Before setting off on our drive down the Baja California peninsula my sister Lee and I did a lot of research about traveling there -- online, in books and in conversations with acquaintances who've visited the region by car. In the wake of our own journey it's clear that there's a lot of misinformation floating around about automobile travel by foreigners in Mexico.
With respect to Baja California itself, a lot of this is just residual mythology from the time when driving down Mexico 1 to Cabo San Lucas was a wilderness adventure. The road wasn't paved the whole way to the cape until 1974 -- a fact that thwarted my own first attempt to drive down the peninsula in the late Sixties in a car with insufficiently robust shock-absorbers. For years after the road was paved it wasn't maintained scrupulously and supplies of gasoline along the way couldn't be depended upon. All of that has changed.
But some of the misinformation is undoubtedly due to plain old paranoia and prejudice.
In the whole course of our journey we were only accosted once by an aggressive and vaguely threatening beggar. We only encountered one incompetent and indifferent hotel or motel clerk. We only found ourselves once in rooms with seriously malfunctioning air-conditioners -- rooms whose temperatures were recorded at 99 degrees on the room thermostats and whose wall units were unfitted to reduce this temperature very much.
All these things happened in Blythe, California, in the Imperial Valley, before we even crossed the border.
In Mexico itself we encountered nothing but cheerful hospitality, casual but efficient and friendly service and good deals. In La Paz, we stayed in large, cool, comfortable rooms with pleasant sea views, at one of the best hotels in town, for five dollars a night less than we paid for the grubby sweatboxes in Blythe.
We were careful about drinking tap water but were extremely adventurous about where and what we ate. (My nephew Harry, just shy of his 14th birthday on the trip, ate so many strange but delicious things in Mexico that he kept a photographic record of them, starting with the bowl of grilled octopus, above, that he ate con mucho gusto in Guerrero Negro on the trip down to La Paz.) Each of us experienced brief, mild bouts of intestinal distress but nothing that could have been the result of anything more than entering a new microbial environment -- something you might encounter just by visiting a different part of the United States.
When we got back to Las Vegas we were all jonesing for cheeseburgers and went out to an upscale burger joint here to indulge ourselves. I barfed it all up later that night -- something that never happened to me in Mexico. I would say that you can get better, fresher and more delicious food in almost any roadside taquería in Mexico, however funky it may look on the outside, than you can find on almost any gleaming stretch of strip development in almost any American town. We had really superb shrimp and carne asada tacos at the improvised diner below, in El Rosario -- a place we happened upon by chance:
It would make much more sense for Yankees to warn Mexicans about traveling here -- about the rude, uncaring service, bad deals and synthetic food -- than to listen to the warnings of fellow Yankees about traveling in Mexico.
For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.
[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]