B.C. man takes public transit all the way to Mexico

William Hui did not cheat.

He set his own rules and then planned his route carefully, determined to make it all the way to Tijuana without flying or using Greyhound and Amtrak.

At the end of June, he did exactly that, travelling from Vancouver to Mexico using only public transit.

“People who know me, they already know I'm nuts,” said Hui. “There's a lot of surprise. There's a lot of, ‘What did you do?’"

A TransLink employee, Hui admits he loves transit.

So for nine days, and nearly 3,000 kilometres, he transferred between buses and trains, making his way to the southern tip of California and beyond.

“One of the things I enjoyed doing was just purely looking out the window, looking at the scenery that was passing by,” he told CTV News.

“Whether that's the Oregon Coast, whether that was the giant redwoods that were in northern California.”

His trip wasn’t about saving money. In fact, he figured the transit fares totalled about US$200.

Hui also stayed nightly in hotels, and admitted this kind of travel is not for everyone.

“Absolutely not,” he said, smiling. “Not everybody relishes taking public transit on its own, even for maybe half an hour.”

“It’s right up my alley, and I really enjoyed just exploring new places, exploring places that I thought I could never get to without a car.”

It’s possible he could have travelled beyond Tijuana, but Hui said his Spanish is limited, and decided it was wise to bring his public transit trip to an end.