Border Crossing By Bus, Tucson, Nogales to Mazatlan

Bus, Phoenix/ Tucson, through Nogales  to Mazatlan
   Updated Bus Fare Prices, March  2015

#Bus Tucson Mazatlan                                                                                                                                                  

 Tufesa Bus runs bus routes from Phoenix,  Tucson, and various
 California cities  to Guadalajara  through Mazatlan.

Bus Through Mazatlan
Tufesa Bus runs bus routes south from Tucson and Phoenix AZ through Nogales Mexico to Mazatlan, Tepic, (San Blas surfing) and to Guadalajara.

Guide To Luxury, First Class Bus Service In Mexico  First Class Bus Travel  (Link)

For USA Vacation Travel Ideas See   USA Family Vacation Places  (link)

 From Mazatlan, Primera Plus Bus runs to Guadalajra and to Mexico City, Norte Station.  Tufesa also runs to Guadalajara.

Plan your departure  time well on your trip south from Phoenix and Tucson to Mazatlan on Tufesa Bus.  (link)  Leave in the early afternoon  (2:00 PM Tucson) and you will arrive in Mazatlan early in the morning.  The Tufesa station in Mazatlan is open all night, however, and taxis are always at the station to meet the buses.
 See Tucson  (link)

Tucson to Mazatlan Ticket Price  $109. USD,      1678 Pesos
Trip duration 16 hours
Executive Buses  $140 USD        2155 Pesos

The buses leave from Tucson Tufesa Station  at 5550 South 12th Street .  Order online or buy at the station.  The best seats for the trip south from Tucson are between one and twenty, left side of the bus for an afternoon trip to avoid the sun.  The front and middle of the bus will make for comfortable sleeping.

Guadalajara
Once you reach Mazatlan you could continue on to Guadalajara (link) from Mazatlan with Tufesa Bus or you could switch to Primera Plus, (link)(Flecha Amarilla) and reach Mexico City.  Primera Plus service is a step above at around 15 cents per mile.  Primera Plus reaches only as far north as Mazatlan from Mexico City. The Primeara Plus buses serve Mexico DF (See Mexico City Bus Terminals) (link)

Primera Plus Bus Ticket Price, Mazatlan to Mexico City  1197 Pesos

Tufesa Bus service from the USA goes as far south as Guadalajara (link)
A small café in the  Mazatlan Tufesa Bus station offers hot meals and a snack.
You can take a taxi from the Tufesa station to the Primera Plus terminal not too distant and located on the same street for 50 Pesos.

Mazatlan beaches look out on islands Venado, Chivo, and Pajaro.

Mazatlan Bus Options
Reach Mazatlan by Bus from the US on Tufesa,  (link)  Tap, Elite, Omnibus, and other lines that serve Mazatlan with first class service from the north. Tufesa is a cross-borer bus while the others originate in Nogales and Tijuana
 Tufesa Bus serves Mazatlan with cross-border buses from Phoenix and Tucson through Nogales. (Many other US locations including Las Vegas)
Primera Pus serves Mazatlan from Mexico City and Guadalajara.

Mazatlan Sightseeing
Once in Mazatlan  (link) you can taxi to the city and beaches.
If you arrive in the early morning, check out breakfast at Panchos,  a favorite of the locals and the tourists who come each year from Canada and the US.
The seating at Pancho’s is on an elevated patio right on the beach, not fifty yards from the waves.
Pancho’s is situated in one of the many small malls along the beach with a view out on small islands offshore, Venado, Chivo, and Pajaro.  The malls are interspersed within mid and high-rise hotels with plenty of good shops nearby.

A walkway stretches the length of Mazatlan's beaches.   Mazatlan offers some good recreation with about three miles of beach-side walkway along the arc of coastline where many small parks are accented by sculpture.
Mazatlan’s Centro Historico is a walkable several blocks around a zocalo. Sightseeing in the historic Center will reveal some great colonial architecture.
Mazatlan has its tourist season from December to April. During those months,  Canadian, American, and European tourists come to enjoy the beaches and nightlife, casino gambling, shopping, restaurants, and Sunday bullfights. Cruise ships also visit from the US.  In 2014 Mazatlan expects three cruise ships each week during the winter months.  Spring Breakers also arrive in Mazatlan, February, March April.

For an overview of Mazatlan, a cab driver will tour you around the city for two hundred peso per hour.  A good choice would be Armando Milan, a friendly and helpful person who knows the city well.  He is knowledgeable, helpful, safe at the wheel, courteous, and flexible. He can get you the local info on restaurants, gambling casinos, theater, bullfights, beaches, surfing, good views from the Mirador, and the old city.
Armando is a 20 year resident of the city and has a family of four grown children. His Cell: 044-669-155-6308,  Home, 9 40-1908. He can pick you up at the airport if you are flying in.  The airport also offers a bus shuttle to the bus station.
Tufesa bus will reach  Guadalajara. (link) From Guadalajara you can reach Morelia for the Monarch Butterfly Migration.(link)

Flights to Mazatlan
      You can reach Mazatlan by air on many National and International flights.
Mazatlan's Aeropuerto Internacional General Rafael Buelna (MZT) 30 minutes outside of the City of Mazatlan. ($300 Peso cab ride to the City of Mazatlan)
Mazatlan is served from Houston, Tucson, Chicago, and LA as well as Mexico City and many other hubs. Mazatlan is served by International flights, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta, Frontier, Northwest Airlines, Sun Country Airlines, US Airways, and WestJet

Mazatlan by Bus
Reach Mazatlan by Bus from the US on Tufesa,(link)Tap, Elite, Omnibus, and other lines that serve Mazatlan with first class service from the north. Primera Pus serves Mazatlan from Mexico City and Guadalajara. Tufesa Bus serves Mazatlan with cross-border buses from Phoenix and Tucson through Nogales.

Related links, First Class Bus Mexico

Review, Hotel Palacio del Sol, Chihuahua, Mexico

 Hotel Review,  Hotel Palacio del Sol, Chihuahua, Mexico

The Cathedral of Chihuahua

I recently stayed at the Hotel Palacio del Sol in Chihuahua and found a five star value within a short walk to the Cathedral and the colonial center of the city.

Palacio del Sol Hotel seen

from in front of the Cathedral

Hotel Palacio del Sol

The five-star Palacio del Sol is elegantly furnished and offers in-room WiFi, flat panel TV, cable,  and a writing desk.

In the modern bathroom with tub and shower the hotel offers toiletries,  a hair dryer, and a coffee maker.
The hotel also offers room service, a shuttle service, baggage storage, laundry, dry cleaning, meeting and banquet rooms, and Fax and photocopying services.


See more hotel photos and guest reviews at booking .com      link to photos

The lobby of the Palacio del Sol Hotel and the entrance

to the buffet breakfast dining room

A full breakfast is included with the room rate that offers fruits, pastries, cereals, and omelets made to order.
 The hotel offers three restaurants where international and regional cuisine is featured.   Also offered are a gym and free parking.

At around 950 Pesos or $70 US dollars the Hotel Palacio del Sol, Chihuahua is a good value with its great location just a block from the Chihuahua Cathedral and the pedestrian shopping plazas.

The Hotel Palacio del Sol is also just 3 km away from the station for the CHEPE Train  to Copper Canyon. link

Chihuahua Bus Service  link   Serving Copper Canyon, the US Border, and Mexico City

The Cathedral,  St Frances

of Asissi, was built  in 

Spanish Baroque 

style between 1725 and 1826

Nearby Museums

Several museums are within a walk including the Casa Chihuahua.

A modern museum in the Palacio Municipal displays modern 

artisan ceramics 

Museum Casa Chihuahua displays pottery from the ruins of
Paquime link  at Casas Grandes

The Plaza de Armas is a busy, 

pedestrian walkway of shops, 

restaurants  and street entertainers

Chihuahua Map

Backpacking the Americas From Antarctica To Prudhoe Bay

 "Stranded In Chicken,"  A Backpack Travel Book by David Rice 

Two Years Of Backpacking the Americas, From Antarctica To Prudhoe Bay

Amazon Books

David Rice

David's account of his travels is
available through Amazon Books

 Excerpts from the book

     I live in the Ozarks of Missouri where I take care of a 100 year old house in the countryside. I tend a garden while caring for the old farm and I take a rent from my house in the city.

I have always loved the hills of Springfield in late winter and although I live comfortably in the rural house for most of the year, at times I get restless and feel the need to travel.

Since this account is a confession of sorts, to tell you the truth, travel is more obsession with me     than need. 

You Pisceans and Sagittarians will, I hope, empathize with one born under the sign of the compass rose. I have been around the world more than once and would love to do it again, this time staying completely on the ground.

My tale is one of the traveler. While I neither boast nor apologize, this is my story and for convenience rather than contrition, I will call it the confessions of a traveler.

Continue

Poems and Prose by Travelers

Loss
By A Kelty

No noise wakes me just one in my head.
"Contrition," I say.
 "Why,"  she says.
"We are different, we are tired, we need to separate and think it over," she says.
"We need to talk." I say.
My head stops talking and the birds take over as they flit about the patio. So happy.
I am happy my head says.
 The weather is beyond fine and the sun now turns the edge of the building to gold.  Mountain air and mountain light combine on my patio to make a miracle.
I watch in awe.
Could she ever see it. Could she feel it. Could she smell it.
A jet glides in over the mountains bringing a hundred people to the city.
None of them will ever be her.

Text A Kelty  © 2013

Silly Things
By A Kelty

Voices on the stairs, a dog barks, the maid sweeps, a bus horn sounds, a bird chirps and the city wakes up.
 My neighbor clangs bowls together as she slices fruit for her breakfast.
She needs passion, she told me, just once before she dies; she has never had passion, never that crazy in love feeling that makes you do silly things.
I invited her to do a silly thing but she can't today, she has her chiropractor session.
Not tomorrow she teaches.
Not the next day, the bus ride will exhaust her.
Not the next, her daughter is coming.
Not the next her allergies are acting up.
Her cold still lingers.
Her back hurts.
Voices on the patio, a car starts. The sun hits the edge of the patio and the birds chirp. A dog barks, bowls clank.

Text A Kelty  © 2013

Prose And Poems From Travelers Across The Border
Excerpts from www.softseattravel.com 

Yolanda  
Armond Kelty

I hear the whimper of a lonely dog,  a poor apartment dog locked in while his master leaves each day for the city.
 I look out to see that the sun has just started to abrade the edge of the roof outside my apartment. The birds have started their frantic chirping.
The dog's whimper turns to a sad whine of loss.
     My water bottle gurgles as if there is someone in the kitchen filling a glass. I wish it were her hand pressing on the lever.  It's not and never will be, she thinks that my tropical outpost is primitive and uncomfortable and a little backward,
the very reasons why I love the place.
     We can always get modern and efficient and boringly predictable at home in New Haven.  We often did.
But can we find the pulse of life that I found last night in the plaza where Mariachis played trumpet beneath the trees.
     One trumpet played off to one side, another at the other side, distant from their accompanying violins and bass guitar so that the volumes came into balance.
The first would make a plaintive wail with a hard-edged brassy sound; the other would answer,  muffled by trees and the porticos of the old colonial building.
The sound was sweet and exotic.
When the Mariachis ended their serenade of a young couple seated at the sidewalk cafe, the pulsing rhythm of the Latin band at the other end of the plaza drew me in that direction.
     Eight men and a woman played a rhythmic salsa tune while couples danced and a family member passed a cup around.
"How old are you," I asked the young drummer when the song ended.
 He had fired in rim shots without hesitation at just the right time, every time.
The son of the conga player answered, "Nuevo."
 Just nine years old and he kept the beat like a pro, tacking out a rhythm on the side of his two drums and then, at every twelfth bar, he would slam in his metallic accents seamlessly.
His little brother handled the clave while his aunt in a skin-tight homemade outfit adorned with spangles in strategic places, danced Salsa while sensuously massaging rhythm from a long metal tube with serrated sides: zt, pause zt, zt, accented zt, pause zt, zt, accented, hypnotic.
A couple next to me stood spooned and moving to the rhythm of the strong electric base beat and I envied them their closeness. She in purple rebozo,  stylishly slung over her shoulders and a long skirt split to mid-thigh; just like Mexico, hiding and showing at the same time.
They moved as one and I felt my legs move and my feet move but I was only one and there came a twinge of loss: lost time, lost opportunity, lost love.
The Salsa rhythms crashed to a finale with rim shots and symbol sizzles as the cup passed again at the hand of the sequined aunt.
     In the quiet the sweet voice of a tenor crying for Yolanda came from the other corner of the square. Two guitarists with subtly-amped flat-topped acoustic guitars did vocal harmony around Cuban love songs, always full of pain and longing. I listened while sipping a Modelo Negra and remembering dancing to Pablo Milanés's.  "Yolanda, Yolanda, Eternamente Yolanda"
     That is how I would sing it if I could, but the name would be different. My song might be as fleeting though, as fleeting as the feeling in the plaza on that night of warm tropical fantasy brought on by rhythms and songs and words of love.
The sun rubs higher out my window, my water bottle gurgles again for no one, the dog's wail turns into a whimper, my neighbor starts her percolator, and the sun now burns the patio where I will take my coffee: alone, happy, and free.

AK
 Text A Kelty  © 2013

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