Month: February 2017

February 11 to February 22, 2017—Heading north on Baja peninsula

What a difference a few thousand feet can make. For the last two weeks we enjoyed reliable weather in Los Barriles—highs in the high 70s, lows in the high 50s. The wind varied in intensity but the weather was always in the high end of the pleasant scale. We drove inland about 80 miles, climbing 1,600 feet to Rancho Verde campground near a national Bio-reserve. The temperature in the daylight was hot enough but went down to 38 at night. The area was forested and full of bird life, much more so than the coastal areas.

Water hookup and hot showers, $8US/night. There was no electricity but we have learned to conserve our resources for more extended stays off-grid.

A local man offered to sell us something called “marihuana;” jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said there was a field of it back in the forest. And it was a forested area, with real trees, the first we’d  seen in six or seven weeks. The national park contains the last or largest stand of pine oaks in Baja or the world, I’m not sure which because the national parks do not come with a lot of information. In fact you would never really suspect you were in one—there is no signage, no trailheads, no rangers, and there are private ranches here and there within the park. On the map is a green area indicating the park boundaries and its name and that is about all you get. Mark and Val and we spent a day in the park, about a half hour from our campground, walking the arroyos, taking lunch under a giant banyan or ficus  tree of some sort.

Seeing  a bobcat was the height of that trip. Mark and I explored several miles of trails around the camp, avoiding the ganja fields.

We stayed two nights in the mountains then descended back to the Gulf and the capital city La Paz. We returned to Campestre Maranatha on the outskirts of the city. It is not a particularly desirable spot but the better of two RV camp choices. We needed a number of supplies from the US-style mega-marts found in La Paz–cat litter, cat food, odds and ends.

An exceedingly rare midwinter rainstorm was forecast during our stay in La Paz; no rain is expected in Baja Sur until the fall. At one point they were calling for 3 inches of rain and 50 mph winds. By the day of the arrival of the storm the forecast was reduced to a half inch of rain and 30mph winds. After some discussion and research we all decided to ride the storm out at a hotel and booked rooms at the Hyatt overlooking the city. Quite a treat, the first hotel stay of our nine month trip, and a good call—it drizzled or rained all day and the winds were as predicted. The cats rode out the storm in the Scamp which was tucked away in a protected corner of the hotel grounds.

The road north from La Paz turns inland into the mountains and then back to the Gulf. We drove several hours to hotel that some sources had described as very accommodating to campers like us, and others described as being a dump with no facilities. (Mark had turned me on to a site called Overlander that logs first-person reports about off-road and obscure camping opportunities around the world. The conflicting reports about the hotel were both at the Overlander site and posted within a few weeks of each other. ) The Hotel Tripui, below Juncalito on the coast, was a very nice spot for us. A gentleman came out and showed us the various sites we could use, offered to run his own extension cords and hoses, told us to use the beautiful pool, wifi in the restaurant. $12US/night.

 

We stayed two nights, taking a day trip to a vast beautiful deserted beach, Punta Arenas, beachcombing.

We bypassed the city of Loreto and made for a dry-camping (i.e. no facilities) beach on Bahia de Concepcion. This meant climbing back into the mountains to probably 2,500 feet and down again to the coast. Following Mark, high in the mountains, I began to wonder about the strange shadow I was seeing under his right rear tire. I got closer and realized it was dangerously, almost completely, flat. I flashed my lights as he realized at the same moment that his steering was getting awfully squishy on some of those tight mountain curves. It could have a tragedy had it blown suddenly. He made it to the bottom of a hill, still high in the mountains. There was a serious gash in the tread of the tire. These are heavy duty tires he has, 34 inches high and 14 inches wide, costing $450 Canadian apiece. He used one of those tire repair kits with the needle and the sticky strip of rubber and, miraculously, it stopped the leak. Unfortunately between the two of us he couldn’t get more than 40 pounds of pressure in the tire before  his cheesy bike pump started revolting. But the tire held the twenty miles it took us to get to Santispac beach.

Santispac is the most desirable of the string of beaches along Concepcion Bay. The mountains behind shade some of the other beaches hours before they cast shadows on Santispac. We had stayed at Coyote Beach, a few miles down the Bay, on our way down and loved it but Santispac is everyone’s first choice—a beautiful cove, two restaurants, water that is shallow for a good ways out and warms during the day. We took Mark’s boat out several times, fishing or cruising. I climbed the mountain behind the beach. Tough climbing these hills; you really can’t use your hands because every plant that you might want to grab is bound to be full of thorns or spikes or needles, and the handholds between rocks might contain black widow spiders. It is slow, strenuous going; worth the effort for me.

Took Mark’s tire to the llanteria a few miles down the road. (Baja roads are lined with discarded tires and small tire repair places.) These guys removed the tire, patched it from inside, had it ready in an hour, charged 400 pesos ($20),  while Mark and I went into Mulege for supplies (read beer.)

Stayed four nights in Santispac. Brenda developed a relationship with a chihauhua named Lucy

and befriended a 5 year old French Canadian girl named Flora. I tried to wash my hair in the bay using biodegradable soap that Mark had. I thought it was trick soap because it wouldn’t lather and it coated my hair with some wax-like substance. I looked like Albert Einstein on a bad hair day. I learned later that ordinary soap is animal-derived and based on sodium chloride which undergoes changes in the presence of salt water none of which  enhance the properties expected of soap. What you need in saltwater is “sailors’ soap” which is plant-derived and based on potassium chloride.

Mark and Val had some Ontario neighbors that were supposed to have met them in Mexico weeks ago but were delayed by the harsh winter in the north and some other issues. They finally arrived in Santispac, nice couple named Jeff and Wilma. The Ontarians plan on taking the ferry from Santa Rosalia to mainland Mexico, which shaves about 600 miles off their trip east and spares them the bad roads we know are ahead.  We all hung out for a couple of days then it was time for Brenda and I to go off on our own. Between Alan and Betsi and Mark and Valerie we have been traveling with partners for almost our entire stay. Being on our own suddenly makes me feel a little vulnerable, but we are old Mexico hands now and, and for a the next week or so, traveling ground we have already been over.

 

January 27 to February 11, 2017—Land’s End

Todos Santos (All Saints)

From La Paz we crossed back to the Pacific, to Todos Santos (TS). TS is the northern edge of the   heavily-touristed region of southern Baja that reaches north from Cabos San Lucas. It is day trip distance from Cabo so a lot of people who have flown into Cabo take tour buses to TS to see “the real Mexico” and a whole industry has sprung up to simulate the real Mexico. It is nice enough—some touristy shops but a greater number of fine art and craft shops selling silver, pottery, Oaxacan blankets. There are a lot of restaurants, a few nice hotels. The prices were higher than any place we had visited, and the shopkeepers did not negotiate.

We were lucky to get two spots at the only RV park, El Litro, a dusty lot at end of a dirt road on the edge of town, some palms providing shade. Most of the spaces were taken up with long-term residents. The owner, an American named Sylvia, and several of the residents I talked to, had been there thirty years.

Mexican towns are filled with dogs, and they are overwhelmingly good-looking mutts, well-fed and well-behaved. The dogs of Todos Santos were more aggressive and threatening. Our friends Alan and Betsi have a lovable old golden lab, a service dog that doesn’t have an aggressive gene in its body. It was harassed and nipped on several occasions by the local mongrels on the occasions when we took her into town. The dust, the dogs, the Cabo gringos—we hadn’t found the place where we could hole up for an extended period.

Took a couple of trips to the beach nearby, Punta Lobos. We saw whales spouting offshore, and rays jumping clear out of the  water near shore. The fishing fleet is here, about twenty pangas on the beach. Tourists come here for whale-watching and fishing tours. When the boats return from these trips the operators idle offshore about thirty yards and read the rhythms of the waves. When the timing is right they go full-throttle and drive the boats straight into the shore, hurtling about thirty feet onto the sand, props spinning. We watched them fillet the mackerel and bonito they had caught.

I got a glimpse of the phenomenon called “green flash” that I has interested me all these years. In the tropics (the Tropic of Cancer runs just north of TS), in the moment when the last of the sun disappears into the sea, observers report seeing the sky flash green for microsecond. What I saw was the tiny arc of the disappearing sun turn a distinct green color just before dipping into the ocean.

Since we were so close to the bottom of the peninsula we decided we might as well see things through to the bottom of the peninsula so left Todos Santos after a couple nights and went to Cabo San Lucas. It is bustling with local life and lots of visitors who fly into the nearby airport. Beaches lined with all-inclusive, barricaded hotels, and with vendors of everything–blankets, massages, jetskis, sensemilla, blankets, hats, Cuban cigars, everything “almost free today, senor.” We rented space from a peculiar Dutchman, given to odd comments that I think he thought were funny. I would have liked to have heard his story but we walked the beaches all day, went into town for an overpriced dinner, didn’t see any celebrities, and left the next morning.

Drove across the peninsula again and up the Gulf coast for an hour to Martin Verdugo’s Hotel and RV Resort in Los Barriles, and here we have remained for twelve days. It has been nice to sit in one place for a while. Mark and Valerie had arrived a few days before us so we were all together again. Alan had a high school friend who built a house in Barriles to spend the winters in. It is one of the best-designed homes I’ve ever been in; not a mansion but perfectly thought-out and high quality construction by a local architect and her husband, a contractor.

Los Barriles attracts kite-boarders and sail-boarders from all over the world. When the wind kicks up to fifteen knots or more they swarm the gulf for miles of coast here. When the wind dies down for a few days they race off to find it. Amazing aerealists, these guys, launching off waves to hang twenty or thirty feet in the air, cutting through the surf at 30 mph. Some of the kite-boards have hydrofoils underneath that allow the board to rise up a few feet out of the water and avoid the bounce of the waves so the operator is just gliding along smoothly like an ice skater.

This is also a world class fishing destination—marlin and all other bill-fish, tuna, dorado, rooster fish. The high season is the spring and early summer, but there is still a lot of fishing activity here. Mobula Rays jump out of the near shore water here, with regularity, propelling themselves several feet into the air and bellyflopping loudly, for reasons not understood.

Apparently Los Barriles (“the Barrels,” for reasons I haven’t been able to discover; I did see many barrel cactus here which I had not seen elsewhere in Baja) has exploded in popularity with gringos over just the past few decades. Several RV parks accommodating 60+ rigs each,  many hotels, and a lot of property going into north American hands. (Property laws in Mexico for the most part forbid actual ownership by non-Mexicans. People here wind up getting lifetime leases. They can only realize equity by selling the lease or becoming renters but they never actually own title to the property.) A lot of this growth has been fueled by the wind sports.

We liked it because it was relatively cheap at $22/night for water and electricity and sewer connection, had hot showers, free but sketchy wi-fi, lots of dining options, and occasional musical entertainment at local establishments. I played harmonica backup for a couple of performers at the open mic held at Fogota restaurant on Thursdays. There is also a palapa covered, twelve-seat open bar on the beach in front of Verdugo’s park, open from 4 to 8, serving potent and delicious margaritas, run by an enterprising young fellow named Rodrigo who must squeeze a couple hundred limes every evening.

Brenda has walked miles of the beach in both directions. I hiked up the little “mountain” overlooking the town a couple times. We can walk ride bikes to everything in town which has about a half mile of main street with shops and markets and bars and restaurants. Took a couple day trips to see the area and one excursion visiting the veterinarians in neighboring villages until we finally found one that we think has cured Soulie’s ear problem.

Otherwise we have just been lounging, meeting up with our travel companions at the bar in the evening or at a restaurant, or taking turns hosting dinners. Mark is perfecting his recipe for a Baja specialty called La Coquetiel—served in a parfait glass it is a cold, tomato –based concoction like gazpacho, containing chopped vegetables and an assortment of cold cooked seafood, and lime juice.

The water is a little too cold for everyone except me to swim in. It is clear to ten feet and full of life; falls off to deep very quickly and has a strong tidal pull.

Barriles has the most treacherous streets and sidewalks. The curbs are cliffs, sometimes a foot and a half high. The sidewalks slope off sharply into the street at odd intervals. There are often barbwire fences running along the sidewalk. There are open utlity connections everywhere–some you could put both hands in, some you could drop a TV into. Brenda took a spill on one of the slopes that interrupt the sidewalk, sliding on the sand that had accumulated there. Got skinned knees and a skinned elbow. Could have been worse, even deadly, if a car had been coming.

We finish up our stay in Barriles tomorrow. Alan and Betsi left three days ago heading back to California. Mark and Valerie left three nights ago also to check out more remote beaches but returned her to Verdugo’s just an hour or so ago. Tomorrow we caravan with them inland a little ways into the mountains for a couple nights before starting a slow return to the states, taking maybe three weeks to cover 800 miles.

January 14 to January 26, 2017—Loreto to La Paz (with addendum to previous entry)

I neglected to account for a day in our trip from Guerrero Negro to Mulege. We stayed at a beach campground outside Santa Rosalia. It was typical of many campos to be found along the coasts—set up right on the beach, no water or electricity, an outhouse; somebody who might or might not be entitled to do so comes around each day to collect the five or ten dollar (American) fee. This camp, the name of which escapes me, also had a cantina that served food and beverages, and had wifi. There were about fifty sites, less than half occupied. The residents were older folks (older than me that is) who had been wintering in this location for decades. They all knew each other. Most were from northwest US or Canada.

Early in the morning Alan and I talked to a guy, who had been out fishing since dawn, as he was bringing his boat to shore. He told us about the fishing and his history with the place. He noted that every year one or more of the old-timers passes on and, surprisingly to me, there were no new people moving in; none pursuing the beach-camping life for several months during the winter. I don’t know what has changed. He didn’t know what had changed. In any event this guy was knowing and friendly, but as we were preparing to leave the camp an hour or so later he came over to Brenda and started a spiel that went “People like to have mementos of their travels and with that in mind I’d like  to offer this book of poems of my own to you. Some people are put off by poetry because they don’t understand it but I think you will find my work quite accessible.  Let me read you one,” and he  proceeded to read some iambic pentameter doggerel about Mexican children and sunsets, simple-minded stuff. It was accessible alright, but not at his asking price. I offered to trade him an unused Potomac Riverkeeper hat but he said, “No the price is thirteen dollars.” I’m behind his back signaling to Brenda, “Ixnay on the ookbay!” She offers ten, I might have sprung for five for the amusement value, but he sticks to his $13 price. Sorry Amigo, no vende. Hustling old codger, maybe he’s the reason gringos stopped coming to Mexico.

Baja Sur is desert cut through with high mountainous remains of volcanic origin veering from coast to coast, and cordon cactus the largest in the world, and crystal waters on the Sea of Cortez side and the wild Pacific on the other. In between is vast areas of untrammeled, scrubby land broken up with the occasional small town or village. Some, like Mulege or San Ignacio, are palm tree oases beside perennial rivers. Others pop up in the most inhospitable of areas, compact collections of ramshackle shanties that could be in Soweto or Kingstown, or cute little towns of adobe painted bright and planted around with flowers. On long stretches of fifty miles or more there will be a few roadside tiendas or taquerias, little wooden shacks or one room adobe buildings selling a few comestibles and beer. There are maybe a dozen cities, excluding the border towns, that number more than a couple thousand residents

During the monsoon season, September, the rivers flood and destroy whole villages. In 2009 a flood wiped out a swath of houses three deep along the river in Mulege, along with road infrastructure and bridges, a disaster from which they are still recovering. Historically, the capital of Baja California has been relocated from cities destroyed by rainstorms. The high mountains receive more regular rainfall which seeps through the porous volcanic rock and emerges in intermittent streams that support small homesteads seen off the road marked by windmills. In the central plains of the south there is more abundant water near the surface and row crops like corn and chickpeas are grown. But tourism and fishing are the prime income sources for the Baja peninsula, with a few cities supporting some mining operations.

It is a dusty place. The residents of the cities and shanty towns are constantly sweeping the few paved streets and sidewalks. All over Mexico, every third building is in a state of being under construction or under demolition, it is hard to tell which. There are building lots everywhere with walls of structures, two or three or even four walls, some chest-high, some ready for a roof, and it is obvious that they have been in this state for many years. Perhaps these are markers of the 2008 financial crisis in Mexico. Or perhaps they are being built slowly as resources become available. Somone told me that a building in Mexico isn’t subject to taxation until it is finished so there is motivation to leave your house unfinished.

Loreto

Loreto is a decent-sized city of some 20,000. In the mid 18^th century it was the largest city in the western coast of the Northern hemisphere. In 1750 there was no place with more inhabitants from Alaska to the equator on the Pacific coast. It was the home base of the Spanish Christian missionaries who went inland to San Javier to build what is now the oldest European church in western part of the northern Hemisphere (1749) and which we visited by driving, sans trailer, over a 5,000 ft mountain range for a day trip.

They went up the west coast establishing missions as far north as San Francisco. Junipero Serra started from Loreto. First the Jesuits, then the Dominicans, then the Franciscans. Just as in the US, many of the native tribes died from disease or outright murder shortly after the arrival of the Europeans.

We moved into the RV camp within the city of Loreto, and were soon joined by Mark and Valerie who had been dry-camping on the coast while we were in Mulege.

Over these few nights several restaurants were sampled, I tried unsuccessfully to obtain cash advances on my bank card, a problem that had surfaced in Mulege and was starting to become a worry, and too much tequila was consumed by Mark and I. Brenda and Betsi hit all the little shops along the malecon and around the old town square.

We met a Canadian who played the pennywhistle and he and Brenda met up in the camp patio in the evening to play some songs. They played a few songs, drew a small appreciative crowd, played a few songs more and fun was being had, until some recently-arrived camper complained about the loudness. It was 9:30 in the evening. The musicians obliged and the party broke up. At 6:00 am the next morning the cross fit gym started up with superloud headbanging music and the complainer, according to a witness, “packed up and left in the time it took for me to take a piss.”

There is a nice new hotel and a nice new waterfront promenade in Loreto, constructed recently by the government.

Actually, a few of the Sea-side towns have similar construction projects and similar appearance and Alan hipped me to the fact that a previous government had invested a bundle in these Sea-side projects with the idea that they would draw in the yacht-cruising set. The problem for the government was that yacht cruisers aren’t inclined to pay American prices for hotel rooms and mooring spaces when they can anchor offshore for nothing. The hotel in Loreto probably had two hundred rooms and, at the time we were there, exactly two renters. And the story is the same in La Paz and other locations. The public works project was a bust and in fact may have been a pork project all along.

Loreto is clean, friendly, with lots of good services. It is also noisy (heavy metal music started early and ended late at the nearby CrossFit gym; dogs barking; roosters crowing) and after a couple of nights Brenda and I headed back to the Pacific coast with Alan and Betsi while Mark and Valerie continued on down the Gulf coast.

Puerto San Carlos

A three hour+ drive from Loreto, over the mountains to the Pacific, Puerto San Carlos is on Magdalena Bay, a large protected cove famous for whale watching. We got in late and it was extremely windy, gale-force. We pulled onto the beach behind a hotel/restaurant, asked around, and a guy said we could stay there for $10 american (he was the only guy so far smart enough to quote prices in US dollars. When we arrived in Mexico one US dollar was buying 19 pesos; by the time we got to this place a US dollar was worth 22 pesos—a ten percent increase in value over three weeks.)

We arranged for a whale watching excursion the next morning, $150 total for four of us, for 3 hours, in a panga which is the universal work boat of the Mexicans on both coasts. Boston whaler-sized, high jutting prows, open, fiberglass, powered by anything the seamen can get their hands on. The fishermen beat the daylights out of these boats busting through the chop at high speed. You hear them in the morning in every seaside town—Bam! Bam! Bam!—racing out to sea. We had a margarita in the restaurant and were asleep by 8pm, worn out by driving. The next day was too windy for whale watching so we skedaddled back to the Sea of Cortez to

La Paz

La Paz is the capital of Baja California Sur (Baja Sur being the southern half of the peninsula. In the 1500’s Spanish and Portuguese sailors, who had explored the opening of the Sea of Cortez, thought that the whole Pacific coast of what we now call California was one big island extending from what we now call Cabo San Lucas to god-knows-where.) La Paz is a city of 200,000 residents. We took a spot in an RV park outside of town called Maranatha. It was a large operation with event and dormitory spaces, a pool that the cool weather did not make inviting. We were in a very spacious site near the highway. Made friends with Jeff and Sonya from Washington State, next door to us in a Class A (i.e. bus-sized) RV. Stayed two nights, went into town, shopped at the WalMart, took Soulie to a vet. We were concerned that she had been bothering her eyes and ears with rubbing, but the problem appears to be more serious. She has been eating well throughout the trip but has lost over two pounds. Her protein levels are on the low edge of normal. We made two visits to the vet and he gave her antibiotics the name of another doctor to follow up with in Los Barriles in ten days.

We left the rv camp and went to a free beachfront site twenty miles away, Playa Tecolote. Severe winds and crashing surf. A few hours after we set up camp a group of kiteboarders arrived and proceeded to execute worldclass kite surfing maneuvers right in front of us, twenty of them executing the most acrobatic and high-speed antics. During the night the surf broke over the beachhead and flowed into the campsites. The dirt trail we had come in on was a nascent river.

We managed to find our way out and decided to escape the wind by crossing back to the Pacific Ocean again, which at this point on the peninsula was only an hour away.