Nine days from San Diego to Baja: the best food on this coast is on the far side of the fence

Start downtown and walk. The Gaslamp Quarter is sixteen blocks of Victorian commercial buildings that were the red light district until the 1980s, when the city decided to preserve rather than demolish, and it now runs on restaurants and stag parties. Walk it in daylight for the buildings and eat somewhere else.

Then go two miles southeast to Barrio Logan, which is the reason to spend the first afternoon here rather than on a beach. When the state put a motorway bridge through the middle of a Mexican American neighbourhood in the late 1960s and then proposed a police station under it, the residents occupied the site for twelve days in April 1970 and won a park instead. The concrete piers have been painted ever since, and the collection of Chicano murals on them is the largest anywhere. It was made a National Historic Landmark in 2017.

That is the correct introduction to a trip that spends five of its nine days in Mexico. Eat in Barrio Logan, on Logan Avenue, and go back downtown on the trolley.

Balboa Park is 500 hectares of Spanish Colonial Revival buildings put up for the Panama-California Exposition in 1915, kept afterwards because the city liked them, and filled with sixteen museums. It is the best thing in San Diego by a wide margin and a full day is not enough.

The zoo occupies the northern corner and started with the animals left behind when the exposition closed. It is very large, genuinely serious about conservation, and hilly enough that the bus tour included in the ticket is worth taking first to work out where you want to walk back to. Give it the morning and leave before the afternoon heat.

In the afternoon, stay in the park. The Botanical Building is one of the largest lath structures ever built, went up for the same exposition, and reopened in 2024 after a long restoration, with a lily pond in front of it that is the most photographed thing in the city. The Timken is one room of old masters, free, and takes twenty minutes to see and an hour to leave.

Take the ferry rather than the bridge. It leaves the Broadway Pier, takes fifteen minutes and costs a few dollars, and it puts you at the Coronado Ferry Landing with the whole downtown skyline behind you.

The Hotel del Coronado opened in 1888 and was the largest resort hotel in the world when it did. It is all white timber and red shingle, it has an enormous unsupported ballroom ceiling built by shipwrights, and Some Like It Hot was filmed on the beach outside it in 1958. Walk through the public rooms, then walk the beach, which is wide, pale and has flecks of mica in it that glitter in the afternoon.

Late in the day, drive out to Point Loma. The old lighthouse at the tip was lit in 1855 and switched off after thirty six years, because it had been built at the highest point of the peninsula and the fog sat below it more nights than not. The view south from there takes in the whole bay, the Coronado bridge, and on a clear evening the hills of Tijuana.

Cross in the morning. Walking across at PedWest takes about twenty minutes southbound, and there is a taxi rank and a rideshare pickup on the other side. Leave the American car behind.

Drop the bags and go straight to lunch, because the point of Tijuana is what is on the plate. Caesars on Avenida Revolución is where an Italian restaurateur called Caesar Cardini ran short of ingredients on a busy Fourth of July weekend in 1924 and improvised a salad from romaine, egg, lemon and parmesan, tossed at the table. The restaurant closed and reopened, it is now run by one of the city's better chefs, and they still make it in front of you.

Spend the afternoon at the cultural centre in Zona Río, a 1982 complex by the architect who designed Mexico City's anthropology museum, dominated by a windowless concrete sphere that everybody calls the Bola. The permanent gallery on the history of Baja California is small and clear and sets up the rest of the trip. Finish with a beer somewhere: the city has a serious brewing scene and Cerveceria Insurgente is where it started.

Start at Mercado Hidalgo, which is a working produce market rather than a souvenir one: dried chillies by the sack, moles, cheese, candied fruit and a dozen places doing breakfast. It is the best hour in the city and it costs nothing.

In the afternoon, go west to Playas de Tijuana. The lighthouse at the end of the promenade sits beside the point where the border fence runs down the beach and continues out into the Pacific for a few dozen metres, and there is a small binational meeting place on the other side of it where families have talked through the mesh for decades. Whatever you think about any of it, standing there for half an hour explains more than a week of reading.

Eat seafood on the way back. Mariscos El Mazateño does fish and shrimp tacos out of a place with plastic chairs and a queue, and it is the sort of meal people cross the border for.

The toll road south hugs the cliffs for most of the hundred kilometres, past Rosarito and a long line of half-built condominiums, and takes about ninety minutes. Coaches run every half hour and are comfortable. The free road inland is slower and not worth the saving.

Ensenada is a port, and the first thing to do in it is eat standing up. La Guerrerense is a cart that has outlasted most of the restaurants around it, doing tostadas of sea urchin, clam and octopus with a wall of homemade salsas to put on them, for a couple of dollars each. Two or three is lunch.

The cathedral is five minutes away and is worth ten of them, and after that the evening belongs to Hussong's, a cantina that has been open since 1892, has sawdust on the floor, a mariachi band that will not take no for an answer, and a fair claim to have invented the margarita in 1941. The claim is disputed. The place is not.

The Valle de Guadalupe is twenty minutes inland and looks nothing like a wine region until you are in it: dust, granite boulders, olive trees and about forty wineries hidden up gravel tracks with no signs. What makes it work is the fog, which comes off the Pacific through a gap in the hills every morning and keeps the nights cold enough for the fruit.

Start at the wine museum, which opened in 2012 on a ridge with the whole valley below it and explains the last hundred and twenty years in about forty minutes, including the part nobody expects. Around three hundred and fifty Molokans, Russian pacifists fleeing conscription, settled this valley between 1904 and 1906, farmed it, and their descendants are still making wine here. The small museum in their old settlement is worth the detour.

Then one large winery and lunch. Monte Xanic was the first Mexican producer to go seriously after quality wine rather than volume, and its tasting room looks down a reservoir. Lunch at Doña Esthela, up a dirt road, which serves the best breakfast in Mexico according to a number of people who have eaten a lot of breakfasts in Mexico, and which stops serving in the early afternoon.

Give the morning to Ensenada itself. The regional history museum occupies a former prison from the 1880s, with the cells left in place and the exhibits fitted into them, and it covers the Baja peninsula from the Cochimí and Kumeyaay through the missions and the mining booms. It is small and free or nearly so.

The science museum on the seafront is the other one, and the reason to go is the building: floor to ceiling glass facing the Pacific, so the marine tanks are backed by the actual ocean. It is aimed at children and works on everybody.

In the afternoon, drive fifteen minutes back towards the valley to the cellars of Santo Tomás, the oldest winery in Baja, founded by the mission at Santo Tomás and moved here since. The barrel cave, the tasting and the walk through the vines take about two hours, and it is the right last thing before the drive north.

Mercado Negro opens at dawn and the stalls at the mouth of it fry fish to order from about eight, which is the correct breakfast on the day you leave and the last argument for Ensenada's claim on the fish taco: battered white fish, cabbage, crema, lime, two tortillas.

Then go north, and leave more time than seems necessary. The drive back to Tijuana is ninety minutes and the border queue afterwards is the unpredictable part: three hours is normal on a weekend afternoon, and the Otay Mesa crossing to the east is often much faster.

If you are flying from Tijuana airport rather than San Diego, the CBX bridge lets ticketed passengers walk straight from a car park in San Diego into the terminal, which removes the queue entirely. It costs about the same as an airport taxi and it is the single best-kept secret on this border.