What we Learned on our 6 Week Work Away in Mexico

My adult daughter and I both work remotely. My boss gave me permission to work from Mexico for 6 weeks and my granddaughter is doing remote school. It was the perfect time to test out a work away experience.

In March, my partner and I had planned to spend two weeks in Baja California Sur on a holiday so I had already done some investigating. Our longer term plan is to be able to spend part of the year outside the US in a warm climate so I wanted to check out southern tip of Baja. The consideration (maybe fantasy) of buying some property was also driving the exploration. Covid came in like a steam engine and we cancelled our March vacation and stayed in Portland, sheltering with everyone else. In the early fall Covid was calming down and I was about ready to lose my mind with no where to go, so my daughter and I pulled the trigger on the decision to work away.

As someone who has been an expat in a few different countries and is usually attempting to avoid the expat scene, I wanted some place a bit less traveled. We needed to balance that with reliable and fairly fast internet which we both required. Finding a location that was fairly accessible to the US, just in case one of us had to make a business trip influenced our choice of location. We talked about a few place but on the idea of living in Baja Sur Mexico, as far south as possible. It had bonus points for being just one hour off of our usual timezone. Staying away from Cabo and the busier areas was a priority so we perused houses for rent on AirBnb on the East Cape and West Coast. There we found quite a few homes open to longer term rentals. AirBnB now has a search option for stays greater than one month and the rates are discounted. My daughter and I shared listings back and forth and finally decided on Los Barriles.

If you have the opportunity to hit the road for a while and have the interest, I would definitely advise to do it. That said, we have some tips to help make your adventure smoother and more enjoyable from Day 1. We hit some bumps a long the way which caused some unwanted stress. As with most challenges in life, paying a little extra money made them disappear. That said, we could have avoided the stress and cost if we had asked some key questions up front and done a bit more research. As you read these you may be rolling your eyes, thinking how did they not think of this?? Well, we did and asked up from but we should have dug a bit deeper and had some qualification questions ready to go.

Here is our short list of things to determine ahead of time. I’d be curious to hear from any of you that have tried a work away and what your lessons learned turned out to be…

Reliable Internet- Ok, so this seems like a no brainer and yes, we did ask this question. The property manager insisted that the installed internet was adequate and assured us with her responses to our queries. My daughter’s work requires some decent download speeds. When she arrived and tried to work she did a couple different tests… which returned speeds from 0.14mps to 6ish… UGH! Obviously this was not going to work! We had quite a few heavy conversations, the tech guys visited, and it turned out that the current service installed was the worst of the three options in the little town of Los Barriles. The property managers did get the TelMex tuned up but we needed more so we paid to install a second service- FiberTech. If we had asked for a couple of tests up front with different testing tools we would have not rented where we did… or at least had addressed this up front. Lesson #1 - learned the expensive way.

Reliable Power- Again, you are thinking, “How dumb can these people be?” Well, I guess we were a bit crazy not to assume that power outages were a ‘thing.” It rained about 40 seconds and the power went out for over 24 hours. The other high end houses around us fired up their generators… alas, our lovely house didn’t come with one. Luckily this has been our only longer term outage. Another great question we didn’t ask up front and now we know better- and so do you. After living in Thailand and on an island in Malaysia, I don’t think I put Baja Sur on that same playing field but I should have. Turns out that the infrastructure on the East Cape has not kept up with growth.

Back up plans for #1 and #2- Turns out that the best thing we could have done was stay closer in to the town of Los Barriles itself. It turns out that even though we were just a few miles out of town and staying in an area of very high end homes the infrastructure was sketchy as mentioned in #2. This seemed less likely since our house was so nice but in fact it was much worse. Prior to arrival or before booking, sign up for Facebook groups for the area and ask a lot of questions about local spots with the services you may need in case of an emergency- like turtle speed internet or power outages.

The day the power went out, we hadn’t yet solved our internet dilemma. Frankly, we wondered if we were going to have to head home or figure out another location. I went for a walk and was going to knock on some of our neighbour’s doors. Down the dusty road came a young woman with her two adorable boys in their quad. I waved her over and explained our dilemma. Turns out her husband is a remote worker and of course they had already dealt with all of these challenges. She informed me that her husband was actually in town at that moment, working from a local hotel! Turns out, only Las Palmas Hotel and the bank have fiberoptic cable and of course they also have power, 24/7. We spent quite a few days working at the pool bar until our new internet was set up and we felt we could trust it.

All in all, we had a fantastic time and I’m wishing I hadn’t come back to rainy PDX in January. It felt like we sorted out 3 months worth of dilemmas in that initial week but being able to stay in a lovely Mexican town for 6 weeks made it all worthwhile.

So, if you are considering a remote work away. Do it! There are some resources out there that you can study that can help you choose a location that appeals to you and has the services you need. If you like to take the path less traveled then be ready for an adventure. Currently with Covid, do plan for potential travel delays or last minute need for testing, etc.

Just ask a lot of questions, keep smiling, and enjoy your time.