiftieth of one hotel room is astounding. Enter Hiram, level one airport sales guy. He was good. He knew right off that we were half skeptics and he talked to us as such - didn’t pull any punches and told us straight up what he was after. The perk that sold us was when he pulled out the Eco Adventures magazine and promised us tickets to that - I really wanted to do something like that while we were here anyway, might as well do it for free. He added on a steak and lobster dinner and a trip in the glass bottom boats, all for 75 minutes of our time the next day. Unfortunately this involved actually getting out of bed before noon but we figured one day of that wouldn’t kill us. The last part of the deal was the trickiest. We had to give him 40 bucks, as collateral for our presence. This one was new to me, and pretty smart I thought. 40 bucks is a low enough amount that you will part with it now, but high enough to get your butt out of bed and over there the next day, because that is what I was thinking about when the alarm went off.

Next came Hiram’s instructions for getting ourselves there. We are staying in a place that is far out of town and fairly secluded. There is no way to just walk down the hall to the lobby and catch a cab - it’s a complicated process of ordering a golf cart, then getting a cab to the exit, etc. Hiram informed us that of course our hotel wouldn’t want him there trying to sell us on a different place, so he had to meet us at the entrance. But….we were not to actually tell anyone that we were meeting him, because they would try and steal the deal out from under him. It’s phenomenally competitive. We keep hearing over and over how cutthroat these first level sales guys are, really amazing. So we followed his instructions to the letter, telling the golf cart driver we wanted a taxi, telling the concierge we wanted to go downtown, then lying to him when he asked if anyone was meeting us at the gate, and then not telling the taxi driver about it until we were clear of the concierge. We felt like drug runners. As the cab got to the bottom of the hill, we realized there were about 10 Hirams there, waiting for people like us. Crazy! A guy came over and opened our door. We told him we were looking for Hiram, and he said oh I work with him, remember me? From the airport, hold on, I’ll call him. Well we’d already been told they do this to scam each other out of prospects so by now we’re like crap what do we do? But then we saw the actual Hiram pulling up and he was actually talking to the guy in our doorway on his cell phone. Phew. He sent us along with a taxi voucher and off we went to Villas de Palmar….

Stay tuned for Part 2. I might even figure out how to upload pictures by then.

To Share Time...or Not To Share Time....

Pretty much everyone knows that when you go to a popular resort area in Mexico, you will be subject to any number of creative and persistent sales pitches. For everything. From beach vendors selling clothing, toys, trinkets, etc. (often made in the very Mexican location of CHINA...) to the onslaught of real estate moguls hiding in every taxicab line at the airport...one needs to practice the finer art of the words "NO GRACIAS" before you depart the plane.

We're pretty committed to riding to the hotel in a sales-pitch-free taxi, after we fell for the ride-along timeshare salesperson deal in Mazatlan. However we keep hearing from various sources, both known to us and online, that listening to the pitch at the resort is worth the pain and torture of having to repeatedly refuse to cough up thousands of dollars on the spot. We've heard and read you can invest anywhere from 1-3 hours getting pitched to and in exchange you get a few hundred dollars off your beer bill (yes, our beer bill will likely be in the hundreds), or tickets to a surfing class, or some other such loot.

So what's the real story? Do we give up a precious few hours of our deck chair dozing time to endure this? I happen to suck at being aggressive about "no" but I am counting on the fact that if we do decide to succumb, Dan will pull out his grouchy Irishman.

Timeshare sales experienced people, do tell....what's the real deal?

The Countdown Continues

Don't tell our bosses, but we are kind of obsessed. Especially Dan. We have live webcams open all day long to shots of the beach from various hotels, and look what I managed to capture on the countdown google widget:

Can't wait till it's all 1's....

25:18:04

Days-hours-minutes till we board a plane for sunnier places. We're headed to Los Cabos - Cabo San Lucas for 7 days and San Jose del Cabo for 3.

Currently the plan is to arrive in Mexico, get through immigration, get a Timeshare-Salespitch-Free taxi to the first hotel (Pueblo Bonito Sunset Beach), check in, remove the heftier items of clothing (hush, this will be a clean blog I promise), and find a deck chair within shouting distance of the bar. If we accomplish nothing beyond that, the trip will still be complete.

The purpose of blogging this whole deal is, well, to distract ourselves from the millions and millions of seconds that remain until we leave. Chances are good that I'll write plenty leading up to the magical July 10, and then I might go a little quiet for a few days. I'll be busy. Shouting at the bartender.