TIJUANA – The sight of bright-red roofless buses crossing Tijuana this past week has been drawing smiles, waves and thumbs-up signs – and more than a few surprised expressions. Amid plummeting tourism revenues, Tijuana has found cause for celebration with the launching of a new bus tour aimed at showing visitors different aspects of the city.
PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune
Tijuana Mayor Jorge Ramos and Ann Alicia Meneses, president of the visitors committee, waved to shopkeepers from a Tijuana City Tour bus. The tour has been launched to try to boost the city's flagging tourism industry.
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PEGGY PEATTIE / Union-Tribune
To explain the passing scenery, bilingual guides usually accompany the tour, their narration researched through the Tijuana Historical Society.
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Downtown's Teniente Guerrero Park, the Agua Caliente Tower, a winery, a brewery and the Rio Zone's restaurant row are among the stops on the Tijuana City Tour route inaugurated Tuesday.
“A lot of people don't know the city, think that Tijuana is just Avenida Revolucion, but the truth is that there are historic buildings everywhere and lots of stories to tell,” said Jorge Luis Sánchez, tourism director for Grupo Empresarial Mar de Cortez.
The Tijuana-based transportation consortium converted three buses and launched Tijuana City Tour through its subsidiary Mexicoach, which has provided cross-border bus service for years. The 15-mile city tour starts and ends in the Rio Zone at the Tijuana Cultural Center, or Cecut, but riders can hop on and off at any of the 13 stops, riding all day after paying the $10 adult fare.
As the bus rumbled through downtown Tijuana one morning last week, the busy urban landscape seemed to rush by. Smells of taco stands and tortillerías, sounds of barking dogs and roaring buses, the sights of pastry shops, flower stalls, shoeshine booths and clamato juice stands came and went.
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Tijuana City Tour
When: Every hour. The first trip starts at 10 a.m. from the Tijuana Cultural Center and the last one ends at 8 p.m.
Where: Trip starts at the cultural center, but riders can board at any of 13 stops on the route, such as along Avenida Revolucion and near the border at the Viva Tijuana shopping center.
Fare: Adults pay $10; seniors older than 60 and children younger than 12 pay $5. One child accompanied by an adult may ride free.
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A woman on a balcony watered her geraniums. Outside a secondhand store in Colonia Independencia, four identical swivel chairs were lined up on a street as though waiting for company. A brightly colored mural outside a union hall on Ninth Street denounced U.S. imperialism and celebrated Mexico's relations with Cuba.
To explain the passing scenery, bilingual guides usually accompany the tour, their narration researched through the Tijuana Historical Society. They point out such nuggets as the spot where Nat King Cole once sang and the house where guitarist Javier Batiz grew up.
Mexicoach hopes to encourage cultural awareness through the tours, director José Medina said, and to increase business in Tijuana, including its own, which has dropped 40 percent this year.
“The fact that there is a business that is willing to invest is for us a great stimulus,” said Andrés Méndez, owner of a curio shop and coordinator of an Avenida Revolucion merchants association, Ceturmex. Sales on the traditional tourist strip have fallen 80 percent since 2001, Méndez said, and numerous businesses have closed. “We're running out of options.”
Tijuana's Convention and Visitors Committee reports that overall tourism in Tijuana has dropped dramatically since 2005 – from about 25 million visitors annually to nearly 15 million.
Together with the visitors committee, local businesses have been searching for ways to win back customers from both sides of the border. Events such as a recent sushi festival, organized by the restaurant association known as Canirac, have drawn crowds to the Pueblo Amigo shopping center. This past weekend, Playas de Tijuana was the setting for a seafood festival.
The city also has been attracting growing numbers of visitors from other parts of Mexico, through conventions, conferences and special events, said visitors committee President Ana Alicia Meneses. But businesses reliant on tourism from the United States have been badly hit.
The bus tours “can be an attraction both for people from the city and from outside,” Meneses said.
She and other tourism promoters attribute the sharp decline in visitors from California to the combined effects of slow border crossings, reports of violence, confusion about next year's U.S. passport requirement and the U.S. economic downturn.
Reports of police extortion in tourist areas have fallen dramatically in recent months, Méndez and other business owners said, but this has not brought back their customers.
Next door to Méndez's shop, visitors waited in Mexicoach's Avenida Revolucion terminal to board buses back to the United States last week.
Visitors such as Denise Jefferson of Stockton said they would welcome a guided tour. Jefferson, a city planner, came with her family “for a day of adventure” and traveled by taxi.
“I usually get lost because I am not that fluent in Spanish,” she said. “It would have been really nice to do an open-air tour and get familiar with the city.”
Sandra Dibble: (619) 293-1716; sandra.dibble@uniontrib.com
