Mailing to & from Cancun

Did you ever about the efficiency of the Mexican postal service? Neither did I really (tho I'd have guessed it was run by guys like Cheech & Chong), until I moved to Cancun. Below, I'll describe my limited experiences with the Correos de Mexico...




Te Llega means "We arrived".. Not so fast, Pancho...

For years, I've been selling stuff on ebay (like hockey cards, SD cards, & business cards) to earn a bit of extra cash. After moving to Cancun, I shipped 2 sets of SD cards without thinking about the possibility of Mexican postal delays. After all, I always wrapped them up in paper & shipped them as letter mail, which takes a few days at most in the rest of North America.


How bad could Mexican letter mail be? Well, of the half dozen cards I've shipped to date, one disappeared & another took 3+ weeks to arrive. The others may have taken just as long but only one customer complained.


I also buy a lot of stuff on ebay (like $8 board shorts & PC power cables, mostly from HK), a practice which I have continued here in Mexico (ebay's free seller protection still applies here). Because I wanted my stuff to arrive before my funeral, I was more than a bit worried when I read this excerpt from Carl Franz & Lorena Havens' fantastic Mexican travelogue/guidebook, The People's Guide to Mexico:


"Use airmail from Mexico if you want your letter to arrive during your lifetime. Surface mail is all but subterranean...
"Letters sent to Mexico from the United States should be marked "Airmail" or "Correo Aereo" or just "Aereo. " Without these words, Mexican postal workers won't handle it as airmail. A registered (registrada) or certified (certificada) letter costs about twice as much as airmail...
Be sure to get a recibo (receipt). Note: The declared value on a registered letter is not covered by insurance. You must pay an additional fee for seguro to cover any loss...
"Sending packages and gifts to Mexico can be more of a burden than a benefit to the person receiving them. Although eyeglasses, medicines, used clothing and books are supposedly allowed in duty-free, don't hold your breath. Books are rarely held for custom charges, but anything else probably will be. Toys are a favorite target for high duty. These charges are arbitrary and often unreasonable.
"Note: When mailing to Mexico, always put the postal code (Codigo Postal) after the city and before the state. Because Mexico uses five-digit postal codes -- the same as U.S. zip codes -- letters to Mexico mistakenly go to the U.S. city with the same zip code. To prevent this, you have to hide the Mexican postal code by putting it between the city and the state..."


Oh. Ooops.


I had bought three items, and in each case, accidentally listed my Mexican address as:

Hostel Kankun
Calle Marañon 
Supermanzana 25, Manzana 7, Lote 26
Cancun, Yucatan
Mexico
77509

Not only did I fail to heed the advice about the postal code, I listed the wrong state: While Cancun os in the Yucatan Peninsula, it is not in the state of Yucatan; it's in a state called Quintana Roo!


Needless to say, given my experience with the cards I shipped, I was pretty sure my ebay items would never arrive, lost in somewhere in Mexican limbo.


And this brings us to the strange conclusion of this tale: To my amazement, each of the three items I bought & had shipped to the wrong address in Mexico arrived at my home as fast as they would have in Canada! But letters can take many weeks?


Go figure... & welcome to Mexico.