These photos were sent to us by Tracy Ehrenberg and Glenn Ehrenberg, who live on the southern tip of Baja California in Cabo San Lucas. They photographed Hurricane Jimena unfolding yesterday.
Photos from top: The surf at Cabo Falso late afternoon Tuesday as Hurricane Jimena passes; 50 mph winds and stronger gusts whip the Pacific side Cabo San Lucas. Credit: Tracy and Glenn Ehrenberg
Officials in Mexico City hope to lure skittish tourists with unusual bait: free health insurance. Under a new program, tourists who stay in participating hotels in the city are eligible for free coverage for emergency medical care, hospital stays, prescription drugs and ambulance services.
The initiative, called the "Tourist Assistance Card," grew out of Mexico's recent H1N1 flu crisis, which sent tourism plunging nationwide as would-be travelers steered clear. In Mexico City, which had the country's highest number of reported flu cases, a near-complete shutdown hammered hotels and restaurants, compounding damage caused by the global recession.
The insurance program is run by the city's tourism office through a private insurer, MAPFRE. Anyone staying at a Mexico City hotel is eligible for coverage, officials said, and can get help by dialing a call center, which will have attendants fluent in English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.
A deductible will apply for some services, but officials did not provide details.
Read more on the tourist health insurance offer here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Mexico City's Chapultepec park during the near-complete shutdown earlier this year during the flu outbreak. Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.
Mexico's foreign secretary has announced the suspension of a visa exemption for Canadian diplomats and officials working in the country. The decision comes in response to the announcement late Monday by the Canadian government that it was introducing a new visa for Mexican nationals wanting to travel to Canada.
Canadian officials and diplomats will now have to obtain visas before going to Mexico, but the new restrictions will not affect Canadian tourists. Mexico's tourist industry was severely hit by the H1N1 flu outbreak this year. Adding restrictions for travelers would only cause a further drop in visitors to the country.
The Canadian Embassy in Mexico City has been besieged this week by Mexicans desperate to get their hands on the new visas they need to visit Canada.
The new visas for temporary residents were announced by the Canadian government on Monday, prompting thousands of Mexicans who had bought plane tickets to scramble to the embassy to apply for the documents in hope of salvaging their trips.
Since Tuesday morning, thick lines of anxious Mexicans have run around the block outside the embassy. Many people came from states outside Mexico City to apply for visas on their way to the airport.
We went down there yesterday morning to see what was going on. Watch the video for more.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Video: At the Canadian Embassy in Mexico City. Credit: Deborah Bonello
Mexican nationals will now need a visa to travel to Canada, that country's minister of citizenship, immigration and multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, announced Monday. Canada decided to stiffen the requirements due to what officials said has been a surge in claims for refugee status by Mexicans.
In a news release, Canadian immigration officials said that for the first 48 hours after the new rules go into effect today, Mexican citizens can apply for entry on arrival in Canada. But as of Thursday, a visa will be required:
Refugee claims from Mexico have almost tripled since 2005, making it the number one source country for claims. In 2008, more than 9,400 claims filed in Canada came from Mexican nationals, representing 25 per cent of all claims received. Of the Mexican claims reviewed and finalized in 2008 by the Immigration and Refugee Board, an independent administrative tribunal, only 11 per cent were accepted.
Angelenos with family in Cuba will have another option for travel today, when a Long Beach-based company kicks off nonstop flights from LAX to Havana.
The five-hour flight, which will run every Tuesday and can accommodate 150 people, takes off from L.A. at 11 a.m. and is the only Cuban flight for Cuba Travel since July 2004, when the Bush administration tightened rules governing travel to Cuba, according to the company.
Since 1962, travel from the U.S. to Cuba has been banned, but Cuban Americans have been allowed to visit family under various policies. Obama repealed the 2004 travel restrictions in April. According to Cuba Travel, 1.5 million Cubans live in the United States. About 55,000 reside in Los Angeles County.
For details, see The Times' Daily Travel & Deal Blog.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
The San Francisco Chronicle has some advice for honeymooners planning a trip to Mexico, and has listed what it thinks are the top 10 places for the recently wed to hang out and celebrate.
Quintana Roo state's Riviera Maya and the Yucatan, both on the Caribbean coast, have the most places on the list, but Nayarit, Jalisco and Michoacan states also get a mention.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Ruins in Tulum, in Quintana Roo state, overlook incandescent blue seas. Credit: Deborah Bonello / Los Angeles Times.
British newspaper the Telegraph sent their writer Mark Hudson to visit Mexico. Although it's unlikely that Hudson is one of the "first tourists to return" to Mexico since the H1N1 flu outbreak, as the article claims, he does write about the advantage of visiting when tourism is not at its peak.
"It's just 38 days since my visit to Mexico City was cancelled, with the world staring into the abyss of a global pandemic and the expectation that no one would be visiting Mexico – without urgent cause – for a very long time. And now here I am powering into the heart of the world's third-largest city as night falls, along a dead-straight and apparently endless boulevard, past a great jumble of baroque churches, futuristic tower blocks and battered, low-level ribbon development, with the statues of Aztec emperors and revolutionary heroes looming out of the darkness at every intersection.
"While a brutal drug war rages in the north of the country and the economy is in a state of collapse, it occurs to me with increasing force over the time I spend here that this is far from being a bad time to visit Mexico City."
Read more about Hudson's visit here on the Telegraph website.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Image: The archaeological site of Teotihuacan just outside Mexico City. Hudson reports during his visit that the site -- usually one of the most popular with tourists -- hosted only a handful of visitors. Credit: Deborah Bonello / MexicoReporter.com.
This video dispatch from Mexican newspaper Milenio documents a workshop carried out by the Rennes University in France on the Mexico-U.S. border.
The workshop invited children from Tijuana and San Diego to share their views on the border and the countries that it divides, and the results are pretty interesting.
"One of the kids was actually surprised to found out that people in Tijuana actually drove cars, and that they have paved roads," said Ryan Washburn, an organizer of the workshop.
The video is in a combination of English, Spanish and French.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Andrés Martinez, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, writes today in Opinion, in defense of Mexico:
Why should you care about Mexico? Read on.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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