Well what can I say about Coco Bongos? Firstly if you are wanting to go I recommend you buy your tickets in the morning/afternoon as they are around $5 cheaper up until 10pm, I also recommend getting there early or else you will have to wait in a loooong queue which isn’t fun in the Mexican heat believe me! Beware of people selling wristbands in the street also, yes some of them are legit but seriously would you wanna take the risk and end up throwing you long saved holiday cash away? Anyways on the night we went it was $50 each but as there is an open bar you don’t mind paying so much.

Well, like I said, we had to wait in a super long queue which was annoying not only due to the heat, but also due to the fact that people are so eager to get into the place that they are nearly standing on top of you! Anywho as the queue moves you go along the front of the building where there are various ’statues’ of famous people, such as the Mask and Michael Jackson and well since it’s a go slow queue you have enough time to get some good pics taken which is a plus….once you reach the entrance of the building you are given a free shot of tequila with a slice of lime…and they don’t seem to mind you having an extra couple of shots as the greedy people in front of us were doing (perfect time for us to bunk in front lol). Once you get inside you go along a corridor which is all painted with more famous people such as Madonna, you then turn a corner where you are searched (handbags for girls and bodies for boys), once searched your wristband is scanned and marked with a black line over the barcode so make sure you have purchased one before you join the queue as you cannot buy them inside and will have to take the long trip back the the end of the queue to do it all over again….you then go up not one but two flights of escalators, yea weird I thought so to!

Once inside you are instantly in a bar where you can get all the drink you want…or so I thought, the so called ‘open bar’ only allows 2 different kinds of cocktails so it was either a sex on the beach or a blue lagoon for me, neither that appetising but I went with the blue lagoons….you are only allowed to get two drinks at any one time and only if they know you are with someone else boo!! This is also the area where the toilets are located, females beside where you entered and males at the back near a set of stairs. Of course like in most places in Mexico there is a toilet attendant, well in the ladies anyway, who hands you paper towels when you wash your hand and has a conveniently located tip jar which you kind of feel obliged to put something in.

Once you get through this area you are in the main place where it’s all happening….we arrived at 10.30pm and they were having I guess what you would call a disco as the main show didn’t start until 12 midnight. They play various types of music and pan a video camera around the room at everyone dancing which is shown on the huge projector screens at the front of the place for all to see, they also encouraging dancing in the little middle stage in the main area, this area eventually turned into another bar as the night went along!

Good luck on finding a seat is all I can say!! Seriously there are tiered areas of steps, but there is no way on earth that you’re allowed to sit on them, the barmen come and move you along and make you stand up!! Any tables, which are only around the edges, are ALL reserved which is not good at all. Thankfully where we were standing at the back there was a nice wee couple who let us share their table to set our drinks on.

There also only seems to be one bar in the main area (before the one that gets opened later on) which was quite busy and they seem to keep it this way to make you want waiter service so they in the end get a huge tip (though we never had probs getting served)….we even had one waiter guy take us somewhere to get a so called better view and when I tried to sit down he was all no no no standing room only and when I went to stand up he was in the way and I got his teeth firmly wedged in my head, but did he care?….did he heck as like he just continued taking drinks orders from the people around us….needless to say that when he went to fulfil their orders we legged it back to our original spot lol.

We were quite bored waiting on the show, yea okay it’s a nice big place with loads of lights, smoke, excellent speaker systems and all the rest of it, but whats the point in all this greatness if the ‘disco’ is going to consist of such music such as The Venga Boys, Cotton Eyed Joy and many other various rubbish music from way back when that you would need to be completely hammered to maybe even consider listening to and even at that only if it was the last choice of music on earth!! So bored and demented with the music and having nowhere to sit we decided to do what any normal person would do when there’s a open bar….yep you guessed it we got sooooo stupidly drunk our night just seemed to get better and better!!

Since your only allowed to get 2 drinks at a time and since we were so near to the outside and the inside bar we made a deal….my partner went to one bar for the drinks and I went to the other for shots and then we swapped round when the next drink was required and this worked well….the shots were great, we don’t even know what they were, our request of gimme a red shoot or gimme a blue shot seemed to go down well and in no time we were well and truly hammered!!

Then the show started….actually we were quite surprised….we were having fun! Okay not the kind of music you would want at a nightclub but as they were actually shows it was great they ranged from Robbie Williams look-a-likes to Moulin Rouge then Beetlejuice, there were cirque de solis type acrobats hanging from the ceiling on ropes and ribbons, you never knew where to look or what was going to happen next and the music was deafening, at the end of some of the shows there were great explosions of light combined with streamers and balloons falling from the ceilings and everyone was cheering and dancing where they stood!

Maybe it was the amount of drink we had consumed but we were actually having a really great night in a place we had already decided to be dreadful and confused in its style so to speak, but really deep down I think we were actually enjoying it so much because the acts were so good, the people involved in the show are great at their jobs and everyone felt a part of it…..though one thing my partner and I both agreed on is that they need to make a decision as to whether they want to have a nightclub/disco or whether they want to have a Las Vegas style show….what we mean by this is that as there is nowhere to sit your feet get sore and people are bumping into you a lot so it would be great if it was a whole seated area with waiter service so we would all have somewhere to sit and watch the show and be able to enjoy it without any hassle and then once its over they could removed all the seating and voila an instant nightclub or disco (depending on the music).

We were told that it was a Michael Jackson tribute night but we are still waiting to see this act lol, they played one video when he was a child with the Jackson 5 doing the ABC 123 song, but as we left at around 1.30am due to sheer utter drunkeness who knows it could have been played later on? Though saying that apparently the show lasts a few hours and then its back to being a disco which goes on until the early hours of the morning, so beware if you fancy staying up until closing pace your drinks so you can last the night lol.

Another thing, there are girls running around with bottles of Tequila or some other kind of drink and they will come and blow their whistels at you to see if you want a shot...do not take one, they will charge you $3 per shot and there is no need when you can go to the open bar and get one for free anyways, they are very annoying just firmly tell them no and look away they will get the hint.

The way out is a bit more difficult to find we actually had to get a barman to take us through the crowd to find the exit

doors and once they are open your out super quick with the doors shut behind you and its just bam instant silence its so quiet its deafening and its quite disorientating because you end up upstairs in the middle of the mall area, totally not where you think you should be, it doesn’t even look like the place would go that far back….all the escalators are shut at this time of night so you have to use the lift to get back down and then enjoy your wee walk back to your hotel.

I heard someone saying that you could book a table the night before or that day when you purchase tickets early and I would fully recommend this, but I dunno how true it is because there was one table empty beside us and I’m sure I saw a dude give the waiter a wee bank-hander of money and all of a sudden the reserved sign was removed from the table and he and his girlfriend had instant seats, so its all about the money people….if you do decide to have waiter service apparently if you give them $20 at the start of the night they will look after you completely and your glass will never be empty but we preferred to get our own drinks for free after having already spent $100 between us to get in and we had no problems getting to the bar either!

Another good thing about this place is that, because it’s a show, they do not discriminate on age, okay they aren’t going to let anyone under the legal drinking age in for obvious reasons, but unlike back home, you won’t be discriminated against for being too old as we saw many older people in the place all having a good time!

You are allowed to take as many pictures as you like but they do ask that you do not film the shows, although saying that I still managed to get a few wee movies with my camera, I mean really you're on your holidays of course you’re gonna want a little movie reminder or two and I’m sure I’m not the first and I definately won’t be the last.

Another bad point is for you smokers out there...if you decided to go for a smoke you have to go outside, but there's no smoking area so you have to properly go outside the exit and then alllll the way back round where you have to queue up to get back in...I don't smoke anymore so didnt have this problem thankfully!

All in all for a whole night out it is good value because really you could spend more than $50 each on drink in a night so basically your paying for your drink and getting a free show with it, not too bad eh? I will be honest though and say that we feel we must of missed something because everyone we spoke to before going to Mexico all told us oh my god you must go to Coco Bongos best night of your life ever, and yea okay we had fun but I have had better so yea if anyone can tell me what we missed that would be great thanks lol.

If you do decide to go here for the night I recommend having no plans for the next day, except maybe some sunbathing because I can assure you, you will have a hangover!

Thanks for reading my review I hope you have an awesome time if you are heading to Mexico and enjoy yourselves if or should I say when you end up in Coco Bongos.