Santa Rosalia, pinturas rupestre, reptiles, and raptors…

Good times in Baja today, boys and girls.  After spending the evening in Santa Rosalia, we regaled in the glory of, well, the title of this blog…pinturas rupestre (I’ll tell you what that means in a minute), reptiles, and raptors.

First, one of two photos from last night.   We spotted these two young ladies enjoying an after-dinner walk in front of the Gustav Eiffel church downtown…

And of course, a quick shot inside the church…

Susie and I were up early heading north, and we spotted this member of the Baja Sanitation Department checking things out from atop a Cardon cactus…

The plan today was to visit the pinturas rupestre, or Baja’s ancient cave paintings.   I’d always wanted to see these but never made the trek.   Today we did.   We diverted about 30 miles off Hwy 1 and wow, what a ride and what scenery!  Starting, of course, with this guy…

I included that last shot because you can actually see the remnants of his (of her?) last meal…no doubt a hair from a hare.   Cool stuff.

The road up to the cave was gnarly.  I was glad I was in the Subie.   I don’t think I would want to do this on a motorcycle (especially with critters like the one you see above out and about)…

It doesn’t look that bad in the photo above, but trust me on this, it got a lot worse.   Sheer cliffs on one side, no room to turn around, and not enough room for an oncoming vehicle to pass.   Whew!

When we got to the top, this fellow (his name was Enrique) sold us our official passes and hooked us up with a guide, all for about $15 (for both Susie and yours truly).

The cave paintings are thought to be about 1500 years old, and no one is sure who put them here.   They’re from a civilization that vanished.   Gone.  Poof.  Wiped clean from the face of the Earth.

Okay, enough of the Indiana Jones stuff…here are the photos…

We had a good time, and we met some nice folks while we were up there.  One of the fellows you see in this photo is a Tijuana lawyer with a daughter who is a professor at NYU, another is a physical education professor somewhere here in Mexico, and the third guy was our guide this morning.

That’s Susie, of course, in the middle…

After that it was a blitz into Guerrero Negro.   I stopped along the way for a War Wagon glamor shot…

When we made Guerrero Negro late this afternoon (getting to the pinturas rupestre and back is pretty much an all day affair), we stopped for another round of fish tacos at Tony’s…

We had a couple of hours of daylight left so we pointed the Subie east and drove out to the Guerrero Negro light house.   This entire area is a Mexican nature preserve, and one of its many inhabitants is the Osprey.  They are pretty cool looking, and we watched one doing the same thing we did…he (or maybe she?) was enjoying a fish taco, but without the tortilla…

Oh, and the light house…this was the turnaround point of our drive out to the Pacific today…

Tomorrow we’re going out to see the whales, and if everything goes right, I’ll have some great photos of that, too.

If you’ve been following the War Wagon chronicles, you know that we hit a little trouble in San Quintin two days ago, and it’s been hard to get updates on it down here.  My good buddy Charles Fleming from the LA Times told me they picked up the story today, but it’s been hard to get a read on current status in that area.   The consensus is the situation is still unsettled.   We’re going to take dirt roads after seeing the whales tomorrow and come up along Baja’s eastern coast on the Sea of Cortez.  The plan is to make San Felipe by nightfall, spend the night there, and then re-enter the US through either Tecate or Mexicali the next day.  That will keep us completely out of the San Quintin area.

The question for all of us is this:   Do you folks still want the Inaugural Run to be through Baja (with a diversion around San Quintin), or would you rather do a 4 or 5 day ride through the American Southwest, hitting spots we select from places like the Pacific Coast Highway, California’s Sequoia National Park, Laughlin, the Grand Canyon, Zion, and maybe Bisbee?  I’m okay either way, so let’s hear your thoughts, all you future RX3 riders!