A quick walk around the waterfront in Cabo San Lucas and it’s easy there is plenty to do in this resort community at the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula. Here are a few of the best things to do with teens in Los Cabos.
Ride a Camel in the Desert
The Baja Peninsula is a desert, after all, so finding a camel adventure there seemed somehow fitting.
Cabos Adventure’s Outback and Camel Safari is a bit kitschy, but still fun. The camel “safari” is really just a photo op atop a camel walking for 20 minutes in a big circle on the beach while a guide takes your picture. But the rest of this excursion is educational, fun and yummy.
It starts with a nature walk through the Baja desert where our knowledgeable guide taught us about the flora and fauna. Then we hopped onboard one of the company’s bright yellow Mercedes Benz Unimog 4X4 trucks for a bumpy ride through some breathtaking scenery to meet up with our camels. (Honestly, it was the 4X4 off-roading experience that would have gotten top billing from my teens.)
Fun, Food and Tequila
The camel ride was followed by traditional tea and conversation before we moved on to the final phase of our cultural mashup: the homemade Mexican meal at a nearby ranch.
We left the desert heat for the cool comfort of the dark house rich with the yummy aromas of traditional Mexican cuisine, including the homemade tortillas on the griddle.
After two helpings of everything, our hosts brought out the piece de resistance: tequila.
It is billed as “educational” and I guess it was since he said some stuff about the difference between the kinds of tequilas and Mezcal (that’s the one with the worm). But mostly I remember that all of the tequilas slid down easily and warmed me in a different way than that the sun.
And I remember being glad for the first time that I hadn’t brought any teens with me on this trip.
Swim with Dolphins
There are plenty of options for swimming with dolphins these days. We’ve done it in the Florida Keys and in Riviera Maya, Mexico. Unfortunately, my teen daughter did not accompany me on this press trip to Los Cabos because she would have enjoyed this Cabos Dolphin swim from Cabos Adventures much more than the other two.
Both of our previous dolphin swims took place in the ocean, complete with other fish, slimy algae and all sorts of things you can imagine more easily than you can see is the murky waters of the dolphin pens.
She spent the entire time trying to peer into the water to see what was coming toward her, leaving her little time or attention to spend on the dolphin swimming by.
But this swim was in a sky blue concrete pool. It was clean and slime-free, just the way my pool-raised daughter prefers it.
Do Some Good
The thing about taking kids to these incredible resorts in otherwise impoverished areas is they don’t get to see the real world. That’s why I really like the Helping Hands Tour run by Solmar Hotels and Resorts, my host for this press trip, through its Solmar Foundation.
The foundation was started in 2012 in honor of the late founder of Solmar Hotels and Resorts, Don Luis Bulnes Molleda. The Helping Hands Tour allows families to sign up for a tour of the Casa Hogar orphanage, soup kitchen and other services provided to local residents by the foundation. At check-out, guests are given the chance to contribute an extra $10 to the foundation.
The foundation has a big job. Drawn to the area by the lure of decent jobs at the high-end resorts, Mexican nationals spend all of their money getting to Los Cabos and then, if they don’t land a job, they have no money to get back home. They are stuck in town, in need of a place to sleep and food to eat, a world away from the resorts with their swim-up bars, second helpings and comfy beds.