Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Recently I got to try two Mexican dark beers head-to-head. Modelo Negra has been one of my mainstays for years and is widely distributed in the US. The challenger this round, Bohemia Oscura, is, well, pretty obscure in the US. Its more common sister, Bohemia Original, is available in most stores though not as widely in restaurants as Modelo. I have a few bottles of Bohemia Oscura that I bought in Mexico a few weeks ago and hand-carried home via Phoenix Let's see how they compare!



These two beers represent the same style. They are both dark lagers. The style is also known as Munich lager (based on where the style is popular) or Vienna lager (based on the one of the varieties of hops used in their brewing).

The beers look virtually identical in the glass. The Bohemia, on the left in the photo above, looks a touch lighter than the Modelo, but that's more an artifact of the lighting than the beers themselves.

The beers taste nearly the same, too. Tasting them forward and back without food, I was hard pressed to find a difference between them. They both have the rich, sweet taste, but not overpoweringly so, that's made Modelo Negra one of my go-tos for years. I'd say the Bohemia had a slightly sweeter flavor, but the difference was barely there. I'm not sure I could tell one from the other in a blind test.

Enjoying these beers with food, their similarity continued. It was hard to tell them apart. That also means it was hard to call one better than the other. As much as I've like Modelo Negra for many years, I think the Bohemia is a hair better because of its ever-so slightly sweeter taste. Though because they are so close I wouldn't go out of my way to find Bohemia Oscura when Modelo Negra is available. ...Which means I'll be sticking with Modelo once I finish my last few bottles of Bohemia Oscura because Oscura isn't sold anywhere around here.

I've written on recent foreign trips that I like bringing home a small amount of currency as a souvenir. For example, late last year I brought home $2.75 of Australian coins ($1.80 US). That was a nice cheap little memento. A month ago I brought home $22.50 New Zealand ($13.50 US), a bit more than I wanted to strand in foreign currency but not ridiculous. Speaking of cheap souvenirs, last week I left Mexico with... 8 Pesos.



8 Mexican Pesos, at an exchange rate of approximately 17 to $1 US, are worth 48 cents US.

Oh, but I still have a sack of Peso coins from my last visit to Mexico, 5 years ago. That's another 31 Pesos. Altogether I now have $2.33 US of Mexican currency in my desk drawer. Ooh, real money!

Los Cabos Travelog #20
38,000' over Mexico - Thu, 9 May 2024, 1pm

We wrapped up our 5 days in Los Cabos today. Sadly it ended not with a bang but a whimper (see previous blog). But now we're en route to our next adventure.

Now that we're aboard the flight and well on our way things are going smoothly. Getting through the airport to the aircraft was a bit of a rigamarole, though.

The trip started with a bus ride to the airport. That part was easy; the Viceroy is just outside of San Jose del Cabo, so the ride to the airport was only 10-15 minutes.



SJD has been modernized a lot since our previous trip here 4 years ago. No longer does it feel like a crowded podunk airport but now has spacious halls for checkin, security, etc. Immediately after security it even has you walk through a high-end shopping mall before getting to any of your flights— which is what it seems like all international gateway airports outside of the US are becoming like. (It was the same in Sydney, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand.)

The security gantlet was a bit of a nuisance as the baggage screener alarmed on a pair of carved wood gifts we had in our bag. The heavy ironwood seemed too dense on the x-ray scanner. She told us we couldn't have them in our carry-ons. When we demanded an explanation she pantomimed that we could use them as weapons, to hit someone. So we had to go back out to check-in and check another suitcase with them in it. Fortunately we had another suitcase to use. But then when we came back through security for the second time the automated system alarmed that it was our second pass through. It took a supervisor to permit us reentry.

Once we cleared security it was time to shop! We had to walk seemingly half a mile past stores and restaurants before we reached any gates. Now, passing restaurants would seem handy as we were hungry for lunch, right? Except the food there was ridiculously expensive. I've written before about my dislike of "Paying $25 for an airport pizza and a bottle of Coke." Well, here it was $27 and change for two slices of Sbarro pizza and a cup of coke. And this is in Mexico. Twice in the past 5 days we literally had meals for two, with table service and freshly cooked food, for less than that.

Finally we arrived at our gate.



It took me a moment to spot what was off about this picture.

Can you see it?

Hint: this is the gate at an airport, not a bus station.

Yeah, that's a parking space outside. For a bus. We'd be taking a bus to our aircraft and boarding across the tarmac.



This reminded me of what the pilot said on our inbound flight when we parked on the tarmac. "Well, folks, we lost the lottery for gate space, so we're out here." He made it sound like that flight was unfortunate to arrive at a crowded time of day. It turns out that's just where Southwest always parks its planes... likely because they cheaped out and didn't rent a more expensive gate with an air-bridge rather than a shuttle bus.

As we boarded the bus I wondered how Southwest was going to manage its boarding order, if at all. Some people pay for earlier boarding numbers, and we elites get earlier boarding numbers, too, as an elite status benefit. But when people board a bus in order then get off on the other end, neat order tends to be scrambled. To my surprise, staff on the tarmac asked us to line up again in numerical order! But of course nobody did. Because it's like nobody can count higher than 1 without help. So then the staff on the tarmac started calling us in small groups of numbers. At that point I felt entitled to push my way past the people with later numbers crowding to get on first.

It turns out little of the fuss about boarding numbers was important on this flight. It's only about 2/3 full. That means pretty much nobody has to take a dreaded middle seat... unless they really want to. And everybody's bags fit in the overhead compartments. So now it's a smooth flight on to our next adventure.

Los Cabos Travelog #Ω
Back home - Mon, 13 May 2024, 8:30am

Last night we got home from Phoenix. ...Which is where we went immediately after our Los Cabos Mexico trip. Yes, I'm so far behind on my blog that not only haven't I finished journaling about stuff I did in Los Cabos I haven't even started on our 3-day weekend in Phoenix. Oh, and I still have several days worth of stuff from our trip to New Zealand in April that's stuck in my blog backlog. 😅

"Wow, it's kind of cool out." That was my first thought upon getting home— where "home" is defined as walking out of the airport in San Jose last night. The temperature was maybe in the low 70s at 6pm after hitting a high of about 76 earlier in the afternoon. That felt cool. For the past 9 days that been the temperature at, like, 4am.

After dinner it felt downright cold. The temperature had already dropped to the low or mid 60s. I turned on the heat in the car. Later last night I curled up under the blankets in bed.

I've written before that it's nice to have a day at home after a trip, to decompress and get ready to return to work. This time I've done without it. It's a bit easier to skip it when there aren't also timezone changes to absorb. Baja California, California, and Arizona are on the same clock right now. But it's not just the time change, if any, to deal with. It's coming back to a pile of work that I feel totally lost with. Having a day to recover doesn't really help with that. And while being gone for two weeks in New Zealand didn't leave me feeling totally snowed under at work when I returned, this merely one week trip has me feeling like there was a blizzard I now have to dig out of.

Los Cabos Travelog #16
Viceroy hotel San Jose del Cabo - Wed, 8 May 2024, 9am

It's another taking-it-easy morning here in San Jose del Cabo. Like yesterday morning I awoke early (sunrise is 5:40am) and relaxed on our deck overlooking the pools. And it's not just this morning I'm taking it easy. Yesterday after coming back from our snorkeling trip I was pretty wiped. I took a nap for an hour or two before dinner.

Dinner last night was on our own. While some of my colleagues went looking for expensive food, likely to use up the dining allowance, Hawk and I kept it simple. Like I've said before, we're generally not fans of fancy food. We found a local-style place within easy walking distance and walked over there. I ordered a plate of two tacos while she got a plate of two small mushroom quesadillas. We split a dish of guacamole to enjoy with our chips. Altogether it was a light meal and not very expensive; about $25 all-in.

Light meals seem a bit strange to us as US-ians. We've become accustomed to the gut-busting portions normalized over the past 25-30 years. I still remember what meals used to look like, though. These were adult sizes in the long-long ago. Which means they left us room to enjoy a modest dessert afterward. 🤣 We split an order of churros with chocolate and caramel sauce at a cafe on the walk home.

Well, back to the here-and-now. It's rolling up on 9am Wednesday morning. That means the lazing around on our deck is coming to an end. In a few minutes we're going up to the lobby to meet our group for today's activity— ATV rides in the desert!

Los Cabos Travelog #13
Viceroy San Jose del Cabo - Mon, 6 May 2024, 11pm

This evening our company held a welcome soirée for Club. It was in the "bird nest" just outside our room. (Though actually it looks more like a squirrel nest or maybe a beaver den.)

Yes, this was a welcome reception even though Hawk and I have already been in the area for two days. We pre-extended our trip, paying for the extra two nights on our own. Today's the official arrival day and is why we switched hotels and checked in to the Viceroy.

At the soirée we ate and drank until around 9. Hawk went back to our room after that while I went upstairs to the bar on the roof to drink some more with colleagues. There are some people in the group who drink like fish. I'm trying to respect my own limits and not get sick or get so sloshed I do something stupid. (One colleague already dived into a 4' deep pool and got a bloody forehead from hitting the bottom. 😨) Even so, I drank more than I really wanted to tonight. ...But not so much that I'll be sick. I think. 😰

Club gifts were slightly less generous this year than last. Recall last year in addition to a bag of towels and flip-flops and suntan lotion and crap like that we got a nice USB speaker and... oh, did I mention?... $800 cash. This year there's no valuable item like a USB speaker. I did consider bringing mine from last year to use in the room but decided not to as I imagined we might get another one this year. 😂 Alas, no. And instead of $800 cash we have an allowance to spend up to $800 on food and file an expense report for reimbursement.

An $800 expense limit is not the same as $800 cash. $800 cash is $800 in your pocket, literally. Last time we took the $800 cash meant for 3 days of food and drink and stretched it to cover not only all our meals for 5 days but also the costs of a rental car for two days to tour the island on our own and other incidentals.

An expense limit means up to $800. And we've got to eat $800 of food and drink— or at least order it and throw it away 🤣— to get the full amount. But we don't have expensive tastes. And we're allergic to paying ridiculous resort prices even for basic food. That bougie $133 lunch? We only did that because we knew we were eating on other people's money. And even with OPM we couldn't stand to do it more than once. It's just not our character to spend money wastefully even when it's not ours.

Los Cabos Travelog #10
Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos - Mon, 6 May 2024, 7am

Yesterday was our last evening and now it's our last morning at the lovely Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos. Once again I'm spending the morning lounging on our terraza with a private pool, finding little reason to leave our amazing hotel room.

The Waldorf continues to impress us with its service. I've stayed at 4.5-star rated hotels before. Many of them have been nice, but they were basically just huge hotels with nice rooms. I'm not sure if this hotel is rated 5 stars but if it is, the thing that separates 5 star hotels from those with merely 4.5 stars is the service. Everything here has felt so personalized. When we arrived, we felt like we were the only people arriving. There was no line at check-in in the lobby. There wasn't even a lobby. There was an outdoors lounge, where we were escorted with our drinks in hand, where a registration agent sat down with us at a private table to explain the paperwork.

Then there's this....



When we returned from dinner out last night, the hotel had left a card for Hawk in our room. No, they didn't give us the stuffed hawk; that's a toy we brought because it amuses us to travel with it. But the hotel did put the note— addressed to "Ms. Hawk"— on the hawk. 🤣

The staff's continued use of her preferred name is just one example of the hotel's distinctive customer service.

Edit: "Hawk is retiring" is the answer I gave to the concierge after he asked me several times ahead of our visit if we were celebrating anything special this trip. "We're celebrating coming to this hotel" seemed to be a silly answer even if it was the most accurate, so I went with Hawk's suggestion on this. It's a bit of a lie because while she is enjoying a few weeks or months of time off between jobs, she is actively seeking another job. I've called this "practice retirement" in the past but didn't want to try translating into a foreign language.

Los Cabos Travelog #8½
Downtown Los Cabos - Sun, 5 May 2024, 1pm

I split this journal entry out from the previous one because it was getting too long. At the tequila tasting I did today, Luis was so helpful and so generous in spending time with me (plus he was drinking shots with me, so he got some benefit there too) that I learned a lot about tequila and related liquors. Here are Five Things:

1) Tequila is made only from blue agave.
This basic of tequila labeling I knew already; that to be called tequila it has to come 51% or more from the blue agave plant. The best tequilas are generally 100% blue agave. But there are about 40 different varieties of agave, and there are other agave-based drinks made from them. They're just not called tequila.

2) The different kinds of tequila, by age
I had pretty much already figured this out from learning by osmosis, but tequilas are classified by the amount of time they're aged in barrels.

• Blanco is the youngest tequila, bottled without barrel aging. It has a clear color and the sharp taste of the blue agave.


• Reposado, or "rested", is aged 1-11 months, picking up a pale yellow color and some sweeter flavors from oak barrels.


• Añejo, meaning "aged" or "old", is aged 1-3 years. It has a darker color and even stronger sweet flavors.


• Extra añejo is aged 3 years or more. It often comes out very dark and strongly flavored.


• There are other designations such joven (meaning "young"), which is a mixture of reposado and blanco. There are also tequila-based liquors, like a coffee flavored cordial I tried, which can't be labelled as tequila because they contain less than 51% blue agave. Then there's cristalino....

3) Cristalino tequila is a sham.
Cristalino is heavily marketed as a premium tequila. It's actually just tequila blanco, the least expensive and least sophisticated tequila to produce, run through extra filtering to remote the sharp flavors of the blue agave. Filtering out the flavor filters out the character, though. It's a marketing trap for fools. I'll admit I fell for it, one time. As I sipped my way through the bottle I thought, "Why did I pay $60 (which was a big discount, BTW) for a bottle of flavorless liquor?" That's the power of marketing.

4) Tequila shots are for losers who think drinking cheap tequila is classy.
This is another thing I'd figured out through osmosis and practice. Pounding tequila shots, slamming them down the back of your throat to skip the flavor and boast about feeling the burn, is something you do with cheap tequila. Good tequila has delicious flavors you should savor.

5) Other agave drinks
The most well known tequila-like liquor that's not tequila is probably mezcal. Mezcal has become popular in the US in recent years. It's made from different types of agave than the blue agave plant and it's distilled in underground pots. One characteristic of the underground distillation process is that the smoke generated from boiling the pot is retained in the system. It infuses the liquor with a naturally smoky taste. When I've tried mezcal in the US I've found the smoky flavor overpowering and unpleasant. Luis brushed this off as being a trait of poor mezcal. The example he poured for me had a smoky flavor that was well under control. I still didn't/don't like it as much as blue agave tequila but it's at least fair enough that I wouldn't pour the drink out after taking one sip.

Los Cabos Travelog #7
Downtown Los Cabos - Sun, 5 May 2024, 12pm

Today we're out and about in Cabo San Lucas, wandering the streets and shops in the city center. Yesterday we were here late in the afternoon on a day when there was a cruise ship in port, so all the merchants seemed tired out. This morning things are a lot quieter, and the merchants are fresh-eyed. Oh, and today drug dealers are out. Every second person we pass on the streets is a tout who asks me if I want to buy weed.

I thought marijuana was illegal in Mexico— and heavily punished, compared to the increasingly liberal laws in many parts of the US. Well, a quick search shows that weed is now legal here, albeit only in small quantities. I don't know if the dealers on the street are legit sellers offering legit quantities. The fact that they're all men dressed in ordinary clothes and whispering their offers as they pass strongly suggests to me it's not on the up-and-up.

Another form of drugs that's surprisingly legal here in Mexico are prescription drugs— or drugs that, in the US, are only available with a script. But here all kinds of pain killers, even opiates more powerful than Oxycontin, are sold at streetfront pharmacies. And pharmacies are everywhere. Here in the downtown core there's literally at least one on every block. The implication that there's a huge tourist drug trade— the hotel concierge even encouraged us to visit the town's many pharmacies as tourists— is alarming.



But when in Rome... right? I bought a small bottle of Flexeril pills. It's a muscle relaxant I've used before (with a prescription) when I've had a pinched nerve. The nerve pain I've had in my elbow for a few weeks now has getting worse. I figure instead of gobbling ibuprofen and acetaminophen on this trip I'll take something stronger that I know works for this kind of pain.

Oh, and speaking of gobbling things, we just ate lunch. Instead of another very-bougie $133 lunch at the hotel cafe we stopped a street cafe a few blocks from the marina.



What attracted us here was the overall casual vibe, the al fresco dining, and a menu that skewed toward inexpensive a la carte items. We got a few tacos (one arrachera and one al pastor), a dish of guacamole, and a basket of fries. Oh, and a beer and a glass of piña. All this set us back barely more than $20. Not only was that price less than one-sixth yesterday's lunch, the food was way more flavorful, too!

Los Cabos Travelog #5
Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos - Sat, 4 May 2024, 9pm

At lunch today— a very bougie lunch— we made plans for the rest of the day. Originally we thought we'd spend time this afternoon on the beach, but the beach here is one of those "Look, but don't go in the water" beaches. Though there's welcoming looking sand, the waves are fierce and crash on rocks at the sand's edge. It's because we're on the Pacific Ocean side of the peninsula. It was similar at another Cabo hotel we stayed at years ago. At least on Monday we're changing venue to a hotel on the Sea of Cortez, where the waves will be safer to enter.

Instead of walking on the beach after lunch we took a short tour around the hotel.



One of the restaurants at the Waldorf Astoria is this swing bar. As in, you sit on a swing. I might have tried it for the novelty, though getting liquored up on margaritas and then trying to stay balanced seems like a bad idea. Plus, the drinks here are wicked expensive. They are really good though. The complimentary margarita they brought me at check-in— the one they handed me as I stepped out of the car— was phenomenal.



One thing we wondered about our room is how much of an upgrade we got. I mean, the basic rooms here looked amazing from the photos I saw when I booked. Having a private pool on our balcony made it amazing. But on our walk around the resort we saw that most room have private pools— and some are way larger than ours. For example, the photo above shows a two-level townhouse with a plunge pool big enough for a whole family. Our upgrade wasn't to the top room type or even second to top. It's more like second to bottom. But wow, it's still amazing.



After a tour while there was still light we decided to walk out to downtown Los Cabos. For as remote as our hotel feels, with the ocean on one side and forbidding cliffs on the other, there's a tunnel through the mountain that opens onto a street just a block or two from the edge of the city marina and city center. We walked out there to visit the flea market and the city's many jewelry shops. I'm not much for that kind of shopping but Hawk loves it.

The sellers at the flea market seemed kind of tired after a long day. We'd spotted a big cruise ship in the harbor when we rode in from the airport a few hours earlier, so likely thousands of tourists had already passed through here. But the streets were at least quiet when we came through.

The jewelry in the flea market was mostly crap, as we expected. Hawk is good at assaying stones in a second or two, sorting out real stones from paste and good stones from cheap stones— plus good paste from cheap paste. 😅  The town's many jewelry stores were better quality, unsurprisingly. We visited several as Hawk was curious to see different examples of fire opals, the region's specialty. But even there there were varying levels of quality. And we did find one fire opal necklace that she liked and I thought looked amazing on her... but she was concerned about the composition of the metal in the chain.

We came back empty handed from shopping. ...Well, empty except for a few drinks and sweets to eat in the room this evening. We decided we'd just snack for dinner, seeing as our lunch was late. And very expensive.

Back at the room we spend the whole evening in the plunge pool. It's like, why even use the hotel's pools when we have a private one to ourselves? We sat for a few hours and ate the complimentary chips and guacamole the hotel brought to our room while we were out.

By 9pm now I'm feeling pretty wiped out. It seems too early to go to bed, though it's reasonable as I've been up since 5:30am.