Rosarito

Southern Californians use Rosarito (population 100,000) as a weekend getaway, and during school vacations, especially spring break, the crowd becomes one big raucous party. The police do their best to control the revelers, but spring and summer weekend nights can be outrageously noisy. Off-season, the place becomes a ghost town, which is arguably even less appealing than the frat scene.

The beach, which stretches from the power plant at the north end of town about 8 km (5 mi) south, is long with beautiful sand and sunsets, but it's less romantic for the irritating bar promoters accosting beach walkers, and the amateur explosives that boom every few minutes. Rosarito is a center of fireworks commerce, and some ridiculously powerful blasts are available over-the-counter at the town's several purveyors. Americans and Canadians continue to swell the ranks in vacation developments and gated retirement communities, but they're concealed largely out of sight from charmless downtown Rosarito.

The main drag, alternately known as the Old Ensenada Highway and Boulevard Benito Juárez, is a dirty and depressing eyesore of a strip of cheesy curio shops, mediocre tourist-oriented restaurants, and other assorted signs of the unbridled growth and speculation—this energy might have helped Rosarito's economy, but has certainly ruined its potential charm.

If you do wind up here for a night, head out to the wooden pier that stretches over the ocean in front of the Rosarito Beach Hotel, or hire a horse at the north or south end of Boulevard Benito Juárez for $10 per hour. Whatever you do, come with plenty of U.S. dollars, because many vendors in town don't even accept pesos. That, in itself, should be a hint.