Baja California

The Beginning
I live again! Yes, I am back to blogging after my month-long hiatus. Because I know everyone is absolutely dying to hear about my trip to Mexico, I’ve chosen it as the subject of this blog. All right, then, here we go. It was a dark and stormy night…

…erm, the bright and sunny Saturday morning of March the 24th at 9 o’clock when I set out for the state of Baja California, in Mexico, with my two sisters. Our chosen mode of transportation was my brother-in-law’s extremely nice Toyota Rav4, which he was so generous as to lend us for the week. We packed it with our stuff and Anubis, the protector-dog belonging to my older sister Rebecca, and set out. We crossed the US-Mexican border without even being stopped, which has happened both of the other times I’ve visited Mexico, too.

Once inside Mexico we tried to make it to El Rosario so that we could stay at Mama Espinoza’s, a hotel that Rebecca was familiar with and highly recommended. We took a side detour to visit La Bufadora. Here I got my first pictures of the trip.

La Bufadora is a marine geyser, and is much more impressive in life than in my pictures. It shoots, many people said, up to eighty feet high. I think it goes higher; it certainly looks much higher than that. There’s a legend about it: a baby whale swam into the cave at the base of it and then grew too fast and got stuck in there. The spout is the breath from its blowhole, and the roar of La Bufadora is the sound of its cry. Ickle baby whale, poor thing.

The channel and the geyser, the geyser spouting, more spouting, the runoff during a lull, a particularly high spout, and two more pictures for good measure: one and two.

Along the way to La Bufadora the walk is lined with shops selling all sorts of stuff. Rebecca bought me a bag from here. It says that it’s Gucci, and purports to be made in Italy, but it’s manifestly not. I know this because what is actually stamped in the side is “GUCCI, mede in italy”. I nearly laughed myself to death. I also bought some fake Chanel sunglasses there, because they were nice, except that the brand-stamping was shoddy, so I’ve taken off the marks so that no one can tell they were supposed to be Chanel. Perfectly usable now.

After this detour, we continued on to El Rosario, where we attempted to stay at Mama Espinoza’s. It was full, so we got directed to another place, the Cactus Hotel. Upon seeing the gigantic room we got, plus the very cool arrangement of it and the utter cleanliness of the place, Rebecca pronounced it to be far superior to Mama Espinoza’s.

Also in El Rosario is a little convenience store, Danny’s Espinoza Market, run by a man called Mishael Espinoza. If ever anyone who reads this happens to be in El Rosario, this is the place to buy your stuff. Not because it’s such a very great store, but because of Mishael. More on him later.

Guerrero Negro
On our second day we went down about 350 kilometres more, to the town of Guerrero Negro, which actually saw us leaving the state of Baja California and entering Baja California Sur. Guerrero Negro is a very orderly town, very flat, and very spread out. We stayed in a hotel that at first we thought was very nice. We went along in this happy delusion until the next morning, when we showered and spotted fleas jumping about on the white tiles of the shower. This unwaggy discovery incited us to think that if there were fleas in the shower where we could see them, there very likely were also fleas on the dark carpet where we could not see them. We vacated the premises as soon thereafter as possible. We do not seem to have picked up fleas, so I guess we suffered no harm after all.

There were quite a few interesting features about Guerrero Negro. There is a huge salt processing facility; we actually traveled through it on the way to the whale-watching boat. The salt water is spread out into huge lagoons, which are then allowed to dry. The salt crusts in piles and is then gathered, and seems to be stored in this one gigantic pile. I actually saw bulldozers traveling up it; the pile was about twenty-five times the height of one bulldozer, and many more times as wide and long. I also saw huge sea-barges piled with the stuff.

There are osprey breeding-platforms dotting this area; it has something to do with a conservation effort because of too many osprey eggs breaking because the shells were too thin, a result of overuse of pesticides. I didn’t quite understand the guide on that bit (his English was not the best, and my Spanish is the worst). In Guerrero Negro proper, however, the wildlife consists mainly of dogs. They run everywhere and do not belong to anyone. They flinch away from people at the slightest sharp movement, leading me to believe that they probably get hit quite often. I got a picture of three of them on the roof of a store. I have no idea how they got up there (plus I’ve never seen such a thing in the US) so I took a picture.

Roof Dogs.

Then there were also seals, which we saw on the end of the whale-watching tour. They were quite funny; the men were sticking their noses up in the air, and the less fat one was honking, and the ladies were just flopping about totally ignoring them. We went past some very sandy beaches, piled high with dunes and very desolate indeed, on the tour, which I liked so much that I got pictures of as well. I would have loved to have been able to stop and walk on them, but, sadly, the boat didn’t stop. The picture quality is less sometimes because these pictures were taken from a boat going about forty to fifty kilometers an hour, bumping over the waves.

The seals, proud males and bored females, and one lady notices. The empty sand beaches are as follows: one, two, and three.

And then there was the actual whale-watching tour. It was fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. The boat went out to a very wide bay/lagoon, where grey whales give birth and prepare the babies to go into the open ocean. We got surrounded by them and saw all of the things of a stereotypical whale-watching tour; the breathing, breaching, skyhopping, &c. And all three of us got to touch a baby whale! And his/her mama, too! They feel exactly like wet rubber, except for the barnacles, which are scratchy. The mums were worried about letting the babies near at first, but they loosened up after a while; either that or the babies became more disobedient. We saw one mom shove her baby away when he got too close. That pair went away after that.

All told we probably saw about forty-fifty whales that were distinguishably different (there might have been more, I just couldn’t tell since they weren’t all up at the same time, and I have a limited memory for distinguishing marks). There was one whale that scratched himself or herself on the bottom of our boat; it made the whole thing shake. That actually happened each time a whale was on one side of the boat close enough to touch; the boat shivers and then sinks on that side. Not enough to capsize it or anything, but that’s how you tell when a whale is there. I actually have no idea why it happens. I’ll have to look into the physics of large masses underneath small boats sometime.

The first whale we saw.
I took the picture out of excitement at actually seeing a whale, figuring that I wouldn’t get to see too many more (as happened on my last whale-watching trip, when I was 13). How wrong I was…

The first mother and baby.
Whale with tail visible.
A mother whale, very barnacled.
That mother’s curious baby.
The mother warning him off.
The baby coming back anyway.
That’s Rebecca about to touch the baby.

The mother checking us out.
That’s Jessica about to touch her.

Contact photo!
Jessica actually touching a grey whale! Woot! It was so cool, I touched that one too! And her baby! Whales whales whales! Whee!

Mulegé
Then on the next day we drove from Guerrero Negro to Mulegé. It’s a tiny little town, very peaceful, with the friendliest people imaginable. We actually stayed about ten miles outside of town, on this little protrusion of land aptly named the Point of Dreams (in Spanish of course, but I can’t remember how to spell it correctly). We stayed in a little bungalow we rented, for two days. And we swam, and snorkeled, and it was the most relaxing thing I have ever done, I think. Jessica, my younger sister, found an otter skull, and a starfish, and was the one to spot the first stingray. She kept the skull, but we had to put the starfish back because it turned out to be alive. I haven’t really got much to say about Mulegé except that the two days we spent there were my favourite of the trip.

The sunrise at our private stretch of beach, which came with the bungalow when we rented it, and a scenic wave, also taken at sunrise.

Driving
Then we drove back, and it was pretty much just retracing our steps back, except that we went straight from Mulegé to El Rosario, without stopping in Guerrero Negro. Along the way I took some pictures of various things that interested me.

Drug lord house.
This was a house in an entire neighborhood of houses belonging to drug lords. The construction on some of them is straight from the realm of the fantastic. There was one that was done with minarets, and a yellow castle—with turrets—not far from it, and a bunch done in what I shall term “cinderblock style”, which looks a lot like a prison only with windows. I even saw one shaped like a naked woman’s chest and face. Yes, really, complete with flesh-coloured paint and erect nipples; it was probably forty feet high, set on a hillside. I would have got a picture except that we were going down the highway at 140 kilometres an hour and there was no access ramp to turn back on. It was the single most amusing and pathetic house I’ve ever seen.

Pretty desert.
Pretty cacti.
A flower farm.
A forest of palms.
Vista one.
Vista two.

Military checkpoint.
We also went through eight military checkpoints, four each way, and were stopped six times and inspected five. This is one we got stopped at and asked a bunch of questions, but not actually made to get out of the vehicle and searched. It was kind of amusing to watch them searching our car very assiduously for smuggled drugs. They even opened the hood to check once, but they left most of our stuff alone, not pawing through our belongings.

A cow.
This animal is, as you can see, a cow. It was standing about a foot off the side of the main highway, without any kind of barrier between it and the road.

Cow bones.
And not too much further on we observed these bones, which leads me to think that sometimes the cows get hit when they wander about like that.

We started watching for bones after that, and found at least twenty that we considered worth going to look at. The reason we were looking at them is because we had by this time come upon a desire to possess some desert-bleached skulls, the stereotypical sort you see in movies and suchlike. And we did in fact collect a skull for each of us. Rebecca got the most fantastic cow skull ever (I’ll try an obtain a picture for a later post), Jessica got a somewhat less fantastic but still impressive cow skull (because she already had the otter skull), and I got a horse skull. My skull has a bullet-hole between the eyes; the poor baby was shot and then left in the desert to rot away and get bleached.

The cow skull front, the cow skull from the side, my horse skull from the front, horse skull from the side, and a close-up of the bullet hole.

Pay it Forward
And then on the drive back, one other extra-special thing happened. We ran out of gas on the way from Mulegé to El Rosario, because we forgot to fill the tank in Guerrero Negro, which is the last place with gas before El Rosario. El Rosario is about 350 kilometres from Guerrero Negro, as previously mentioned, and we left Guerrero Negro with half a tank. We were, upon reflection, perhaps carelessly forgetful.

Then, naturally, we were not wagged when we ran out of gas about 15 kilometres from El Rosario. We were having a collective “oh shit” moment, because for three gringas in Mexico, two of whom do not speak Spanish, running out of gas is definitely not a safe thing. Especially at night, which was due in one half hour.

And then the amazing part happened. Jess and I pushed the Rav4 off the road onto a pullout, and there happened to be a pickup hauling a boat parked some ways ahead on the same pullout. Immediately after we got the car off the road, a van pulled in behind us, carrying a man by the name of Mishael Espinoza (related to Mama Espinoza of El Rosario, charity must run in the family) and his friend. These two gentlemen offered to take Rebecca into town to get gas to bring back for the car, and the hubbub of people around the car attracted the attention of the gentleman who owned the boat. He came up to see what all the fuss was, and when he found out, said that he had a can of spare gas with him that we could use.

This gentleman was probably between fifty and sixty, and was a visitor to Baja from Wyoming. And his only requirement for giving us his gas and pulling us out of our tight spot was that we pass it on ten times. I’ve watched the movie Pay it Forward, but I’ve never seen anything in real life remotely like that before now.

So then Mishael followed us into town, to the Pemex station, and made sure we were all right before leaving. It was really the most extraordinary resolution to a potentially catastrophic disaster ever.

That’s the basic rundown on our trip to Mexico. I could elaborate more, but this is long enough, I think. Adios, until next time.