We’re back…crossed the border yesterday at Mexicali (a swing way to the east to avoid the labor riots) and we are back in the good old USA. It’s been an interesting few days.
When I was a lot younger I thought Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark was one of the coolest movies I had ever seen (I still feel that way). I even have an Indiana Jones hat. Actually finding yourself in a dangerous situation with no easy way out, though, isn’t quite as glamorous as it seemed to be in that movie. All that’s in the rear view mirror now. We’re home. Safe and sound.
So, the first question a lot of you are wondering about has got to be this:
Is the Baja trip still a go?
Folks, the answer is yes.
I’ve thought about this nonstop for the last several days and I’m not going to get a bunch of thugs destroy something for me that I’ve enjoyed greatly for the last 20+ years. Folks, we’re going! More on this later.
For now, more photos and more storytelling. My apologies in advance…I’m sitting here on a Monday morning, enjoying a cup of coffee, and I feel like writing. The problem is the dates are all running together and some of the photos are out of order with the preceding three or four blogs. No big deal…just bear with me.
Up above…that’s the best plate of quacamole and chips Susie and I ever enjoyed. Good stuff. We ate at Malarimmo’s restaurant the night before we ventured out to see the whales, and Susie ordered it as an appetizer. Just awesome, but not nearly as awesome as the next day’s events.
We were up early in anticipation of seeing the whales. It’s exciting. It’s like being a little kid again. You meet in front of the hotel, the little van picks you up, you get to the docks, it’s life vest lessons 101, and you’re off, bouncing off the waves at around 30 mph, racing to that part of Scammon’s Lagoon (aka Laguna Ojo de Liebre) where the whales hang out.
The entire region is fascinating. The town is called Guerrero Negro, which means the black warrior in Spanish. It’s the name of a whaling ship that sank off the coast in this region in the 1800s. The locals starting referring to the area as Guerrero Negro, which is unusual in itself because unlike most Mexican towns, it’s not named for a hero of the Mexican Revolution or a saint.
And the lagoon has quite a history, too. Nobody used to know where the whales were going during their annual migration, and the whaling ships of the day just wandered up and down the Pacific coast trying to harpoon them. It sounds strange today, but the whales were needed for their oil. Whaling was a big industry back then. Real Moby Dick stuff, I guess.
Well, ol’ Captain Scammon discovered where the whales were going on their annual southern migration, and it was Baja. He sailed into the lagoon that you see in the videos on this blog and in the photos below, and it was a slaughter. So much so that he and the other whalers of that era nearly eradicated the herd.
That’s when the Mexican government stepped in and enacted laws to protect the whales, and those laws worked well. The herd is now estimated to be over 20,000 whales, which is as big as it was prior to the Scammon-led slaughter of the innocents. Today, this area is the only place in the world where you can actually touch a gray whale. The remote location keeps the numbers down, and surprisingly, you don’t see that many Americans doing this. It’s mostly Mexican folks and a few Canadians.
The first hour is always slow…you’ll spot whales off in the distance, surfacing and spouting, and it always seems like maybe that’s as good as it will get. Then the whales get used to the little pongas (it’s what they call the boats these guys use in Baja), and they start approaching.
Folks, let the fun begin…
And a bunch of photos showing the day’s fun times…
Susie pets a baby whale…
And just for the sake of completeness, here’s that video I posted yesterday, showing the whales having fun with us..
After we completed our whale watching activities, the next leg of our journey was to get around San Quintin. That seemed like it would be tough to me, because as I’ve said before, there’s only one paved road down and back through Baja. It’s the Transpeninsular Highway, and it rolls right through San Quintin. I did not want a repeat of what happened to us on the way down, and that meant we had to take to the dirt.
I’d never done this route before, and depending on who I talked to, we’d either be in the dirt for 45 miles or 80 miles. Most folks in southern Baja knew that the road south of San Felipe (on the Sea of Cortez side) was supposed to be paved some day, but no one seemed to know the road’s current status.
We rolled north on Highway 1 for about 80 miles out of Guerrero Negro, and then turned east, on the dirt road, to head across the peninsula.
One mile into it, we met an old guy on a 1st generation BMW GS motorcycle who had a flat tire. It was hot out, he was suited up in his riding coveralls, and he said his onboard tire pump wasn’t working. That’s the little compressor like I talked about as an accessory for the RX3 several blogs ago. He asked if he could plug it into my cigarette lighter (the one in the Subie), and we did so. It was dead. I then noticed that it had an on/off switch, and I turned it to the opposite position it was when he handed it to me. The little compressor fired up, scaring all three of us with its noise. That poor old guy was so discombobulated by the heat that he had forgotten to turn the thing on! That happens…you get overheated and then you stop thinking clearly.
We pressed on, and the road became pretty gnarly. The little Subie was a champ, and I was thinking how fortunate we were that my War Wagon has 4-wheel drive.
Then, up ahead, we saw another vehicle carefully picking its way across the rocks and the ruts. It was a Chrysler mini-van (a real soccer mom vehicle), and it had a taxi medallion on top! A mini-van taxi out in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt road across the central Baja peninsula’s mountainous spine! Only in Baja, folks! I would have liked to have grabbed a photo of that, but Susie and I were laughing too hard and I was concentrating too intensely on piloting the Subie over the rough stuff.
The dirt road in that photo above looks pretty smooth, and at that point it was. I was too scared to stop elsewhere on this road for a photo.
The old guy on the BMW told us the rough stuff lasted for 23 miles, but based on the stories I had heard from other Bajaenos, I did not know if that meant the rough part of the dirt road, or the length of the dirt road.
Well, we got lucky. After 23 miles, just like our BMW ancient mariner had told us, we pulled into the Gonzaga Bay area (on the Sea of Cortez) and onto a newly paved road that was literally brand new! Woohoo! It was pavement all the way up to San Felipe. The next approximately 80 miles were paved, and not dirt!
Here’s a photo of Susie and the Subie overlooking Gonzaga Bay on the new road…
We spent our final night (for this trip, anyway) in San Felipe. San Felipe is a tourist town and quite frankly, it’s too touristy for my tastes. Susie and I walked along the Malecon (the shoreline) after a seafood dinner at Chuy’s (not as good as I remembered it from a previous trip) and I grabbed a few evening photos…
We were up early the next morning, we rolled the 130 miles north to Mexicali (a large industrial town of about a million people, right on the border), waited the 45 minutes to get up to the crossing, and then from there it was a quick 200 miles back to our home.
This trip was definitely one for the record books. Our mission was to scout out what was happening in advance of our CSC RX3 Inaugural Baja Run, and we sure did that! Vultures, rattlesnakes, Ospreys, cave paintings, riots, the Sea of Cortez, Santa Rosalia, dirt roads, and on it goes.
After that first day, I was mad at Mexico. Those folks staging the riot ruined my vacation, or so I thought. Everyone we bumped into south of that point was talking about it, and the desk clerk at the hotel in Catavina (where we spent our first night) said it was a very bad situation. Then I got to thinking about it. 21 years of touring Baja. One bad experience that we got though okay, other than some minor war wounds on the Subie. Was it worth discarding one of the most beautiful parts of the planet I’d ever seen over that?
One of our fellow travelers exchanged email addresses with us and we received this note while we were down there:
Hello Joe and Sue!
We met you on the church steps at San Ignacio – Hope your trip to Mulege has been good.
We’ve had a great time including the whale trip to the lagoon. The worst part was the hugely long detour we had to take when strikers closed the roads at Colonet – but GOOD NEWS —We drove from Catavina home to San Diego today and the road all the way north is open. Beginning in San Quintin we did see some scorched roadways where fires had been built, and people taking down wood barriers to protect their store fronts/windows. Most of the OXXO stores were closed until we got to Ensenada.
Best of luck in your travels —
Baja Lovers,
Pat & Greg
My thoughts were that for our Baja ride, we could come down through San Felipe and take the dirt road I described above on the RX3s, but truth be told, that road is just too gnarly (in my opinion) for the bikes. There are huge stretches of soft sand and I don’t like riding through that on a motorcycle. The road through the San Quintin area (the Transpeninsular Highway) has been brought under control and it’s open. That’s the way to go.
I also received several notes from you in response to my earlier question about doing a tour through the US instead of Baja. Every one of you said you’d do whatever I felt was best, but you would greatly prefer Baja. My Baja buddy John Welker told me I’d find out who the real adventurers were based on whether they opted for Baja or a US trip. Well, I did, and it’s you.
Boys and girls, we’re Baja bound!
Stay tuned, and we’ll be confirming the dates as soon as we know for sure when the bikes will be here.
TT250 Enduro
RX4 450cc Adventure
SG250 San Gabriel Cafe Racer