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Winding south to the beauty that is Baja
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/11/02/...
Nature reserves and plenty of local color await daring drivers
Sara Gay Damma
New York Times
November 2, 2003
The highway sign: "Camino Sinuoso" -- "Winding Road" is an understatement. Baja California's Transpeninsular Highway snakes incessantly down the
Pacific from Tijuana, switches back up and over the sierra, drops to the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) and finally twists into Los Cabos. The
nearly 1,000-mile drive through fishing villages, mountain mission towns, beach communities and small ranching enclaves has brought us back every year
for the past six years.
We set the car radio to Mexican stations playing guitar- and accordion- driven Norte?o dance music as my husband, Tom, and I swung onto the Tijuana-
Ensenada toll road. We followed the sweep of the coast, with sheer cliffs dropping down to transparent blue water. In the distance, volcanic peaks
disappeared in the clouds; offshore shrimpers dotted the horizon.
At Ensenada, the road became two lanes. Axle-busting speed bumps slowed us in small towns, but we coasted through the drug checkpoints; the soldiers
were more interested in northbound traffic. In the fertile farm region, men and women, their heads shrouded in bandannas, trudged between rows of
asparagus, strawberries, nopales (edible cactus) and grapes. A cowboy galloped by.
After 200 miles, we reached the fishing town of San Quint?n, whose harbor sits in the curve of a small bay where fishing boats and the Mexican navy
tie up. The Old Mill, a low-rise inn, looks out across the bay and a spit of land to the Pacific. My husband rigged his spinning rod and walked across
the Old Mill's picnic area to the nearby sea wall. The crew of the patrol boat laughed when he drew up seaweed. Five young boys gathered to offer
advice until Tom handed his rod to one delighted bare-chested boy. The others jumped into the receding tide to gather crabs with their hands.
We drove 3 miles to Los Jardines, a restaurant set in palms and greenery. At the bar, a pair of men sat head to head, playing guitars and singing
rancheras, sad ballads of lost loves and dreams, to cheers from a table of young locals. We ordered Pismo clams, fresh from the bay, and the day's
catch -- mackerel -- grilled in mango sauce.
When we walked into Mama Espinosa's restaurant the next morning in El Rosario, about 40 miles south, Rollie Espinosa was stoking the potbellied stove.
"Welcome back, welcome," she boomed, then asked after our daughter, who'd been on our first trip in 1996 and is now a graduate student. She filled our
cups with strong Mexican coffee. A grizzled beekeeper came in, laden with jars of wild honey. I coughed, and he zipped to my side with a dripping
tablespoonful.
We continued across deep green valleys. A series of dangerous curves carried us into high desert, a land of giant card?n cactus, Dr. Seussian cirio
cactus, fat- trunked elephant trees, minivan- size boulders and enormous lava flows. We'd arrived in Catavina, a small, picturesque settlement -- a
few houses, truck-stop restaurants and a hotel -- good for filling the gas tank and eating before the three-hour drive to Guerrero Negro.
Dusty Guerrero Negro is dependent on a salt-extracting business and tourists who come from January to March to see the calving Pacific gray whales in
nearby Scammon's Lagoon. We'd joined a whale-watching trip here in 1999, but this year we continued across the Vizcaino Desert, now a UNESCO biosphere
reserve of 6.2 million acres. Home to myriad species, including the endangered pronghorn antelope and the gray whales at Bah?a San Ignacio, the
Vizcaino Reserve was saved in 2001 from expansion of the saltworks by an international environmental outcry.
The town of San Ignacio is a mountain oasis. The much-photographed, 200- year-old Misi?n San Ignacio dominates one end of the tree-shaded plaza. At
the opposite end is the office of Kuyima, an ecotourism organization with which we had arranged to camp and go whale-watching on the bay. Around the
corner is Casa Elvira, a restored 100-year-old adobe house turned bed-and-breakfast where we usually stop for a night.
We bounced across the washboard 36-mile gravel road for two hours to arrive at Bah?a San Ignacio for a sunset punctuated by the splashing and blowing
of cavorting whales. That night, around family-style tables in Kuyima's palapa restaurant, we listened to stories of the day's whale-watching.
The next day we raced in 45 minutes to the whale-watching zone across the lagoon in a 20-foot panga with an outboard motor. Then the drivers cut their
engines; they may not chase whales. Within minutes, mothers and calves surrounded us, surfacing and rolling over next to us.
We'd seen whales in other Baja lagoons, but nothing compared to these, swimming next to our boats and surfacing on both sides. A day later, we drove
45 miles on the steep, curving, aptly named Devil's Grade, from San Ignacio down to Santa Rosalia.
With Las Tres Virgenes volcanoes on one side and ever-enlarging glimpses of the Sea of Cortez around each hairpin curve, we continued to the small
town of Mulege. Mulege, its houses brightened with bougainvillea, nestles in a verdant river valley at the top of Bah?a Concepcion. An old mission
with walls of hand-cut stone stands on the hill overlooking the town.
Over our favorite Mulege meal of barbecued quail by candlelight at Restaurante Los Equipales, we settled into comfortable wood-and-leather chairs to
plan the next day's 300-mile drive to La Paz.
Every turn in the cliff-hanging road south revealed another white-sand beach and camping site. South of Baja's colonial capital, Loreto, the first
European settlement in the Californias (1697), the road climbed the eastern escarpment of the sierra and rolled out across an arid plain toward La
Paz. A giant monument depicting a pair of doves marked the entrance to the city, first discovered by emissaries of Hern?n Cort?z in 1535. With a
population of about 200,000, La Paz is a quietly cosmopolitan small city with a rich history.
In the 16th century, fortune-seekers came for the pearls, followed by missionaries, then pirates who preyed on Spanish trading galleons. The city
became the capital of the state of Baja California Sur in 1829, emerging in this century as a free port and fishing destination.
At Hotel Lorimar, a charming budget hotel two blocks off the malec?n with an interior court full of birds and greenery, we asked after Chuco, a large
macaw that used to roam the hallways trying to join unsuspecting guests in their showers. He'd been removed to a restaurant named for him. "Not a
minute too soon," remarked the gentleman at the desk.
One hot afternoon, we walked through tree-lined commercial and residential streets to the three-story Museo de Anthropologia on Calles 5 de Mayo and
Altamirano. The museum is crammed with Baja artifacts and fossils from precolonial times on, including rock paintings and dioramas.
An hour's drive south is the partly paved cutoff to Cabo Pulmo on the east cape. Not much more than a string of houses and a few diving shops
paralleling a magnificent beach, it was made a National Marine Sanctuary in 1995, to preserve the northernmost living coral reef in North America.
Across the peninsula from Cabo Pulmo, Todos Santos straddles the Tropic of Cancer. When we arrived six years ago to bodysurf and camp on the 10-mile
beach at Los Cerritos south of town, we were captivated by this burgeoning arts community made up of old Mexican families, farmers and ranchers, and
international artists. There are not yet enough expatriates to distract from the town's essentially Mexican atmosphere.
We spent days picnicking and bodysurfing at Los Cerritos, hiking to other beaches to watch gray whales roll in the surf, taking in the fishing boat
landings at Punta Lobos or exploring Pescadero, an organic gardening and farming community, and the nearby botanical cactus gardens. Each day we
wandered through the community's dozen-plus art galleries.
Evenings, we tried restaurants ranging from the pricey Santa Fe to family- run establishments like Miguel's, where I became hooked on chiles relle?os,
and Mariscos Mi Costa, where we found an outstanding seafood soup.
At night, we watched performances, either in the plaza in front of the Misi?n del Pilar or in the adjacent Teatro Marquez de Leon. After a few
desultory semipro ballet presentations, we were riveted by the flamboyant flamenco dancers and a 20-guitar men's chorus from La Paz. The final
Saturday night, we danced in the plaza along with ranchers and fishermen, local gentry and resident artists, expatriates and a few fellow wanderers
before heading back to the winding road home.
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jeans
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Beautiful!
That is probably the most vividly descriptive account of the journey down Mex 1. Even though I made that trip in September, after reading this, I
want to go again, this time in her footsteps.
[Edited on 12-6-2003 by jeans]
Mom always told me to be different - Now she says...Not THAT different
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Bajabus
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Mood: My friends..it's good.
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nice article.....but what are they talking about when they say Pescadro is an organic farming community? During chile season you can just about choke
to death from all the pesticides in the air.
The only semi organic biz I know of is claudia & Ross but most of their production is slated for the states.
"Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked of such a thing."
Dwight David Eisenhower
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bajalera
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tomato
Nice writerly prose. That monument welcoming you to La Paz is a whale's tail and a dove, not two doves, but this confusion is understandable--you
really can't tell what that big white thing represents unless the light happens to be right.
- Lera
\"Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest never happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.\" -
Mark Twain
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jerry
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get a name
anona mouse get a name
jerry and judi
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