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TIJUANA |
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TIJUANA is the Mexican border town - with every virtue and vice that
this implies. More than 36 million people cross the border every year -
the vast majority of them staying only a few hours - so it can boast
with some justification of being the "World's Most Visited City". Which
is not to say it's somewhere you should plan to hang around; but if you
want to stop off before starting the long trek south, Tijuana is
certainly your most practical choice. There's no shortage of reasonable
hotels, although as you'd expect, most things are far more expensive
than they are further south.
Above all the town is geared towards dealing with hordes of day-trippers,
which means hundreds of tacky souvenir stands, cheap doctors, dentists
and auto-repair shops, and countless bars and restaurants, pricey by
Mexican standards but cheaper than anything you'll find in San Diego.
One thing you won't find much of any more - at least not anywhere near
the centre of town - is the prostitution and the sex shows for which the
border towns used to be notorious. This is partly the result of a
conscious attempt to clean the city up, due in part to the changing
climate in the US: indeed in many places, though not visibly here, the
traffic now runs in the other direction with vast billboards on the
American side of the border offering lurid invitations to "Total nudity
- 24 hours a day". Tijuana does still thrive on gambling though, with
greyhound racing every evening; jai alai from 8pm every night except
Wednesday in the huge downtown Frontón Palacio; and bullfights
throughout the summer (May-Sept) at two rings, one right on the coast,
the other a couple of kilometres southeast of the centre. At the off-track
betting lounges all around Tijuana, you can place money on just about
anything that moves and monitor progress on the banks of closed-circuit
TVs.
The parts of the city most tourists don't see fit less easily into
expectations. Modern Tijuana is among the wealthiest cities in the
Mexican republic, buoyed up by the region's duty-free status and by
maquiladora assembly plants (raw or semi-assembled materials are brought
across the border duty-free, assembled by cheap Mexican labour, and re-exported
with duty levied only on the added value). How the NAFTA treaty affects
this remains to be seen, but chances are it means further boom times for
Tijuana's industrial zone. Downtown, beyond the areas where most
tourists venture, the modern concrete and glass wouldn't look amiss in
southern California. The flip side of the boom lies along the border,
where shantytowns sprawl for miles: housing for the labourers and also,
more traditionally, the final staging post for the bid to disappear
north: from the coast, the city now stretches out for around 19km along
the US border.
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