Our excursion at Cabo San Lucas took us about seventy kilometres north to the town of Todos Santos and because you’re the sort of person who can read titles on websites and comprehend the meaning conveyed this won’t be news to you. You possibly even searched for details of the cruise excursion that includes a visit to this town in Mexico and its famous tourist attraction, Hotel California. In this first post about our single day on this cruise anchored off Mexico I’ll go through some of the elements of the town we saw on a guided walking tour.

Our tour began at the Professor Néstor Agúndez Martínez Cultural House.

The professor was a poet, choreographer, composer, and theatre director, and this building was inaugurated in the late 1970s to preserve and promote local art, history, and traditions of Todos Santos. Our guide took us through the large, spacious gallery rooms, pointing out some of the more noteworthy pieces of art, and I particularly liked the old photographs and portraits of local men and women. The building was well-designed with its high spaces and thick walls to feel cool too, despite the high heat outside.

Anyone who’s read other travelogues on this website may know that I’ve a thing for architecture so the next part of the tour that walked us past some typical houses for the area was a delight. None of these buildings were significant in any way but there were touches of Art Deco lines and colours in places and a lovely familiarity that comes from seeing buildings like this on television and in movies. It didn’t hurt that the sky was a cloudless, deep, vibrant blue that just made every other colour just pop.

Our guide was keen to point out the local flora for those unfamiliar with cacti in particular. It actually was interesting for us to see plants like on pavements beside parked cars rather than somewhere out in a more desert-type landscape.

Our short walk from the cultural centre brought our group to the Plaza del Pueblo, beside another small square, the Plaza del Beso. Both were charming little public spaces with some nice public artwork and I was particularly impressed by the colourful sculptures made from junk. These were pieces by a local sculptor called Juan Sotomayor and we would end up seeing an awful lot more of his art pieces a little later in the day here in Todos Santos.

The purpose of the visit to these town squares was to visit the Misión Santa Rosa de las Palmas (it’s known by a few names). The mission church was the first European settlement in Todos Santos, founded in 1733 by Jesuits. Native people were the mission’s congregation and attempts to convert them to Christianity and turn them into farm workers was constantly upset by European diseases decimating the local population and some of the local tribes deciding that coerced conversion and disease-driven eradication and the kidnapping of natives’ children as hostages required a violent response. Seems fair to me too.

Unlike the cultural centre which had been delightfully cool, the church was stifling so I spent most of it outside, waiting for the guide to finish talking about the building’s history and admiring the vivid colours around the area instead.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll move onto the next part of our day’s excursion in Todos Santos which sees us paying a visit to the Hotel California for some lunch and a lot more artwork.

Do you like very vibrant, abstract art? Well, if you do then you’ll like Todos Santos.

A short walk from the mission church brought us to the final stop of this cruise excursion where we’d be having lunch and this took us past some street art on the way. Not the best quality street art, admittedly, but a distinctive style that didn’t believe in subtlety of colour; a prevalent theme in the artwork in the town.

We would be having lunch in Hotel California and much was made of its connection to the song of the same name, even though there was no connection. The hotel’s original name was Hotel California which it changed, then changed back after the song’s popularity. The song was not about this hotel. Any of the half-dozen times you hear Hotel California by The Eagles playing while you’re there is purely coincidental.

It’s likely that nothing requiring courts getting involved about this situation would have happened had the hotel then not tried to trademark the name’s use in America which led to The Eagles suing to prevent this under the persuasive argument that it was heavily associated with their band by common usage. The settlement details of the case have never been made public but the hotel stopped trying to get a trademark in America although retains use of the name today in Mexico.

Because I’d been behind the main part of our tour group to take photos of the street art after everyone had passed it by and allowed clear shots, we were the last ones entering the bar and dining area where place settings had been arranged for us all to have lunch. This just left us seats at the bar rather than at tables, which we were fine with, then exceedingly happy with since the barman, having just made a margarita for a paying customer, had some left over that he put into a small shot glass and handed to my wife for free. Would it surprise you to learn that this was the absolute best margarita we’ve ever had? It was outstanding. There is something about drinking tequila in Mexico that elevates it out of sight of any competition elsewhere in the world. If we’d had more time to spend here before we needed to leave then we’d have ordered more for ourselves.

We didn’t have a huge amount of time once we’d finished our food so we made the most of it by popping into the courtyard area attached to the hotel and to the gallery of artwork there too.

The courtyard was a source of more Juan Sotomayor sculptures (we’d seen some in the plaza beforehand) and the metal elements formed into humanoid and animalistic forms with their bold, metallic paint finishes was something we really liked. Nature meets steampunk.

The art gallery was lovely and cool with some refreshing, calming colours dominating largely abstract paintings and sculptural pieces.

We bought a bottle of Hotel California-branded tequila largely because the bottle shape and stopper were fabulous. The tequila itself was okay, but absolutely not a patch on the stuff we tasted and bought years before in Puerto Vallarta that we still have some left of because we sip it only infrequently to keep the memories lasting longer.

In the next post in this Ruby Princess cruise travelogue series we’ll return to Cabo San Lucas for a fun encounter with one of the locals, and a lovely sail away from Mexico with another very interesting encounter aboard.

For this first visit to this Mexican port we’d woken to glorious sunshine, vibrant colours, sights of the famous rock formations in the area, and a couple of other ships visiting. Cabo is a tender port – the cruise ships anchor off shore – so the calm, deep blue water was humming with shuttle boat activity.

The excursion we had booked for our day in Cabo San Lucas was one that took us to Todos Santos for a guided tour of some cultural and historical highlights, then to the Hotel California for some lunch and a chance to admire some fabulous local artwork, and if you’ve not already read those travelogue accounts and it sounds of interest then you can do so by clicking on the links above. That’s right: I’m explaining how websites and links work to you, a person using the internet.

I don’t often take photos from buses when we’re on excursions because bumpy roads and tinted glass and reflections annoy me immensely – it doesn’t take a lot to annoy me immensely – but the landscape of Mexico was worthy of a few shots. Mountain ridges and cacti all over the place in the Baja California peninsula!

We arrived back at Cabo to be greeted by a long queue of people waiting for a tender boat back to Ruby Princess; long enough for us to have to trek some way between bars and shops just to find its end. The bars held some appeal (well, we are us, after all) but given the length of the day’s excursion and the fast-approaching point of all aboard time we decided to simply shuffle along and get the first boat back we could. In fairness, the line moved fairly swiftly.

A very fun encounter with a local at Cabo then took place as we neared the boarding area.

“Are you a professional photographer?” came a loud voice from one side. It was a young woman outside a shop a dozen or so metres away, and the comment was directed at me because I had my equipment out. Camera equipment, you filthy-minded person, you. I’m an introvert so I simply smiled, shook my head, and mouthed “No” at her, and that would have been the end of it except that about twenty seconds later I heard “Well, you can take my picture anyway.” She’d crossed through the queue to the other side of us and adopted a pose right next to me. I didn’t need a second invitation, snapped a quick shot, and thanked her. I don’t know who she was but she gave me a fabulous memory to attach to the end of a lovely day in this port in Mexico and it was especially fun to hear a few men in the queue around jealously muttering about what I’d done to deserve that special attention. I have an ineffable quality.

More luck was on our side as we reached the front of the queue for the tender boat as a new one had just arrived. This gave us the chance to sit up top and allow for some great views heading back to the ship plus some fresh air to take the sting out of the heat of the day. The dry, rocky landscape and some sheltered beaches were quite nice to see from the water but we particularly enjoyed watching a fishing boat heading out with an entourage of frigatebirds overhead and a pelican sat on its aft.

You can get some spectacular photos of cruise ships if you’re sat up top on a tender boat. However, the pirate-style vessel to the right in the photo below is far away. Cruise ships are big, but they’re not that big. Feel free to imagine Ted explaining this to Dougal in your head right now.

Back on board we enjoyed a little bit of the early evening sunshine from our balcony and looking at not only the two other cruise ships in the port – Navigator of the Seas and Celebrity Eclipse – but listening to the party music from tour boats taking in close views of El Arco (the famous arch formation) as sunset approached.

And then the second interesting encounter with someone of the day took place.

We’d been out on the balcony so had missed a phone call to the cabin. A message had been left and we could play it back but couldn’t make it out clearly enough. All we knew was that it was a manager on the ship and he wanted to speak to us and could we contact him. We couldn’t because we couldn’t work out which manager he was or how to contact him, and we couldn’t work out how to replay the message either.

We headed down to guest services and explained that a manager had left a call for us but we didn’t know who or how to play the message again. The person helping us checked a few things on the computer then made a phone call. “Yes, they’re here at reception now,” we heard her say on the phone before hanging up. “If you’ll just wait, the manager is on his way to see you now.”

I won’t lie: this was not exactly the most comfortable thing to hear because we still had no idea what this was about. Within seconds we saw a member of staff come quickly down the stairs and head straight to us. A quick handshake and introduction – Prishant – helped put our minds at ease a little and he then looked around and dragged us along to the nearby bar to have a seat. Seeing his manager there, a waiter came scurrying over and orders were taken (with no need to check our medallions, of course) with a little small talk to settle things down. Then…

“Is everything fine with the ship?” he asked.

“Everything’s lovely,” we assured him.

“No problems?” he asked.

“No, we’re having a lovely time.”

“And you do go to Skywalkers in the evening? No problems there?”

“We love Skywalkers.”

“But did you post a message about it online?”

Ah.

Finally, we’d reached the point of this meeting. If you’ve read the account of our first night aboard Ruby Princess then you might know that for rather less than twenty seconds I had posted on Instagram a “Do a better job, Princess Cruises!” mini-rant because while we’d been okay we’d seen some other passengers get overlooked in the nightclub as the staff were clustered around the bar and not circling enough. Less than twenty seconds. I deleted it once I saw a typo and couldn’t remember how to edit the post quickly enough.

What had clearly happened was that someone at Princess – and I’d tagged their main account and media team – had been able to still see the message (or more likely get a copy of it prior to deletion through some forwarding system) and had got in touch with the ship where it had made its way to one of the managers in charge of this area.

What then took place was about fifteen minutes of “I want to make it up to you” from Prishant and lots of “There’s nothing to make up. We weren’t affected. The service has been superb ever since then. It was just a first night thing. It happens. We don’t want anyone to get in trouble over this. You don’t have to do anything for us. There’s nothing we need or want. We’re very happy on Ruby Princess” from us.

“Can I buy you dinner at Crown Grill?”

“We ate there yesterday.

“What about Sabatini’s?”

“We’re eating there tomorrow.”

“And you’re already on the top drinks package?”

“Yes. Please, we’re absolutely fine. If it helps you can just go back to your bosses and say you’re resolved the situation. You don’t need to do anything, we swear.”

He seemed to relent and we had a little more general chat before he said goodbye. It was interesting to see some of the other stewards and staff paying attention to the scene of this manager sitting with us, drinking in a public bar (cocktails for us, he was on water as he was working, just to clarify), then lots of smiles and shaking of hands. That would work in our favour quite a lot for the rest of the cruise too. We would also bump into Prishant numerous times from this point on as we’d walk around the ship with many “Any issues? Everything fine?” from him and more handshakes and more crew members wondering just who we were to be getting this attention. Possibly.

Some photos of food from the main dining room now. We’d eat, listen to some music, and head to Skywalkers as usual to conclude this very enjoyable and very memorable day ashore at Cabo San Lucas and aboard Ruby Princess.

Well, almost conclude the day.

During our general chit-chat with the manager we’d asked about the dry dock changes to Ruby Princess and he’d been happy to tell us about some of it, and he’d also asked if there were any changes we didn’t like.

“Well,” said my wife, “the only disappointment is that you can’t get Belle Glos by the glass in Vines any longer. That was our favourite wine to drink in there. But otherwise, it’s all good.”

A throwaway comment, but one the manager retained because we got back to our room to find two bottles of Belle Glos waiting for us. How good was that service from Prishant and Princess Cruises? You cannot help but be impressed by that.

We hadn’t asked for the wine and hadn’t done anything to deserve it.

“He probably needs to go back and explain what he’s done to make us happy,” said my wife.

“You’re right,” I replied. “We’d be doing him a favour by accepting this and drinking it.”

So we did. Not right there and then, of course. We’re fond of a drink but come on!

In the next post in this Ruby Princess cruise travelogue series I’ll cover some of the highlights (and one lowlight) of four relaxing sea days on the ship as we make our way towards Costa Rica.