Amtrak RouteWe arrived at around 4pm and took a bus to the Banana Bungalow right on the beach.Possibly the worst hostel I've stayed in in many respects but you can't complain when your literally on the beach and it's basically a party place anyway so when you retire to your bunk bed in your 18 person dorm you're more than ready to crash.
First night we discovered Ralph's supermarket across the street and scored a 12 pack of Corona's for $11. Much better than $18 for a 6 pack in Oz! We just sat on the deck and chatted to a few of the packers and enjoyed the chillaxed environment after the hectic LA experience.
In the morning we helped ourselves to the 'Free breakfast' which consisted of black instant coffee and toast... it was free I guess. Then we went into town and explored a bit of the Old Town and ended up on board the USS Midway and spent about 3 hours doing an audio tour of the whole ship. Pretty impressive piece of machinery. It was launched at the end of WW2 and served in Vietnam and Desert Storm and only became a museum this year.
Upon returning to the Bungalows we joined the crew for some drinks before heading to another hostel downtown for a pre-game party before we all went to watch the San Diego Padres play the Colorado Rockies. It was a pretty good game (I guess) and the Padres got up 6-0. After we went to a bar with a bunch of messy people and kicked on for a while.
Wednesday morning we went on a mission to Best Buy to try and find a video camera do document this trip... bus as with the stores in LA they had little or no stock of the ones that I was interested in. We just made it back to the Hostel in time to get ready for the excursion to Tijuana which left around 11am. There was about 10 of us in the old hostel van with our guide Chaz who spoke Spanish and was almost a local south of the border. It took about 20 minutes to drive to the border where we parked the van right near where people cross the border on foot. As we neared the gates we were approached by a Spanish TV crew who asked if they could interview 1 or 2 of us for our thoughts on the shootout between drug dealers and police the previous day and the subsequent travel warnings to tourists. This was the first we'd heard of any of the. One of the Welsh guys in our group did a short interview as we all looked on.
Nobody seemed that phased and we proceeded across the border into a VERY quiet Tijuana. The day consisted of walking around town with multiple stops one of three things... a Corona, a tequila shot or a taco... good times!
We left around 10.30pm and by then things were pretty messy. One of the guys fell asleep in the van on the way back to the hostel and we couldn't wake him up so we decided to let him sleep it off in the back seat.
The next day (Thursday) we got the train back to LA at about 9.30am.
