Mexico Family Travel Guide

Read the advisories by state, not the country. The State Department publishes a Level 1 to Level 4 rating for every Mexican state and updates it. Yucatan and Campeche have consistently sat at Level 1, the same rating as France. Several states carry Level 4, do not travel. Both facts are true at once and both are about Mexico.

The places I actually send families. Yucatan state including Merida and Valladolid. Quintana Roo tourist corridor, meaning Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Tulum and Cozumel. Mexico City. Oaxaca city. San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato. Puerto Vallarta. That list covers almost everything a family would want and none of it is a compromise.

Drive by day and use toll roads. The cuota roads cost money and are worth every peso. They are better maintained, better patrolled and faster. The free libre roads take you through places and at times you do not need to be. In the Yucatan a hire car is relaxed. In some other states I would not put a family in one.

The practical risks are ordinary ones. Petty theft in crowds, taxi overcharging, and the sun. Use ride hailing rather than flagging a cab. Do not wear the good watch. Drink bottled water outside the cities. Keep an eye on the children at cenotes, because there are frequently no lifeguards and the water is deeper than it looks.

Merida is the specific answer to the specific fear. It is repeatedly named among the safest cities in Mexico and it feels that way to live in. We walked home from dinner with three children. I am not going to tell you that makes the whole country safe. I am telling you the version of Mexico that most frightens American families is not the version you would be going to.

The famous ones are the worst ones. Ik Kil is spectacular and it is also a line with a changing room and a restaurant, because it sits next to Chichen Itza. Go if you are there. But the cenotes worth the day are the ones down a dirt track with a man taking a hundred pesos at a gate. We found several that we have never seen written about anywhere and they became our family swimming holes.

Ruins, ranked honestly. Chichen Itza is the one everybody knows and it is worth seeing once, early, before the coaches. Uxmal is better. Fewer people, better carving, and you can still climb parts of it. Ek Balam is better again for children because they can go up the pyramid and there is a cenote next door. Dzibilchaltun is small, close to Merida and has a cenote you swim in.

Valladolid is the town people drive past. Colonial, cheap, has two cenotes inside the town limits and is halfway between Cancun and Merida. If you are doing the peninsula by car, stay a night here rather than making Chichen Itza a day trip from the coast.

The Museo Nacional de Antropologia is the single best thing. Give it half a day and do not try to see all of it. The Aztec and Maya halls are what you came for and they will hold a nine year old. The Sun Stone alone is worth the trip.

Stay in Roma Norte or Condesa. Tree lined, walkable, full of parks and cafes, and a completely different city from the one in the news. The Centro Historico is for daytime. Coyoacan is worth a whole day for the Frida Kahlo house and the market.

Teotihuacan is under an hour away. Older than the Aztecs, enormous, and you can walk the Avenue of the Dead. Go at opening. The balloon flights over it are the postcard shot and are expensive and good.

The altitude is the thing people forget. It is at 2,240 meters. Children get tired faster and adults get a headache on day one. Slow the first day down and drink more water than you think.

Pick your airport rather than your city. Cancun, Mexico City, Merida, Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta all take direct flights from the United States. Flying into the hub nearest what you want to see saves a whole day. Merida has direct flights now from Miami, Houston and Dallas, which most people do not know.

A hire car is right for the Yucatan and wrong for Mexico City. The peninsula has good roads, short distances and things worth stopping at between them. The capital has traffic that will end your marriage. Drive the Yucatan, use the metro and ride hailing in the city.

ADO buses are excellent and nobody outside Mexico believes it. Clean, air conditioned, reserved seats, on time. The Mexico City to Oaxaca run and the Cancun to Merida run are both easy with children, and ADO Platino is almost a business class seat for the price of a cheap lunch.

The Tren Maya changed the peninsula. It now links Cancun, Valladolid, Merida, Campeche and Palenque. It is new, the timetable still moves around, and stations are often a long way outside the towns. Check the transfer at the far end before you rely on it.

Pesos, and pay in pesos. Card machines and cash points will offer to charge you in dollars. Always decline and take the peso price, because the conversion they are offering is dreadful. Cash still matters for markets, cenote gates, small towns and tips.

Use bank cash machines inside a branch. Santander, BBVA, Banorte. Avoid the standalone machines in convenience stores and tourist strips, which charge badly and are where card skimming happens.

Tipping is real and modest. Ten to fifteen per cent in restaurants, twenty to fifty pesos for a bellhop or a bag, and something for the person who watches your car in a street space. Check if propina is already on the bill in tourist areas.

Healthcare is good and cheap. This is the one that surprises Americans most. Private clinics in Merida, Mexico City and Cancun are excellent, walk in, and cost a fraction of a US urgent care visit. Pharmacies have doctors attached for very small money. Take travel insurance anyway for the flight home, not the treatment.

Learn twenty words before you go. Not for politeness, though it is polite. Because a child who can say gracias and por favor and cuanto cuesta gets treated as a small person rather than luggage, and Mexico responds to that enormously. Ours were speaking passable Spanish inside two months.

Two bases beat five stops. The single most common mistake I fix is a ten day itinerary with five hotels in it. Pick two places and go deep. Merida and the coast. Mexico City and Oaxaca. You will see less and remember more.

Eat late or eat early, not in between. Mexican dinner starts at nine. If you have small children, do the big meal at two in the afternoon like everybody else does and have something light at seven. Fighting the schedule is how families end up in a hotel restaurant every night.

The sun is not the same sun. Nearer the equator and often at altitude. Hats, long sleeves in the middle of the day, reef safe sunscreen and a proper siesta between one and four. The locals stop moving in the afternoon for a reason.

What healthcare actually cost. Several trips to the emergency room in Merida with three children, and the most we ever paid was seventy five dollars including x-rays. We never blogged it at the time. It has done more to change how we think about living abroad than anything else on this list.

That there is no yellow cheese. No hard shells, no sour cream on everything, no burritos outside the north. The Yucatan tastes nothing like Oaxaca, which tastes nothing like Baja.

How little English there is once you leave the coast. Cancun and Playa run in English. Merida largely does not, and Oaxaca and Guanajuato really do not. That is not a warning, it is the reason to go. But arrive knowing it.

How much of Mexico is a highland country. Almost everyone picturing Mexico is picturing a beach. Mexico City, Oaxaca, San Miguel, Guanajuato and Puebla are all mountain cities, several of them cool enough to want a jacket at night, and that is where most of the history is.

That three months went too fast. We arrived planning a season and left planning a house. Our children still ask when we are going back, and the honest answer is that we are working on it.