Call me Ishmael…

Ishmael? 

Who the heck is Ishmael?

Ah, read on, boys and girls…

My good friends Carl and Mary had dinner with Susie and me a couple of weeks ago (you know, I wrote about it in the blog earlier).   Carl’s an advisor to the California Scooter Company, and during our dinner, we talked about a lot of things, including Baja.   The outcome was entirely predictable…a quick plan, and zoom, we’re off in the Subie to see the whales!

Okay, I know…this is a motorcycle blog.   I gotta at least say something about motorcycles.   So here’s the obligatory moto photo…and it’s a Deusy!

That’s Carl on the right, and Martin on the left.  Martin’s our new friend.  He’s from Ireland.  The photo?  We’re in front of Mama Espinosa’s restaurant in El Rosario, a cool 200+ miles south of the border.  You’ve seen my Baja Blaster CSC Classic in the blog, and you’ve seen the red decal on the windscreen…it says Mama Espinosa’s, and I bought it right here last year on the CSC ride to Cabo San Lucas.  Great food.   You can bet I wasn’t going to miss stopping there for lunch, and that’s where we met Martin on his KLR 650.   On his way back to San Francisco.   From…get this…Panama!  Man, talk about adventure riding!  We had a good chat with Martin…what a ride he was having.

I already had the Nikon out, so I grabbed this great shot of Carl and Mary just outside of Mama Espinosa’s before we entered Baja’s Vizcaino desert…

There’s lots of stuff in that magnificent expanse of pristine land, and lots of things that used to live there.  El Rosario is known for its fossils and prehistoric findings.   I’ve got a pretty good idea this T-Rex outside of Mama Espinosa’s is fake…but I snapped a photo anyway…

I know…you might still be wondering about my opening lines in this blog…who’s Ishmael?

Well, Ishmael was the main character in Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby Dick.   In fact, the opening line of that awesome story was…Call me Ishmael.  Ishmael sort of went whale watching with ol’ Captain Ahab, and you know the rest.  Our story ends better.  We rode down to Guerrero Negro to see the California gray whales.   These awesome animals just completed their migration south from Alaska!   We sure had a great day.   Turns out we weren’t the only ones down here whale watching today…there was another guy out on the water with us…a young fellow named Felipe Calderon.   You may have heard of him.  He’s the President of Mexico.  He’s in town for the same reason we were…to see the greatest show on earth.  

Okay, enough talk about Moby Dick and politicians…check out the next photo of Carl and Mary on our whale watching ponga (that’s a little fiberglass boat about half the size of the whales)…

It sure didn’t take long…thar she blows!  Look out into the water…

That’s the real deal, folks…a California gray whale, and it’s only about 25 yards out!

What a day we had…we probably saw maybe 100 whales in all.  The guys told us there are just under 700 in Scammon’s Lagoon right now.   One came right up alongside the boat and spouted, soaking us all.  Grand fun!  Check out just a couple more photos of my California gray whale friends…

Grand fun indeed! 

Our ponga captain was a nice young fellow named Javier (I kept wanting to call him Ahab).  Javier really knew his stuff…

After spending a couple of hours with the whales, Javier showed us a bunch more…the biggest pelicans I’ve ever seen in my life (think small ostriches and you’ll be in the ball park), several ospreys in their nests (they are magnificent predators), and a bunch of the toughest and loudest seals you’ll ever meet outside of the US Navy…

We watched those guys fight for space on top of the buoy you see above, and I’ll tell you what…they are tough.   Those guys in the photo, though, must have been the alpha seals.  They slept through the buoy turf disputes and the other seals just left them alone. 

When we got back on land, we had fish tacos off my good friend Antonio’s truck (everyone agreed…they are the best on the planet).  I’ve been buying fish tacos from Antonio for nearly 20 years now.  I guess loyalty counts.   I only get down here about once a year, but Antonio always remembers me.   He asked if we were on the bikes today, and I had to tell him…no, we settled for my turbocharged little WRX!

After those great fish tacos, Carl, Mary, and I hopped back in the Subie for a quick 125-mile run south to San Ignacio…and it was great.   Carl and Mary fell in love with San Ignacio immediately, just like I did the first time I came down here.  It’s an awesome little Mexican town.  Check out the photos I took earlier today outside (and then inside) the San Ignacio mission…

The San Ignacio mission is an amazing church.  Built in the mid-1700s, it’s still a working church.  It’s an awesome thing to see.

In fact, the last two days have been entirely awesome.   Yesterday was a long one…we ran a little over 600 miles to make it down to Guerrero Negro in one day.  The whales were (as always) almost surreal.  Seeing living creatures this big, this close, and this friendly was spiritual and inspiring. You make an almost telepathic connection…it just feels like there’s something there.   So, I beamed a mental message to my new aquatic buddies…I asked them to say hi to Felipe.  Hey, why not?   It was cool.  Then on to Antonio’s and the fish tacos.  A great lunch. San Ignacio and the mission.   The lava fields at the foot of Vulcan Las Tres Virgenes.   Yep, we rolled by a real volcano today.   Down La Cuesta del Infierno to the shore of the Sea of Cortez.  And on into Santa Rosalia.

We had a delicious dinner tonight (we decided, of course, to go for Mexican food).  After dinner we stopped by the Santa Rosalia church designed by Gustav Eiffel (the same guy who designed the Eiffel Tower).   We bought cookies from the Boleo Bakery for dessert.  We’re staying in a delightfully old, all wood historic hotel…it’s the Frances Hotel high up on a bluff above Santa Rosalia, looking out over the Sea of Cortez.  Life is good.

I may not have Internet service for a few days (we are, after all, about 700 miles south of the border in Baja), but I promise you we’ll have more good California Scooter stuff coming your way!  Stay tuned, boys and girls.