If you want to get from La Paz, Mexico to San Jose del Cabo airport or the reverse, that’s what we’ll be talking about in this today. And I promised myself, this is going to be it. I just landed at the Cabo San Lucas airport, from the San Jose del Cabo airport to the palace, and I’m going to be taking the Eco Baja tour.
So the first thing that I’m going to talk about is how I like to get between the San Jose del Cabo Airport and La Paz with Eco Baja tours. I’ll cover tickets, location, stopover, getting a good seat. The second part of this video is about why you wouldn’t just fly out to La Paz airport. Third, I’ll talk about other options for getting between La Paz and San Jose del Cabo. And that’s going to be pretty quick because I haven’t done a lot of those, but I’ll tell you what I know. And then fourth, I’m going to share my experiences with Eco Baja tours, which might help you understand why it took so many tries to make this video.
Always be sure to check up here. If there’s a little “i” up there, that means I’ve added some kind of detail to this video. And be sure to check down in the comments below because there are a lot of other folks who watch my videos. And they have different experiences that they’re sharing in the comment section. So let’s start with Eco Baja Tours is a company that runs a shuttle multiple times a day between San Jose del Cabo airport and downtown La Paz. You can head to their website, buy your ticket online, or you can give them a call, press one for English, and be able to talk to someone to get your ticket purchased in advance. I recommend calling because sometimes their website is a challenge. You want to do this as far in advance as possible because they list a lot of different times on their website, but they don’t operate all of those. So they watch to see who’s buying tickets at which times, and then a few days before they remove all the rest of the buses from their schedule.
So those of us who wait till the last minute are forced to choose from what is left, which means that the buses are more likely to be full. And they are 15 Passenger buses, they’re pretty comfortable. If you are in La Paz you can go to the downtown bus station right on the Malecon. there’s a stop there so you can hop on and off those stops The buses go through Todos Santos, check the schedule to see which direction your boss is going, they stop so that you can stretch your legs, go to the bathroom and you can also go and get a snack. I love the bakery in toto Santos, it’s right around the corner from the bus stop.
If you’re going in the opposite direction from San Jose del Cabo airport to La Paz, what you’re going to do is head out of the international arrivals, and there’s a number five bus terminal bay there, near the outdoor area of bars. The bus will pick you up, you can hang out there at the bars to wait. I’ll talk more about that in my experience section. One quick tip is if you’re over six feet tall, you want to be one of the first six people on the bus. A lot of the seats work better for shorter people. And I’ve been on the bus where I’ve gotten some great space with lots of legroom. And I’ve been on the bus where I’ve gotten to see with very little legroom. There’s no internet on the bus and it is kind of spotty cellular service between La Paz and Cabo. A one-way ticket will cost around $27. And it takes about two and a half or three hours to get between the airport and downtown La Paz. Now to get to the bus stop either one of them in the past, I like to use the app In driver. It’s something like Uber, but you get to bid how much you want to pay for your ride. So my trick is usually I go to Uber, I see how much it should cost and then I go back to In driver and say that I’m willing to pay a little more. That way I’ll get a ride. Now especially if you’re out in Centenario. Uber doesn’t make it out here. You have to coax a driver with a little bit more money. And you can do that using the In driver app.
Why fly from San Jose del Cabo airport instead of the La Paz airport, which for me is just 10 minutes from my house. And the answer is simple. San Jose del Cabo airport is so much bigger than the La Paz airport. There are a lot more tourists in San Jose del Cabo. And that means that the airport doesn’t have nearly as many flights, especially international flights. Some flights go directly to the US to Phoenix and Dallas on American Airlines, but those don’t operate year-round or every day of the week. So I think it is starting in mid-December through March or April. And then again a little bit during the summer, when they’re flying.
It’s super convenient and inexpensive if you can catch one of those flights, but the rest of the year flights into La Paz tend to be expensive. And a long flight time from Portland into La Paz, I’ll often see that it’s 20 plus hours, including the layover is going through Mexico City or Guadalajara. Now one other option to fly to La Paz is to take one of the national airlines and fly to Tijuana. The airport in Tijuana makes it super easy to cross the border. They call it the cross-border Express. You have to pay a little bit maybe $15 to cross here. But the Tijuana airport is on the US border. So you can walk directly out of the airport go straight through customs and you’re on the US side of the border. And then you can take an Uber or Lyft over the airport in San Diego. That’s probably about a 40-minute drive.
So let me hit on a couple of other options for getting between the PAs and the San Jose del Cabo airport. You could hire an individual private driver, you could go to a Facebook group like local La Paz expats, a lot of people will recommend someone who goes back and forth and you can arrange directly with them and advanced plan on spending $125 to $175 for one way transportation with a local, I’ve never done it. So if you’ve used a private car, let us all know in the comments section how well it worked.
A private car is super convenient, especially if you’ve got three or four people traveling together. And then you could just hop in a car and zip off to exactly where you need to be, not just the bus station. You could also get a super fancy ride, you could get a big white SUV with a chauffeur for $400 to $500 if that’s your style. These are probably safer vehicles and probably have better insurance. Side note: Mexican Vehicle Safety Standards suck compared to the US and Canada.
Another option is to take the Aguila Bus. This is owned by the same company that owns Eco Baja tours, it’s just a bigger intercity bus. It’s a little slower, and it doesn’t go to the airport in San Jose del Cabo. It goes into Cabo San Lucas, and then into San Jose del Cabo downtown. The cost is $15 for the regular bus, and then you have to pay for the router bus, which is about $4 one way. The regular bus might be a good option if the timing is just not right with Eco Baja tours, you could pick up the regular bus instead.
This is my experience section. The first time I used Eco Baja tours, I bought a ticket by calling the phone number. They’re really helpful on the phone. The woman who helped me spoke English, helped me to get the ticket. And she told me where to go stop number five, but I had to wait a couple of hours at the San Jose del Cabo airport for the next run. I just missed the earlier bus by like 10 minutes. So I waited for like three hours in Cabo.
And because of COVID, there are not that many tourists, which is also why Eco Baja has restricted its schedule. And so if you buy a ticket on one of those buses and you’re the only passenger or maybe one or two or three people bought for that time, eco Baja will put you in a cab to your destination. They will do what it takes to get you there. The first time I got a ticket on eco Baja, I ended up being the only passenger and they hired a private cab to take me to the bus and I didn’t have to pay anything extra for that. So great customer service at Eco Baja tours.
Most of the folks that work for Eco Baja speak English. But that’s not a guarantee if they put you in one of those cabs, your driver may or may not speak English. Let’s tell another customer service story. I was going from La Paz to Cabo. And I had forgotten to get my COVID test prior in La Paz. And so I thought, oh, I’ll just get it at the airport. I talked to the driver Marco Antonio. And at that time in San Jose del Cabo COVID test, we were not at the airport. He said that a recent hurricane and blown away the COVID testing site that was at the airport. So at that point, it was off the airport just a little bit, but you had to grab a cab to get there. The great news is that Marco Antonio drove me over there, and I was able to get my COVID test. Then he drove me back to the airport, super customer service.
And if for some reason you arrive in Los Cabos and you don’t have a ticket on Eco Baja tours, there is an office there, it’s actually in Terminal One. So international arrivals in terminal two, and you can walk over to terminal one. It’s a good walk, like a 10-minute walk in the sun. And that’s where they have a little office where you can buy your ticket there. And one time I hadn’t bought a ticket in advance, I got there. And they said they’ve got a guy who’s going to La Paz in like 15 minutes. So when the other passengers showed up, they put us in a cab. His name was Scott, we get to know each other well. He was someone who was buying a house in El Centenario, my town down here. And we got to chat quite a bit on the drive over to La Paz.
And this is Mexico so things do run a little bit late. So don’t worry, don’t have too much anxiety. Here’s one morning when I was catching the bus from La Paz to the airport went to the Ojo de Aktobe Ray station, because it’s a little easier to get to from my house, instead of going all the way downtown. And it took a while there was a lot of traffic, my In driver got stuck in traffic and I was there at about 8:20. So I reach the station and I’m counting on things in Mexico being behind schedule. I reached right as the bus was supposed to be leaving and the company reassured me that the bus had not gotten there yet. It showed up about eight minutes later and I was able to hop on with a little bit of anxiety not being sure if I had missed the bus or not. Of course, there’s always the option of renting a car and driving it over La Paz. I have a video up here with tips for driving in Mexico. And I’ll give you the most important tip. Do not drive after dark in Mexico. You will hit a cow!
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