On Monday night, my friend Kristy and I began our adventure to get to Peru. Due to flight availability and prices, our journey to Peru resulted in 2 red eye flights connected by a 16 hour layover in Mexico City.

When I travelled to Asia last year, I had two 6 hour layover in Shanghai. Looking back, I wish that I had booked a longer layover for one of the legs so that I could go in and see the city! That was partially the reason why I chose the long layover.

We flew with Aeromexico and our first flight wasn’t spectacular. It was a full plane and we waited in the check in line for 2 hours, then realized our flight was delayed! The plane had no TVs and the turbulence was pretty wild. We were happy to arrive in Mexico City. One great thing about Aeromexico is that we got a meal with our flight (breakfast served at 1am?!!?) and our big bags got checked all the way to Peru, so we didn’t have to worry about them during our layover.

After an emergency stop at the airport Starbucks, we made our way into the city on the MetroBus. It was a quick 30 minute ride to the main square in the city, and we went for breakfast at the Turquoise Palace. I’m really lucky that Kristy speaks Spanish because mine is minimal and NO ONE spoke English. We also felt like the only tourists in Mexico City. The streets were quiet for the first hour but quickly got busier and busier to the point where we could believe how many people were surrounding us on a Tuesday afternoon. Our day consisted of visiting beautiful buildings around the main square, eating the best tacos we have ever tasted, and crashing for a few hours at a Starbucks on the main strip (wifi and accepts Starbucks cards on your phone – a travellers’ top tip for us so far. I’m actually writing this blog post in a Starbucks in Ica as we speak – we are waiting for an 11:50 pm night bus and don’t want to wait in the station).

Our last stop in Mexico City was for a rooftop drink near the main square. They definitely scammed us into paying about $8 more than we should have by misquoting the price of our drinks on the bill and then refusing to change it when I asked, but we were trying to get rid of our pesos and the money meant more to them than to us in the end.

Overall, the layover was a great start to our trip. 16 hours was a bit long – I would say 8-10 would be more reasonable. We had a few long hours in the Mexico City Airport waiting for wifi. And you’ll be happy to know that our second plane was a LOT better – a row to ourselves, TVs, the works! All the better to get us to Lima.