Mexico Adventure Travel: NOLS Baja Courses, OARS Sea Kayaking, Whale Watching, and More!

Compare Mexico Adventure Travel Vacations to Baja, the Yucatan, and more, from the world’s premiere Mexico tour operators.

Similar to the neighbor you’ve lived next door to for years and have come to take for granted, Mexico is likely to fall off your radar when seeking excitement. But stop to take a closer look, however, and you’ll find a country ripe for adventure.

For example, you’re probably familiar with Cancún, but close-by, just off the tip of the Yucatán Peninsula, is the largely unheard-of, small island of Isla Holbox. Every summer, this island’s waters play host to some impressive visitors: whale sharks. Weighing fifteen tons and measuring forty feet in length, these fellow travelers are not actually whales but the world’s largest fish.

Swimming with these gentle and curious creatures will be a highlight of your Mexican adventure travel experience, as you get close enough to observe their checkerboard patterns of pale, yellow dots and stripes that cover their thick, gray skins. Or experience another natural marvel on Mexico’s Pacific coast, where for a few months every year, olive ridley sea turtles come ashore to lay their eggs in the sand. Stand guard in the light of the moon, as the baby hatchlings scurry to the sea. These little ones will forever remember the location of their birthplace, to which they will return one day as they continue the cycle of life.

If communing with birds is more your style, make sure to explore Isla de los Pájaros — or “Bird Island” — on a Baja sea kayaking trip.  It flows with frigatebirds, flamingos, boat-billed herons, snowy egrets, and white pelicans.

At the opposite end of the size scale from the whale sharks are Mexico’s monarch butterflies. Your tour of Mexico could include a hike to their ancestral wintering grounds in the central highlands, where the snowcapped volcano of Xinantecatl stands sentinel. Here, three hundred million monarch butterflies amass before setting flight on a remarkable three-thousand-mile journey to the northeastern U.S. and Canada — a journey the National Geographic Society calls one of the world’s “Great Migrations.”

You can make your own “migration” by taking a NOLS Baja coastal sailing course or spending a semester among the granite mountain ranges of Baja, which extend more than a thousand miles down the Yucatán Peninsula’s central spine. Or plan a Mexico adventure in Sonoran Desert country amid an amazing variety of life, including more than 110 species of cacti.

Mexico adventure travel tours hold other surprises, such as ancient caves, Mayan ruins, colonial cities, and an eclectic cuisine. So don’t sell the country short just because of a shared property line. Take time to get to know your neighbor, because just over the “back fence,” adventure awaits.