This topic comes up from time to time on sitcoms: when someone is in the mood for a night of depravity that puts even Vegas to shame, they head for Tijuana. Want to see a woman doing fellatio on a donkey? Tijuana. Want to spend no more than $5 on a whore? Tijuana. Want to get staggeringly drunk on hideously cheap tequila? Tijuana.
Is Tijuana really the depraved bacchanal that it’s made out to be?
No. Av. Revolución is pretty comparable to a low-market version of the Las Vegas Strip without the casinos or their money, but it’s just a border town that caters a lot to Americans out to party.
It’s a town that is fairly cosmopolitan and has over 1.5 million people living in it. I haven’t spent much time there, but have heard some very nice things about the food, culture, etc. from people who know the place pretty well.
It has to be, otherwise all of the things we built our teenaged years around are lies.
Bangkok, on the other hand…
I was in Tijuana the summer of '88, and it was a shock to my young Canadian sensibilities. The streets were filthy, vendors were physically pulling us into shops, a restaurant we went into had poo on the ceiling (!) of the bathroom, and a trough in the ground to pee into. The whole establishment stretched the definition of a enclosed building as there were incomplete walls and holes, etc.
A leather duffel bag we bought rotted and stank after a few months, and I think I was mildly sick after eating salsa and chips in the aforemention restaurant.
Anecdotal and a 25 year old experience, but I wanted to get that off of my chest!
My next visit, I’m going to dress up as a donkey to test it out.
It’s truth in advertising and all in the name.
It is very likely that if you find the right cab driver, you can be taken to a place in Tijuana where even illegal things happen, beyond what is permissible. But if you just casually arrive in down and walk down the street, it is just like any other Mexican city. Somebody in Los Angeles, is making snuff films, too.
My understanding is that Tijuana got its lurid reputation back in WW2 when it was a favorite destination of sailors from San Diego. Since then things have toned down, in much the same way that Times Square isn’t an open-air market of drugs and hookers anymore.
Born in San Diego in 1950, lived there until 2005. Haven’t ventured across the border since 1968, but prior to then TJ was a squalid hellhole of a city. Even as a child I found it sad and unsettling; as a teenager I never felt safe there. My parents would go there fairly often (my Mother was half-Mexican) and obviously didn’t share my misgivings… Until around 1980, when my Dad and Sister got pulled over for an unspecified traffic violation and were “allowed” to give the cop all the cash they had on hand, for him to “give to the judge.” That ended their visits to TJ.
The “Woman and Donkey” sex shows were common knowledge at least by the early 60’s, when I first heard about them, but from what I’ve read since then I strongly doubt they ever really existed.
I’ve been to Tijuana. I’ve been to Juarez. Don’t hold a candle to Pattaya, or even certain sections of Bangkok.
And the donkey show is a myth. I came of age in West Texas, and a friend and I drove down to El Paso in his pickup once, parked it and walked across into Juarez in the wee hours of the morning. That was my first experience in a foreign country. We were young adults, 21 years old.
His pickup had a camper shell on the back, so that’s where we would sleep at night. He didn’t want to drive it into Mexico, so we always walked over the border that trip. I still remember our hunt for the legendary “donkey show.” A taxi driver said he could take us to it, but each bar he took us to didn’t have it. He’d go inside with us and sit down at the end of the bar, no doubt getting a free drink or some sort of commission for taking us there. Each time we’d tell him, “No, you don’t understand. We want to see the donkey show.” And he’d say, “Oh! The donkey show! Okay, I know where it is.” After three or four bars, we realized he was just jerking us around. I remember one bar in particular, done up like a cave or grotto. I think that was the name of it, The Cave or The Grotto, only in Spanish. The place was empty except for an old hooker named Lucy, had to have been at least 65, and her tongue stayed glued to my friend’s ear.
We never found the donkey show. And what a fine pair of goodwill ambassadors we were, too, for our country. A couple of punk gringos wandering the streets in search of a local lass willing to get it on with livestock. 
Foolish mortals!
To see The Donkey Show you need to go to Café Oberon in Cambridge, MA
Here’s Wikipedia’s take on the legendary Tijuana Donkey Show:
I was a sailor in SanDiego and I saw the donkey show. I think it’s pretty much what the OP described too. I used to go pretty much every day though. I loved it there. I do agree, it’s nothing compared to the Phillipines or Thailand.
The discussion on the Snopes message board from many years ago. No useful information there that I can see
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=print_topic;f=16;t=001149
I saw the donkey show only one time because it is a bit of a scam that taxi drivers do. I remember after the show a Marine gave the girl oral sex and then a navy guy had sex with her on the stage.
I’ve seen all of that…but also fine restaurants, as spotlessly clean as anything in any U.S. city. I’ve driven through the Colonias, where the poverty is as hellish as any “Hobo Jungle” of the U.S. Great Depression…and been to museums, concerts, and festivals that would fit well on any main street in America.
I’ve been helped out, gratis, by friendly people who went out of their way to give assistance…and I’ve been shaken down by corrupt policemen.
Tijuana is a little like the Internet: it allows people to display the full range of their potential. A saint…or an asshole…in Tijuana is a greater saint or asshole than they would be in, say, Fresno or Peoria.
Tijuana still partakes of a greater flavor of a “Frontier Town.”
(And…the worst drivers in TJ are those with U.S. license plates!)
I’m genuinely interested to know how recently this was.
August 11th 1996 2 weeks before I got out of Navy
I never looked for the donkey show, but wasn’t especially interested. I can’t recall ever hearing actual verification from a shipmate.
TJ had whorehouses, and cheap hotels where they’d send a woman to you: Hobson’s Choice. If you were less sentimental about the whole thing, a bar girl would fellate you in the stock room. You’d pay a small price for the act, and a larger price for the shot of tequila that was her right as mouthwash afterward.
We had to be off the street by sunset. Once a ship’s cook and his buddy an aircraft handler (who’s arm was in a cast after a shipboard accident) went to TJ together. The cook was beaten to death, and the Mexican cops kept the Airedale in jail for the murder. He couldn’t remember being in the fight, and the cops hadn’t even bothered to put blood on his cast.
Pattaya was still Third World but higher class. We didn’t worry about the cops, just the stealth transvestites.
If you really wanted to take the pulse of God’s thrombosing hemmeroids, you needed to go to Olongopo, on the island of Luzon.