There
is just no way to describe the coast and the islands of the Mar de
Cortés.  Parts of it remind you of stretches along the coast of Alta
California as it must have been in frontier times.  Most parts of
it seem like a landscape from another planet, or like our own earth
reduced to its purest elements — sea, land, no frills.

Every mile of Mexico 1 that takes you within sight of the Mar de Cortés is beautiful and inspiring.

Driving east from San Ignacio we hit the Mar de Cortés just north of
Santa Rosalía.  Then we drove south in a state of enchantment to
Mulegé, a town built next to a palm-lined estuary, and stopped for
lunch at Dony's taquería,
where we had some fine shrimp and carne asada tacos at a sidewalk
counter.  Then we followed the road down the coast to Loreto,
where we spent the night.

Loreto is rumored to be the “next cool place” in Baja California, which
means that developers are building fancy condo compounds near it. 
The town itself is pleasant enough, though a bit touristy.  It's a
famous place from which to set out on the Mar de Cortés for fishing,
and we found that American fishermen tended to be the most
objectionable tourists in Baja California — mostly white, middle-aged
men with loud voices pretending to be Ernest Hemingway and behaving as
though Mexico was a country populated entirely by domestic
servants.  (We eventually became fishermen ourselves, however, and met some
very nice pescadores among the blowhards.)

The La Pinta inn we stayed at in Loreto was the shabbiest one we
encountered on our trip but it had a big pool right next to the ocean
with an island in the middle of it that thrilled Harry and Nora. 
Nora also had her first piñada here, a pineapple smoothie.  She became an afficionada
of the concoction and had them everywhere, rating their
qualities.  The ones with a cherry and a pineapple slice included
always rated highest, especially if they were served in a large
frosted-glass goblet.

Lee had her first fish ceviche
at the restaurant at the inn, which became an obsession of hers for the
rest of the trip.  All of it was good, but the best was a ceviche made from a trigger fish I caught myself . . . but that's a tale for another time.

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.

In
Mexico, whenever anyone asked where my sister Lee and her kids were
from she always said Alta California.  This delighted Mexicans,
who probably think all Americans believe there is only one California,
the U. S. state.  In fact there are two others, Baja California
and Baja California Sur, both Mexican states located in the Baja
California peninsula.  Mexicali is the administrative center of
Baja California, to the north, and La Paz is the administrative center
of Baja California Sur.

At the La Pinta inn in Catavina my sister ran into a Mexican woman who
had lived in Los Angeles but had moved back because she didn't have
“the right papers” and didn't feel good about it.  My sister
remarked on how unfortunate it was that papers could keep the
Californias apart.  “I know God meant us to be together,” the
woman said, “but something has gone wrong with it.”  “Maybe we'll
all be one California again,” my sister suggested.  “I think it
will happen,” the woman said, without much conviction.

The woman seemed a bit puzzled about why someone from Alta California
would choose to visit the poorer Californias to the south. 
“Because it's so beautiful,” my sister said, ” and the people are so
wonderful.”  The woman nodded dubiously.

The poverty of Mexico, at least in Baja California, south of the
tourist zone, rarely seems ugly or degrading — the everyday culture of
the nation is rich and humane.  But it's so often frozen where it
is — economic progress is coming but coming slowly.  Looking into
the eyes of their niños, many Mexicans may feel that don't have time to wait for it.

They may not realize how much they stand to lose up north.  The
idea of making grueling sacrifices for one's children is losing
currency in America, and many Americans no longer believe that their
children will have better lives than they've had.  The ragged
Mexican man walking miles through the desert country of the borderlands
to get a back-breaking, low-paying job in the United States probably
has a picture of some children in his pocket.  If you're tempted
to fear and despise him, think of that.  He may have more to give us than we have to give him.

The
first time I visited Ensenada (above) in the late Sixties it was a
small, dusty
tourist town.  Now it's a big, sprawling tourist town but still
has some charm.  Above Ensenada on the Pacific coast, yuppie scum,
mostly from Alta California, the world headquarters of yuppie scum, has
turned the region into into a nightmare of condos, tourist traps and
perverted, groveling commercialism.  This is where you see the
true face of Alta California, “The Wellness State”.  The influence
of the Great Satan begins
to wear away the further south you go — only to
flare up again like a festering boil at Cabo San Lucas at the tip of
the peninsula.

On our first full day in Mexico we made it as far as Catavina, a tiny
town in a bizarre high-desert setting in the middle of the
peninsula.  (Mexico 1, the only road that goes all the way down to
Cabo San Lucas, zig-zags back and forth across Baja California, from
one coast to the other.)  The desert around Catavina is covered in gigantic, car-sized boulders
and tall cactus — like much of Baja California its landscape is
surreal in the extreme, with an effect on the psyche that can't be evoked by
photographs.

In Catavina we stayed at a La Pinta inn.  These are dotted along
Mexico 1, are run by the government and are very pleasant, with a
cantina and restaurant surrounding a small courtyard fountain and rooms
surrounding a larger courtyard with a pool.  Mexicans pay about
$57 (American) a night there — rates for tourists can rise up over
$100 a night, but my sister quickly discovered that Mexican hotel
clerks love
to bargain, especially if the negotiation is conducted with humor, so
we paid well under the tourist rate wherever we stayed.  The
clerks always seemed genuinely delighted when Lee managed to talk them
into lowering their rate, as though they were appreciating a clever
goal from an unlikely player in a soccer game.

The terrace behind the restaurant at the Catavina La Pinta looks out
over the mystical desert and has a shrine dedicated to Nuestra Señora
de Guadalupe, which puts everything into perspective.  When
driving the roads of Baja California you want constant assurances that La Morenita
is with you, and you want a chance to thank her for getting you to
wherever it is you've gotten.  This is psychologically sound,
whatever you think of the theology of it, because it reminds you to
never, ever
take Mexico 1 for granted.  It's full of surprises, most
delightful but some hair-raising.  I'll write more about Mexico 1 in a later post.

On
the first day of our drive to Baja California we got off to a late
start — a miscalculation that led to us having to spend our first
night in Blythe, in Alta California.  I'm not sure what the deal
with Blythe is, but it seemed like a depressed and hopeless sort of
place.  We stayed in a lousy, overpriced motel and were happy to
be on our way again in the morning.  Above is a picture of a
rooster on top of a cafe in Vidal Junction, Alta California, on the
road to Blythe.  The cafe was closed and the only restrooms we
could find in Vidal Junction were some dirty Porta-Potties behind a gas
station, which was also closed.  The sight of a new moon behind the rooster cheered us up immeasurably.

If you drop more or less straight down from Las Vegas you hit the
Mexican border at
Mexicali, but we'd been told that crossing at the smaller town of
Tecate was quicker and
easier, so we veered off westward at El Centro on the I-8, then dropped
down to a smaller road that skirts the border on its way to
Tecate.  (Tecate is where the great Mexican beer of the same name
originated, though it's now brewed in other places in Mexico as well.)

It was fascinating to drive through the Imperial Valley of Alta California, past the huge
Sahara-like sandscape of Imperial Dunes and through the lush cultivated
fields beyond them.  The water that irrigates the Imperial Valley,
and makes it one of the most productive agricultural regions in the
world, comes from the Colorado River, which used to empty into the top
of the Mar de Cortés.  Now only a trickle of it arrives at the
apex of the great sea and the rich delta that used to be there is more
or less a wasteland.

The land above the border on the road to Tecate is well-watered, too,
and very beautiful.  We passed four U. S. Border Patrol cars along
the road before crossing quickly and easily into Mexico at
Tecate.  You need a Mexican tourist visa if you plan to travel
south of the “tourist zone”, or more than about 20 miles into
Mexico.  Lee had gotten hers and her kids' in Los Angeles but the
Mexican consulate in Las Vegas doesn't issue them.  I got one on
the Mexican side of the border in about 20 minutes, with no trouble at
all.  The Mexican border officials were friendly and efficient.

Somehow we managed to find our way through the teeming streets of
Tecate onto Mexico 3, which cuts across the top of Baja California and
hits Mexico 1, and the Pacific, at Ensenada.  The road passes
through high valleys where grapes are cultivated and wine made.  We
stopped at the largest of the Baja California wineries, L. A. Cetto, a
lovely establishment surrounded by a sea of green vines.

Lee and
I sampled and bought some good, cheap wines there . . .

The kids were
diverted by a pen that held burros . . .

. . . and peacocks . . .

At Ensenada we headed straight for the city's fish market, with its
extraordinary displays of seafood arranged in elaborate, artful piles.  We
had some indifferent seafood tacos at one of the small stalls lining
one side of the market, then cast about for a place to stay for the
night.

We lucked into El Rey Sol, a pleasant motel-like place with a protected
parking lot, a great little bar and a good pool for the kids. 
While the kids swam, Lee and I washed away the dust of the road with
beers and margaritas, talking to a cheerful bartender who recommended
good seafood stands in Baja California Sur, and to other travelers,
including a surfer who'd explored the undiscovered breaks of the
peninsula in his youth and was now revisiting the region with his young
family.

After the motel disaster in Blythe, Lee and I had discussed the
dehumanization of roadside inns in America, contrasting them with the
rich inn culture of Dickens' time, when inns always offered inviting
public rooms where travelers could meet and exchange tales of the
road.  All the Mexican hotels and motels we stayed at had such
public rooms, and they were always in use — just one of the many areas
in which Mexican culture reveals its humane genius and outshines its
“richer” neighbor to the north.

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.

Last
month I started off on a road trip with my sister Lee and her two kids,
Nora and Harry, down the length of the Baja California peninsula. 
It was a journey of great adventures but surprisingly easy and
trouble-free, contrary to some stories we'd been told about the hazards
of driving in that part of Mexico.  We ascribe most of our good
fortune to the Ghost (my trusty Lincoln Navigator) and to the kind
ministrations of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe.

The Ghost is not a car for the 21st Century, due to its high
consumption of fossil fuel, but it is in all other respects one of the
most perfect machines for land travel ever created.  It transports
four people and assorted luggage in extreme comfort and is as reliable
as a burro, though far less truculent.