Mexico City & Acapulco Before The Cruise

Since the embarkation port was so far away from Australia, I wanted to allow plenty of buffer time in case of any flight delays. This is a good idea when you have something unmissable such as a cruise. I figured 3 days would be enough. We flew into Mexico City, did a morning trip to Teotihuacan by public bus, then picked up our bags and took a nice intercity bus to Acapulco.

We stayed at the Hampton Inn Mexico City Centro Historico as they had a special deal at the time (April 2011). We arrived really late at night and took an official taxi and left very early in the morning so didn’t spend much time here but it was nice. We’d gladly come back here again.

This is the bus station to Teotihuacan, it’s the obvious one with the pyramid logo. Coincidentally, another blogger (Point Me to the Plane) who has been there more recently posted precise directions.

We saw this contraption with acrobats as we got off the bus. Not sure if they are always there or if it was for something special.

We spent a couple hours at the pyramids, then it got too hot and we didn’t want to hang around. We also had to get a bus to Acapulco.

Back in Mexico City, scenes from around the main plaza as we walked to the Metro station.

The bus to Acapulco was really nice and comfortable. We didn’t book in advance, just rocked up and asked for the next deluxe bus to Acapulco. It was around $30 pp.

In Acapulco, we stayed at the Crowne Plaza on points and got a nice upgrade to a corner suite with fantastic views!

Since we had a couple of days, we saw most of the tourist sights – cliff divers, market, small zoo and the beach of course.

I had to laugh seeing an Australian Budgie on a Mexican phone booth! It’s not like Mexico doesn’t have cool parrots of their own!

We got around using the local buses.

Finally our ship came in.

We eagerly boarded the beautiful Coral Princess and set off to explore the ship. I was very pleasantly surprised to see we had been given a free upgrade to a balcony cabin after only paying for the cheapest cabin. We later found out it was because the ship was only around 2/3 full but we were thrilled to have a balcony on a Panama Canal cruise!