2020 Review of Ensenada, MX for Remote Work
I went down to Ensenada last week to experiment with remote working overseas. Like a lot of people, I’ve been working from home for 8 months now and it’s harder and harder to justify living in California when you could live on a beach in Mexico or Thailand AND save ~$1000/month in living expenses. That’s still a pretty big jump though and I wanted a safe place to experiment before making a larger commitment. Ensenada was a great location because it’s one of the safest places in Mexico and it’s driving distance from the Bay Area (about an hour and half south of the San Diego/Tijuana border crossing). I thought I’d share my notes in case anyone else is interested and wants to try it out.
So, let’s start with the positives. You can drive there in a day and actually be pretty Covid safe either being in a car, isolated in your room/house, or outside on the beach. Yes, the beach is awesome and the scenery is gorgeous. Food is amazing, and not just the Mexican cuisine you expect but a shocking amount of great Asian and Japanese cuisine. Best food I had was fresh octopus Sushi. It is cheap, you can get decent accommodations for $500-$800 and food/other goods is 1/3-1/2 the price of US equivalents. It’s super safe and while the streets/sidewalks aren’t as well kept, there’s also somehow a smaller and less disruptive homeless population.
The cons are minor but they’re also almost deal-breakers: internet, electricity, and utilities in general. We had some unique internet problems but in general the internet is not up to US standards and fails frequently; you will lose internet for some period every day and it struggles to handle Zoom calls. This is simply unacceptable for remote work and while I did eventually find a work around, having difficulty calling or gaming with friends is a big hit. Electricity was also a rare problem; it almost always worked but if you depend on a CPAP like I do then a 1 hour outage at 1:30 AM will mess up your whole next day. I don’t want to say Mexican utilities can’t handle these issues or are bad but remote workers are going to want 99.99% uptime, not 99% uptime. Also, expect a lot of ambiguity and confusion regarding various issues. My credit card company got confused; four calls to AT&T did not resolve how billing would work for cell phone data, debit cards did work for withdrawing money but I wouldn’t depend on that. Also, while ability to drive to Ensenada is a bonus, it’s a brutal drive. Plan on 12-13 hours if you only stop for gas, longer if you break for meals. Theoretically you could do it faster but realistically, something will go wrong.
I will probably go again for another week, basically just to do one trip without issues. Things I’ll do differently:
-If the internet isn’t working at 7:45 AM, go straight to the Hub Center coworking space (
https://www.hubcenter.mx/
). I spent too much time messing with the internet and hoping it would work. Hub Center was a fine spot and $15/day was fine for a short time period.
-I need backups for everything. Another backup credit card, maybe a backup debit card, CPAP battery, maybe satellite internet. Basically, whenever anything stops working I want to be able to seamlessly and effortlessly switch to a backup.
-Optimize for the view, not being near the beach. This time I was a block away from the beach, which was super nice, but after a full day of work I never really wanted to go to the beach at 5PM in November. In general, I should have optimized more for quick, simple, and easy advantages like restaurants/views/etc rather than big, energy-intensive things like beaches/wine tours/etc. I just didn’t have the time or energy to do those as much as I thought.
-Speaking of wines, the Lechuza winery was super nice (
http://vinoslechuza.com/
). I’ll probably go back.
-Also, I need to go with someone else again. Buddies are critical when things go wrong.
Overall, I felt like the core concept worked but I was just underprepared. I used to live overseas and I took more precautions than I used to; I’m just in a very different spot now. When you’re an intern or an English teacher or just not in a very demanding job, you can spend time to figure out/fix various issues. Semi-sarcastically, since I’m older with like a big-boy now, I expect and kind of need things to work consistently and without effort on my part because of responsibilities and stuff.
Originally from: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1562