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Nothing recent but the family did Mexico City 7-8 years ago...I’m thinking our impressions are still valid.

Mexico City is HUGE. 22-23 million people live there, another few million drive in each day to work. Smog was bad.

Traffic was awful and we spent hours in it. We initially were going to rent a car but changed our minds before we even left home. Too many cars are stolen...rental company was going to put a several thousand dollar deposit on the charge card.

Figured we’d just do public transportation. Wrong. Good luck figuring that out. Good place to get robbed, too.

First day there, checked into the hotel. Decided to set up a Grayline tour for the next day. They’d pick us up at the hotel, take us back to the tour office to start the tour. On a map, we didn’t look that far from the office, but it took us an hour and a half to get there. Driver wasn’t running a scam because we compared his route to the map and it was a straight shot. The drive in was a friggin’ struggle. Traffic was that bad.

We finally did the tour (general city tour), and enjoyed it. The main thing we learned...if we did this trip on our own, we’d spend most of our time lost. Did I mention Mexico City is HUGE? Throw in the traffic, very poor street signage, feeling like a target...it was pretty daunting.

Long story short, we talked to Grayline office manager and got a good price on a package of tours for the week we were there. First thing the manager did was change our hotel. Better hotel, closer to the center city, and cheaper. I cared less if he got a kickback out of it.

We basically turned ourselves over to the company for the remaining 5 days...and had a blast. Drivers/tour guides were great. Tour vehicles were usually minivans. They took us to a number of places that were “off tour”. We saw so much (including out of the city tours), learned a lot, and really enjoyed the trip.

Bottom line, I would never try to navigate the city by myself. I’d hire somebody to help me.