Traveling by car down the Baja California peninsula is one of the world's great drives. You pass through ever-shifting landscapes of the most extreme, surreal beauty -- from high desert to low, from mountain to plain, from the shores of the Pacific Ocean to the shores of the Mar de Cortés.
The surface of the two-lane highway is very well maintained these days -- the era of the lethal potholes is over. Gas supplies are plentiful at the government-owned Pemex stations along the way, though you'll have trouble finding premium gas, if that's what your car prefers, between El Rosario and Santa Rosalia. (Stations do run out of gas from time to time, mostly depending on how many big campers pass through them in any given week, but if you fill up wherever possible whenever your tank drops below three-quarters full you'll never get into any serious trouble.)
Mexico 1 is a marvel of engineering but most of it leaves you little to no margin for error. Shoulders are rare, especially on stretches which snake through high mountain passes with terrifying drop-offs just inches from the edge of the road. At every blind curve on such stretches you just have to pray that oncoming vehicles, especially the big trucks, will stay in their lanes and leave you enough room to live. It's on stretches like this that you want to be thinking about Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and not about the drop-offs, though this is difficult sometimes because of road signs reminding you of the present hazards with icons of tall trucks flying off the edge of the mountain. Often you really do need supernatural aid to maintain your nerve -- as the trucker below, with his Jesus and Mary mudflaps, clearly knows:
Even when the road cuts straight through level desert it's usually built up on a high causeway with steep sides, no shoulders and few turn-outs. If you had to veer off the pavement suddenly, even here, you'd probably roll your vehicle, though the roll probably wouldn't end in flaming death, as it certainly would in the high mountain passes. And this is not to mention the livestock that occasionally decides to share the road with you.
This is a road you never want to travel at night, or at speeds much above the 80kph limit. I mean, don't even think about it.
The road from San Ignacio to Santa Rosalia on the east coast of the peninsula is one of the most hair-raising stretches of Mexico 1. But you're more than rewarded near the end of it by your first sight of the Mar de Cortés, which is less like a real sea than a sea out of some ancient legendary tale. It enchants everything.
For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.
[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]