Field notes · outside the usual routes
Camping in Mexico with two children
When I was 21, on a multi-day solo trek in British Columbia — carrying my tent, sleeping bag, cold-weather gear and food — I learnt that I needed more than peanut butter, a heavy loaf of bread and bananas to feel excited about the next meal. After three days of hiking, the first thing I did on returning to civilisation was buy my first liquid-fuel backpacking stove.
Now, with two children, school and work, I value the human centripetal force of homemade food more than ever. The WhisperLite has been replaced by a rather less compact butane stove.
This page is our family’s packing list: the ten things we always carry on a camping trip in Mexico, and a few things that come along without ever making a list.
Living and working in Guatemalan, South African and Mexican rural communities, I found food bringing people together not just in the home but in the street: chicken dust — spiced chicken grilled over charcoal — in the South African townships, tacos and consomé in Mexico, enchiladas and atol in Guatemala. Mexican natural parks and campsites are no exception — eating is never just a necessity to get through. That’s why four of the ten things on our list are connected to food or cooking.
Where we camp
Our camping is Chiapas camping. For five years we’ve been going back to the same site by a thermal river outside Tuxtla Gutiérrez; we’ve camped in the pine forest at Rancho Nuevo, above San Cristóbal de las Casas, where we live; and sometimes we drive down to the coast. The list below is one family’s kit from those trips, refined mostly by forgetting things. Prices are marked ✓ — what I actually paid, with the year and place.
Four of the ten things we carry are connected to food or cooking. That isn’t an accident.
1 · A butane stove
They sell them on Amazon and in well-stocked ferreterías. Mine boils water faster than my electric kettle at home, and you can buy the butane cartridges (butano) in almost any ferretería, because the same cans fit blowtorch heads. It’s not a backpack item, but it earns its place in the car. I use it mostly for breakfast — eggs and beans — and for tea and coffee. A cartridge gives me at least an hour of cooking, and since I cook quick meals, I generally get three camping trips from one can. I only use it outside — never in the tent.
2 · Long sleeves — and, for me, quercetin
I don’t use insect repellent, but I do cover up anywhere with mosquitoes, and I carry quercetin. I swell more than most people after insect bites and I suffer from allergies; I’ve found it reduces my own itching and swelling, so I start taking it a few days before we leave, and I take it with vitamin C.
That is my personal routine, not advice for anyone else — and my choice not to use repellent shouldn’t be read as advice to avoid it, particularly where mosquito-borne illnesses are present. The WHO’s dengue guidance recommends a suitable repellent as well as covering exposed skin.
3 · Salt, oil and coriander
Living in Mexico, I can think of few dishes that don’t take coriander (cilantro). Corn, meat, salad, a plain avocado — it livens all of them.
4 · A ground sheet
I’ve never bought a footprint — the plastic sheet cut to your tent’s exact dimensions. For MX$150 ✓ (San Cristóbal, 2026) a generic tarp protects the underside from sharp stones and general wear, and adds a second waterproof barrier. Mine is a Pretul, folded so it sits under the tent base without protruding — you don’t want rain running over the tarp and pooling under the tent. Just about every ferretería I’ve been into sells them, and with a little rope or cord you can also sling one between three or four trees for shade or a roof.
5 · A yoga mat
For stretching, sitting and sleeping on. Mine is thick enough that I use it under my sleeping bag instead of an inflatable mat — and it’s added incentive to do a little yoga or meditation while on holiday. That’s for the warmer places, though; a cold night in the pine forest at Rancho Nuevo needs more insulation from the ground than a yoga mat gives you.
6 · Sleeping-bag liners
With the children I use liners far more than actual sleeping bags, because we mostly camp in the warm zones — near beaches and lowland rivers. Sleeping bags are a pain to wash and dry properly; a liner goes straight into the washing machine between trips and takes up very little space.
The liners have their limits, and we learnt them the honest way: one winter at Rancho Nuevo we went up without proper sleeping bags, and the tent froze over. Waking to an icy white pine forest was beautiful. Making the morning fire with trembling hands was not — it was a painfully cold start to the day. For the high, cold sites, take real sleeping bags.
7 · Refried beans and totopos
Ultra-convenient, versatile, and easy to find in tiendas and OXXOs across Mexico — and despite the salt, far healthier than most of what you’ll find in a petrol-station shop. The beans come in a bag, so they’re easy to carry and leave only a small amount of litter, easy to stash until you’re home if there are no bins. Before we leave I add two purchases from the market: eggs and avocado. Together with the beans and totopos they make a one-pan dish that’s ready in ten minutes and feeds the family. The only caveat: your kids may not like avocado.
And take mangoes. Our favourite fruit for camping — they peel easily, don’t get crushed, and don’t ripen too quickly, unlike bananas, which can go over in a single hot day. To the unripened, still-hard ones you can add lime, salt and chilli, if you want to feel a little more Mexican.
8 · Shoes for the water
Every time I take the children to a river and forget our slip-on water shoes, I am deeply repentant. With them on, you can happily walk across a stony riverbed all day without wincing once.
9 · Ocote — resinous pine
In the rural communities where I’ve lived in Mexico and Guatemala, families cooking over wood commonly use ocote as a natural firelighter — the resin takes a match directly. Rather than felling a whole tree, I’ve watched people slowly hack smaller resinous sticks from living ones. It also self-seeds remarkably quickly in my garden. I buy it ready-cut into small sticks for MX$20 ✓ at the market in San Cristóbal (2026) — I see it in the local markets and sold on the street. It burns with thick black smoke, so light it in the open, never inside the tent or under a closed shelter.
One more use for it: at the coast, if we can salvage some old coconuts, we use ocote to get the husks smouldering, and the smoke seems to reduce the mosquitoes around us. Do it where fires are allowed, and keep the smouldering husks well away from the tent and the children. The last time we camped at the coast, the coconuts were donated by the owner of the campsite.
10 · Toilet paper and baby wipes
Many camping areas have very simple bathroom facilities and no guarantee of paper. I always carry a roll, along with baby wipes for grubby hands and for cleaning muddy feet before they come into the tent. The used wipes get bagged with the rest of our rubbish and come home with us — never flushed, never left at the site.
The other thing in my pickup
Like many people in rural Mexico, I usually have a machete in the back of my pickup. I use it sometimes to dehusk coconuts — much harder work than you might imagine — and for cutting small branches and preparing wood for a campfire. And although I have never felt unsafe camping in Mexico, I do find it reassuring to have it nearby at night when we’re somewhere remote.
The tent I downgraded
Until recently I had a mid-range tent, highly wind-resistant and waterproof. When the second pole broke after years of use, instead of repairing it I replaced it with a budget Amazon-brand tent, similar to the Coleman Sundome. It feels substantially less robust — but the mesh sides, with a really simple tarp fitted over the top, make it far more comfortable in hot weather. I’m probably not going back to a more expensive tent.
We are not camping to save money.
Why we keep going back
Camping in Mexico isn’t automatically the cheap option. At Rancho Nuevo we paid MX$300 ✓ for the tent — four of us, one night — back in 2021, when that was about the price of a very cheap room; the price will have moved since. At the river site outside Tuxtla it was MX$40 ✓ per person (July 2026). So it’s worth planning the trip; but the money was never really the point.
For five years now we’ve made the hour-and-twenty-minute drive to the same site by the thermal river outside Tuxtla — summer holidays, and again at Christmas. We’re friends now with the family who live at and run the site. The children play with the dogs and spend the evening, and most of the next day, in the warm river water under the shade of the coconut trees.
When we take that trip in the first week of July, just as the schools break up, the uninhibited feeling of being away from school — no rules, long days full of adventure — comes through in their laughter and in the way they move. That’s what we’re carrying all this kit for.
— Luke Burchell
Field notes
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