We
hated to leave La Paz but the hotel bill, even with the discount rate,
was mounting and the kids had stories they wanted to tell their dad and
their friends back in Los Angeles.  So we packed our frozen fish
in a cooler and headed north again, a prospect made more pleasant by
the thought of re-visiting the towns we'd stopped at on the way down.

There was much excitement about the first night's stop in Loreto,
because of that great pool, but the La Pinta inn there was booked —
which turned out to be a happy circumstance in the end because it drove
us to the Hotel Oasis, which was wondrous:

A great bar where the
kids were welcome to hang out, playing darts and pool, a great seaside
restaurant, hammocks strung up between the palm trees and on the
porches.  Nora took advantage of one of them to finish the magical
book Half Magic:

On subsequent days, San Ignacio and Catavina proved to be every bit as
charming as we remembered them.  There was even a horse grazing outside our rooms this time at the La Pinta in San Ignacio:

But we made a fatal miscalculation at
the end of the journey.  We decided to drive north of Ensenada and
stay at Rosarito, and then take the toll roads across to Tecate, to
save some time.

It was fun to drive by the Fox studio outside Rosarito, where Titanic
was filmed, but the town itself was a nightmare of traffic and hustlers
and tourists.  We stayed at a bland motel, whose only advantage
was that it was across the street from a famous old restaurant
specializing in carnitas, slow-roasted pork, which we hadn't run into
often in Baja California (it's not a specialty of the region.)  The carnitas was good, and so was a
shrine near the restrooms to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe:

Driving the next day proved to be a nightmare.  The toll road
north was fine and fast, but there were no signs for the turn-off to
the toll road to Tecate and we got lost in the shabby maze of a Tijuana
suburb.  Between the hideous condos on the coast and the wretched
poverty of Tijuana, we felt as though we'd entered another
country.  It made me think of the old saying — “Poor
Mexico!  So far from God, so near to the United States of
America!”  Things in this part of Mexico are probably just going
to get worse in the years ahead, and I don't think the condo-sized
Jesus, below, is going to help much.

We eventually made it to Tecate, where we waited for over an hour in a
long line of cars to cross the border.  The crossing itself was a
breeze.  The U. S. guard, who spoke English with a Spanish accent,
asked us a few questions then waved us through — and suddenly it was
all over.  We were back in the States.

All that was left was to miss Mexico — something I haven't stopped doing since.

The
Mar de Cortés is one of the world's great fishing grounds and we
decided we couldn't end our time in Baja California without at least
one fishing expedition.  Morning is the best time to catch fish in
the waters around La Paz — the earlier the better — so we decided to
arrange the expedition through the hotel, which meant we'd get picked
up there instead of having to drive ourselves to a distant rendezvous at some
ungodly hour.

Captain Jack, the hotel's agent for such things, confirmed the wisdom
of this when he told us we had to be ready to leave at quarter to five
in the morning.  We would be driving an hour to the beach we'd set
off from.  The 4:45 departure and the long drive sounded grim
but encouraging — we would be in the hands of people who were serious
about catching fish.

We stumbled into a van with four other pescadores
at the appointed hour and headed off towards the west, across the
peninsula that forms one side of the Bahía de La Paz.  The last
part of the trip took us over bone-rattling unpaved roads to a remote
beach lined with pangas.  The sun had not yet risen but Jorge, the
captain of the panga we'd rented, appeared out of the darkness and
rounded us up, loaded rods and a drink cooler into his boat, dragged
the boat into the ocean, helped us on board and set off towards the
Isla Cerralvo, about a half hour away by sea.

Just off the island he rendezvous-ed with two men in a skiff who sold
us our live bait for the day.  The two men wore baseball caps and
slickers and had the exact demeanor of Maine lobstermen — with faces
that seemed carved from granite.  (People who work the sea tend to become mythological.)

The sun was well up by now, and our taciturn captain finally asked us
what sort of fish we were looking to catch.  “Fish to eat,” I
said.  “Only fish to eat.”  His face lit up, he smiled
happily and began replacing the big hooks on the poles with smaller
ones.  I don't know if he was happy because he thought catching
fish to eat made sense, or because it meant he wouldn't have to deal
with the sort of egos that can't be satisfied with anything less than
impressive sporting trophies, but he was incredibly kind to us from
then on, warm and solicitous.

There were several other chartered boats out in the channel looking for
fish — all open pangas like ours.  Our captain looked around to
see who was catching what and finally stopped at a likely spot. 
He baited our lines for us and spooled them out by hand to the
indicated depth — he said that the channel here was about 60 feet
deep, its bottom lined with rocks which attracted marine life of all
sorts.

It's always so dramatic and mysterious to set a fishing line out into
the ocean — it seems wildly improbable that it will ever connect with
anything swimming down in that alien realm.  I was so happy just
to be out on the surface of that enchanting sea that I wouldn't have minded if we never
caught a thing.  But almost instantly Nora's rod began to
jerk.  “Fish!” shouted the captain, and slowly but surely Nora
reeled in a big, beautiful dorado, also called a mahi mahi, one of the
tastiest fish to be found in any ocean.

Then I hooked something really big — it was all I could do to land
it.  But it turned out to be a bonito, a humongous bonito, which
is not a good a good fish to eat.  The captain said he would save
it anyway to give to a friend, for shark bait.

Then Nora landed a smaller bonito, which we threw back, and I landed a good-sized tuna — which of course we kept.

By this time Harry had
become seasick.  He was truly miserable but the beach was too far
away to land him on — an hour's round trip.  Finally he threw up
over the side, said he felt much better, took up his rod and
immediately caught a nice tuna of his own.

Then his stomach turned
on him again and he was more or less out of commission for the rest of
the trip.  (This explains why there are no cool photos here of our time out on the water.)

I caught a parga (a red snapper), a great eating fish, and a trigger fish,
an odd-looking flat fish which I'd never heard of before.  “It makes the best ceviche,” our
captain assured us — and he was so right.  Lee caught a tuna
then, and we felt we'd had a most successful expedition.

Back on shore the captain (sharpening his knife above) filleted the fish and our driver put it in a
cooler in the van.  (I gave the captain my big tuna for his family
— we had more fish than we could eat ourselves in several meals.)

In La Paz that afternoon I took our fish to the restaurant at the hotel and asked
the staff to cook up enough of it for dinner for four that evening and
to
freeze the rest.  I asked them to make some ceviche out of the
trigger fish.  The waiters had to call the chef to identify the
trigger fish, which they didn't recognize, but he beamed when he saw
it.  “Ceviche — yes,” he said.

That night we dined like kings — like fishermen.  Nora's
dorado
was generally acclaimed as the best-tasting fish of them all, which is
saying a lot when the competition is freshly caught tuna and red
snapper, and the
ceviche made from the trigger fish was sublime.  The ocean had
been generous to us, and we took no more from it than we could
use.  Life was good.

I
was leery of visiting Cabo San Lucas, reputed to be an outpost of
Orange County, but El Arco is there, the rock arch (above) that marks the
bottom of the Baja California peninsula, and it seemed unthinkable to
have driven most of the length of the peninsula and not visit its
terminal point, where the waters of the Pacific meet with the waters of
the Mar de Cortés.

We decided to make a beeline for land's end, see the cape, and head
straight back to La Paz.  This turned out to be easier than
expected because there's a new road to Cabo San Lucas from La Paz
which runs down the Pacific side of the peninsula.  (Mexico 1,
formerly the only paved route from La Paz to the cape, runs down the eastern shore of the peninsula and is a bit longer.)

The new road on the Pacific side is in superb shape, allowing for faster speeds than
normal, and we made it to Cabo San Lucas well before noon.  The
town of Cabo San Lucas still has some charm, but it's ringed about by
hideous condo compounds — enclaves for people who want the views but
don't want to live among Mexicans, in anything resembling Mexican
culture.  In forty years the whole of Baja California will
probably be encrusted with these compounds, as the Pacific coast above
Ensenada already is.  Go see it now, before the
yuppie stain grows insupportable.

The tip of the cape can only be visited by sea, unless you're an expert
rock climber.  We rented places in one of the glass-bottom
superpangas that take tourists out for a look.  Fortunately the
other passengers were one large extended Mexican family, cheerful and
friendly and good company.

As we motored out of the harbor we were greeted by the strange and
nauseating sight of huge party boats filled with tourists drinking and
listening to bad pop music from live bands blaring their sounds out
over huge amplifiers.  “We're having an experience — we're having
fun now!” was the message.  Not.  “We might as well be in Las
Vegas!” was more like it.

El Arco looks as though it might have been designed for dramatic effect
and beauty by some 19-Century landscape artist like Frederick Law
Olmstead.  It's a most appropriate and theatrical punctuation mark
at the end of the great peninsula.  Just beyond it you can
actually see the light green water of the Mar de Cortés mix with the deeper
blue of the Pacific.

The captain of our panga had his wife and kids and father on board —
his oldest son took the helm on the ride back to the docks.  His
father beamed at him and made sure we all saw how well he was doing.

We decided not to tarry in Cabo San Lucas but headed back
towards La Paz and stopped about halfway there at Todos Santos for
lunch.  Todos Santos is a lovely little town that's become
something of an artists' colony.  We looked forward to visiting
the galleries there, but they were all closed, because we came on
a Sunday.  You would think that Sunday would be the one day of the
week most likely to bring tourists into the galleries, but there is
obviously a higher law at work here — the Lord's day, and the day of
rest, trumping commercial concerns.

We did have a fine lunch at the Hotel California, a charming place
that
is often visited by Americans on the mistaken assumption that it has
some connection with the Eagles' song.  Harry had the Mexican
equivalent of surf 'n' turf — a plate of shrimp and carne asada tacos.

We got back to La Paz before dark, in time for drinks at sunset on the terrace of the Hotel Perla.

We were happy we'd visited Cabo San Lucas,
and land's end — even happier that we didn't have to spend the night
there.

The
early Spanish explorers of Mexico, who almost always traveled with
priests, had a habit of giving religious names to the places they
“discovered” — which was fortuitous with respect to the region of the
Mar de Cortés, which has an unearthly, supernatural beauty.  It's
hard to imagine talking about, even thinking about, the Isla Espíritu
Santo, Holy Spirit Island, under some more prosaic name.

It's a severe, haunted, sublime place.  When the Spanish first
arrived there were about 300 Indians living there — they must have
been hard, solitary folk.  Disease or some other European-borne
catastrophe left the island unpopulated until a French entrepreneur set
up a camp there for pearl fishing around the time of the outbreak of
the Mexican Revolution.  Disease again intervened, wiping out the
pearl-oyster beds throughout the Mar de Cortés between 1936 and 1941.

Today there are a few shacks used by local fishermen (with solar panels
on their roofs for electricity) and a luxury tent camp for wealthy tourists.

There is something shocking, even frightening about the landscape of
Espíritu Santo.  It's a place for gods and monsters, not
people.  I kept thinking that when blind Homer imagined the
settings of The Odyssey in his mind's eye, they probably often resembled the Isla Espíritu Santo.

We rented a panga, with a captain, at Pichilingue beach for a cruise to
the island.

It was a magical journey — we flew like the wind
across miles of open sea to reach the island, then circumnavigated it
slowly, pausing to marvel at many wonders.

The captain took us
at speed through rock-bound channels barely wider than his boat, into caves and
along the seemingly endless curves of totally empty beaches, running the boat close in to the shore for dramatic effect.

We stopped to snorkel at a small island populated by hundreds of
braying sea lions, who swam close to us when we were in the water, eying us
ironically.  “You don't really think you can pass muster as an
aquatic mammal?” they seemed to say.

We stopped to look at what appears to be a mask carved into the rock
face of the island.  That seemed like an ironic gesture by nature
itself, vaguely threatening.

Finally we came ashore at a lovely beach.  The captain set up a
table under an umbrella and produced lunch — ham and cheese
sandwiches, exceptionally fine fish ceviche and pickled marlin.  We swam and ate and
felt utterly elated.

It was good to go to the island, and good to leave it — it didn't seem
like a place that wanted to be visited for too long by the children of
men.  All the same it might be interesting to camp out on it for a night
— like spending a night in a haunted house.  I imagine one would
hear exceedingly strange voices in the wind.

Adults can sit in the shade of the palapa roof, eating and drinking
exceptionally well, while their kids frolic in the ocean, which makes
for a pleasant afternoon.  Harry and Nora went kayaking and Lee
made friends with a panga captain who offered to take us on a tour of
Espíritu Santo island for a price far lower than we'd pay if we
arranged the trip in La Paz.  We checked on this back in La Paz,
found he was right, and came back the next day to sign up for the
cruise.

On a different day we spent an afternoon at Balandra beach, which was
truly breathtaking.  It curves around a shallow bay, which you can
walk across to visit the famous mushroom rock, an iconic landmark of
the area.

 
There's a reproduction of it in the central square of
La Paz, across from the cathedral:

Smaller reproductions can be
bought as souvenirs, though I really can't imagine who would buy such a thing:

Some American tourists in La Paz told us
that the rock had actually toppled off its stem a few years ago and had to be
bolted back together — which turned out to be true.

Mexico
1 leaves the coast of the Mar de Cortés just south of Loreto and cuts
back into the interior of the peninsula before veering east again and
doubling back to the great sea at the Bahía de La Paz.  The city
of La Paz, nestled in the wide curve of the bay, was our main destination on this trip and Harry recorded the
attitudes of the passengers at the moment we arrived there.

Here's John Steinbeck on La Paz, as it was back in the 1940s:

La Paz grew in fascination as we
approached.  The square, iron-shuttered colonial houses stood up
right in back of the beach with rows of beautiful trees in front of
them.  It is a lovely place.  There is a broad promenade
along the water lined with benches, named for dead residents of the
city, where one may rest oneself . . .  [A] cloud of delight hangs
over the distant city from the time when it was the great pearl center
of the world . . .  Guyamas is busier, they say, and Mazatlán
gayer, but La Paz is antigua.

We didn't approach La Paz from the water, as Steinbeck did, and it has
changed plenty since his time, but a cloud of delight still hangs over
it, purely Mexican, not fueled by American tourist dollars, and it it
still antigua, old and wise.  It's a tourist town, but it caters to
Mexican tourists, and so is graceful and slow in its rhythms, without
the frenzied party-til-you-puke atmosphere of Cabo San Lucas or the
Pacific coast above Ensenada.

There is nothing spectacular about the place, its allure is quiet . . .
but powerful.  After a day there I never wanted to leave, and I
wish I was there right now.

I thought it would be good to stay for at least a night or two at the
Hotel Perla, the first “destination hotel” in La Paz, built in the
1940s, which for a short time, into the 50s, was host to Hollywood and
literary celebrities, a kind of proto Cabo San Lucas — but the Perla was full, which led us happily
to the second destination hotel built in La Paz, not long after the
Perla, the Los Arcos.  The rooms in the main building were too
pricey for us, but we got fine rooms in a more recent extension of the
hotel across the street, the Cabañas de Los Arcos.

The main hotel was full of American fishermen, the cabañas were full of
Mexican families and so pleasant that, after a couple of days spent
searching for even cheaper accommodations, we sent my sister Lee forth
to negotiate a lower rate for an extended stay at the Los
Arcos.  This she accomplished, and when we checked out we
discovered that they had applied the rate retroactively to our first
days there as well.

This rate was cheaper than you'd expect to find at a Holiday Inn next to an
ugly Interstate off-ramp in the United States, though the big rooms had
views of the Mar de Cortés, the service was superb and the hotel was
located on the malecón, the
broad promenade along the water that Steinbeck mentions and that is the
heart of La Paz's daily public life, especially after dark.

I felt I had come home.