Here are the available villas for rental in Mexico.

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila ... floor

From the Mail on Sunday

Poor Tijuana. Could the publicity have been much worse?
First there was the grim, drug-smuggling film Traffic which showed the Mexican border town to be a sepia-coloured, washed-out hellhole of murderous cocaine dealers and deeply corrupt cops. (Actually, to Tijuana's lasting annoyance, the film sequences were shot in another Mexican border town, Nogales.)
Then there was the real-life problem that two-thirds of the 350 tons of cocaine that enter North America every year comes via the border, much of it handled by the notorious Tijuana Cartel, one of whose leaders is on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List.
Add to that bleak list the indisputable truth that some parts of Tijuana do for Mexico's tourist industry what Chernobyl did for ecology and you have a challenge no travel writer can resist.
With exquisite timing, I reached Tijuana on its one alcohol-free day, a tragedy caused by the local elections and a desire by government to avoid over-enthusiastic voters blowing each other away in political discussions.
Frankly, I could have gone to Cheltenham for more excitement on my first evening.
I stayed in the Camino Real, a large, hugely dull, Eastern European-style people warehouse, safely tucked away from the beckoning red lights of Revolucion Avenue, Tijuana's main street of unparalleled naughtiness.
There are six other five-star hotels in town; choose any one rather than this. Could I have a drink as an accredited resident please? They looked at me as if I were Pecos Pete on a psychotic rampage - and promptly served me tea.
A friendly tourist guide took me to a restaurant for a classic Mexican meal of tortillas and beans. Er, could I, as a man who had travelled far, have a wee drop? The waiter glowered at me and brought Diet Coke.
Without tequila to wash it down, the meal tasted like wet cardboard. ... more

On the trail of Burton and Taylor

Kamikaze superstar Richard Burton created a disgraceful scandal in 1964 on Mexico's west coast (for younger readers, Burton was a kind of prototype Russell Crowe, only interesting).
Audiences started booking Latin American holidays in droves, hoping to be outraged over a seven to 14-day period.
Burton was filming a racy adaptation of Tennessee Williams's The Night Of The Iguana, directed by fellow hellraiser-John Huston.
The movie is set to a backdrop of Mexican peasant life, representing 'a lost world of innocence', Tennessee Williams never having washed non-fast coloureds on a stone.
Burton plays an alcoholic, teenage-girl-snogging priest who can't understand why he's been defrocked, and Ava Gardner is a hotelier who offers her guests marijuana and boasts of group rumpo with 'the beach boys', presumably the inspiration for I Get Around.
Of course nowadays this wouldn't make a Grange Hill Christmas special, but it got people going in 1964.
And once filming stopped, Welsh wildman Burton went one better, abandoning Mrs Burton to live openly in sin with Eddie Fisher's wife, Elizabeth Taylor, a real star who spurned detox for retox.
The swingers bought a house and the resorts of Puerto Vallarta and Mismaloya became tourism's Sodom and its lively beach-club Gomorrah.
Even after Burton moved out of their Mexican love nest, Taylor never stopped loving him, gaining seven stone to honour his death.
But nearly 40 years later, would I find the Burton/Taylor spirit alive in the Bahia? And how on earth could I recreate it, determined as I was to follow a no-alcohol, 1,000-calorie a day diet? ... more

Down Mexico way

Please don't tell everyone, but here's a secret I overheard one night at a dinner party.
A travel agent, asked to reveal his favourite destination, immediately whispered to the questioner that his idea of paradise was an ancient city in the south of Mexico.
It sounded something like 'Wahaka', but turned out to be the way to pronounce Oaxaca. What, I wondered, made it so special to this man who'd been just about everywhere in the world? I had to find out for myself.
A couple of months later, I discovered it's one of those so-called remote places that's far easier to reach than you might think. It was a 45-minute plane ride down from Mexico City to the city's tiny, flower-bedecked airport.
After a very short ride into the centre, I soon realised I'd stepped back in time.
Oaxaca is a beautiful little city of 250,000 people, nestling in a valley amid the mountains of the Sierra Madre del Sur. It looks, despite a devastating earthquake in 1854, as if it has been preserved from the 16th century.
Its narrow, bustling streets are lined with Spanish-style facades painted in hot Mexican colours - vivid ochres, terracotta and deep lavender. Its principal colonial buildings, plus the cathedral and the church of Santo Domingo, have all been splendidly restored.
There are, incongruously, a couple of internet cafes, but none of the usual commercial graffiti.
No Texaco, Pepsi or McDonald's distracts the eye. There are no remotely modern buildings, let alone skyscrapers, because of strict planning restrictions.
I soon realised that what makes Oaxaca so inviting is its very ordinariness, its simple, provincial charm and apparently unconscious preservation of its past. Cars, like tourists, have been accommodated without the city appearing to have compromised its roots and traditions.
What draws tourists in increasing numbers is the fact that it isn't in the least touristy. Hotels, shops and cafes which cater almost exclusively for tourists fit so neatly into the everyday fabric that there is no sense of separation between resident and visitor. ... more

Sleeping it off in Mexico

From the Mail on Sunday

Here's a health tip for anyone heading south to Mexico - never drink mescal on an empty stomach. It can transform your brain into something that resembles a lump of week-old Emmenthal cheese and make you behave like an idiot. Attempting to tap-dance on the wings of a taxiing aeroplane is a common side-effect. So too is telling your friends and family what you really think of them - then making a mess on their shoes.
Mescal, of course, is Mexico's second great contribution to the world of alcoholic beverages. Its first is tequila. Anyone who has ever gone to a stag night at a Mexican restaurant has experienced, at close range, the mercilessness of tequila. That, however, suddenly seems as benign as Ribena once you've sampled the toxic delights of mescal.
Mescal is made from the fermented and distilled juice of the agave plant and has the kick of a demented mule. But it is not related to the hallucinogenic drug, mescaline. And though it is perfectly legal (on sale in assorted Mexican dives, and in many an upmarket British off-licence), drinking it is a bit like playing with liquid dynamite. Especially if you make my mistake, and quaff it on an empty stomach. But hell - it was a seductively cool, moonlit evening in the Mexican city of Oaxaca, and I did not really see how a mescal or two could do too much damage.
Oaxaca is, without question, one of the most delightfully seductive towns in the Americas. And it's the perfect soft landing after negotiating that urban maelstrom Mexico City, the so-called 'gateway' to the country, which essentially means that it is the inescapable port of entry through which anyone flying from Europe to Mexico must travel. Though it's one of those megalopolises which was probably built to house, at worst, eight million souls, its current population approaches the 13 million mark - which (to steal an old line) leaves five million people looking very stupid every night.
Yes, it is one of Latin America's great cultural centres. And yes, it has great universities, great publishing houses, and a fine orchestra, and all those splendid Diego Rivera murals, and a resident intelligentsia, and splendid restaurants, and all the other telltale attributes of metropolitan sophistication. But for the new arrival in Mexico City, these corners of cosmopolitanism are obscured by the sheer manic overdrive of the place.
The city is like a vast ongoing car crash - a place where the air is permanently perfumed by dense clouds of smog, petrol smoke and burning debris; where the ten-mile tailback is a permanent traffic condition; and where crime against the person is allegedly the favourite municipal sport.
Or, at least, that's what I was told by assorted denizens of the capital - all of whom led me to believe that it was best to walk around after dark with an Uzi slung over my shoulder. As I usually don't travel with a submachine-gun, I decided to do the next best thing - I took a plane to Oaxaca. ... more

Big new wave for Mexico

From the Daily Mail

When you are perched on a stool at the swim-up bar in your hotel in Acapulco, it all feels a long way from the land of the bandy-legged bandito. With a margarita in one hand and a whirlpool bath jet whirring away at your back, you finally consign the stubble-faced outlaw of film fame to cinematic fiction - even if you could do with a fistful of dollars when it comes to paying the bill.
Misconceptions about Mexico - often called America's poor relation - and the Mexican people have been hard to live down. After all, even the poetically entitled Acapulco, meaning 'place of the reeds' was first put on the map by the Hollywood jet set - Liz Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley - looking for an alternative playground to Europe.
When, during the Sixties and Seventies, the developers moved in, the stars decamped for pastures new and Acapulco was deemed a has-been location. Now it is undergoing a renaissance, and for the first time it is Mexican money that is fuelling the boom.
Indeed, under its new president, Vincente Fox, who heads the first change of government in Mexico for 71 years, commentators inside the country are as optimistic about its future fortunes as if they had just struck gold in the Sierra Madre. And from the tourist point of view, Mexico has become one of the most chic locations in the Latin world.
In fact, Acapulco was always favoured by upmarket Mexicans looking to buy a holiday home, and not because they lived in hope of catching a glimpse of Liz Taylor or the ghost of Elvis. They regarded it as being fundamentally Mexican, unlike the more Americanised pretenders to the 'seaside' throne - Puerto Vallarta and above all, Cancun.
And for those who imagine Acapulco as an Identikit tourist resort - much the same as any high-rise resort in the world - think again. It is true that its main strip, the Costera, is a pleasure- seeker's paradise of hotels, restaurants, bars and nightclubs. But the Costera also happens to be perched on arguably the most beautiful natural bay in the world. That is just the beginning, for Mexico has more than 4,000 miles of coastline. ... more