Years of Poems and Spirits

Song and I wanted to go to a sunny, warm ocean front to escape from the depressing Seattle winter. We settled on Los Cabos over Hawaii because the it is the rainny season in Hawaii and we thought Cabos, being part of Mexico, would be a cheaper option.

Boy, were we wrong about Cabos being cheap! For a while, I thought I made the right choice when looking around at price tags until I found out they were in … U.S. dollars! A three-mile taxi ride costs $12, car rental starts at $70 a day, the cheapest half-day snorkeling trip is over $100 per person … Even a big Mac costs over $8–more than it does in Seattle!

For a moment, I felt we were trapped: we’ve already committed to a week-long stay. But unless we stayed inside hotel eating cookies everyday, we could easily spend $2000 more than budgetted!

Soon, I realized that there was a reason why everything was so expensive and there was a way out of this bind. The key? One word: timeshare.

Yes, timeshare industry attracts thousands of middle class Americans and Canadians with excess income; Timeshare provides good jobs for the locals; Almost every hotel or resort has a timeshare program; Many locals–street vendors, bartenders, restaurant waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides … are timeshare referrers. In short, Los Cabos is built by timeshare, of timeshare and for timeshare.

To entice people to listen to presentations, timeshare vendors offer deep (between 60%-100%) discounts on almost everything. It is like a currency–you can get vouchers for lodging, food, rental, activities and tours. To us, this means that we either have to pay the inflated price on everything or to earn the equivalant by going to sales presentations. What should we do?

A presentation lasts at least two hours. Because a sales rep gets either 10% or nothing for a day’s work, you will be treated with thousands dollar-worth of intensity. If you fail them, you will be cursed behind your back as though you have stolen thousands of dollars from them. Timeshare sales rep is an unique specimen that lives on anticipation, disappointment, ecstacy and anger everyday.

Still, we chose to earn our vacation. The first presentation lasted over four hours; The second two and half . The last, just over two. As we were getting more fluent at how to say No, the conversation got uglier linearly too.

But we have to: the first one gives us $800 off lodging (from an Expedia quoted $1400) and $200 dinning. The second one gives us almost-free tickets to “Swim with Dolphins” (although I am not a circus-goer–either on land or in water, Song is dying to pat those cute creatures, ohhhh …). The third one gives us free deep-sea fishing trip! A $250/person value! And wait there is more …

If anything, we certainly did as Romans when in Rome, so to speak.