I left you in Tijuana, a border town with a dangerous reputation for people/drug smuggling but in reality a relatively tame location provided you are sensible. Naturally Tijuana´s notoriety throughout the media, combined with the fall of the dollar, has turned it into a ghost town and the only other foreigner we met whilst there was an Israeli guy named Shai. Its funny how travellers manage to gravitate towards one another, even without the aid of a hostel or a lonely planet, and within 24 hours of knowing Shai we had arranged to rent a car with him and travel Southward through Baja California, the spit of land on the west coast of Mexico. This proved incredibly useful, as Shai´s dark features could easily be mistaken as Mexican and we received virtually no hassle from men whilst in his company.
Simply renting a car, was in itself, a total adventure as driving a manual on (what we Brits consider) the wrong side of the road, was something I was unsure I´d be able to do. Yet (and I say this with a shameful amount of pride) considering it took me over two years to pass my test in the first place, I found it relatively easy. The only sticky situation we got ourselves into was when Shai supposedly didn´t stop at an 'alto' sign and we got pulled over by the police. Whether or not the alto sign even existed was dubious. The clearly bent cop that pulled us over insisted that we follow him to a suspiciously small looking 'station' and proceeded to ask us to pay a forty dollar fine, but was unable to provide any paper work to go with it. When we questioned the legitamacy of the fine he proceeded to tell us that if we went to the main police station they might be able to give us a discount but we wouldn´t want to do that as the station was on the other side of town. When we assured him that we´d be more than happy to make the journey he finally let us go, and thankfully we didn´t part with a penny.
Northern Baja California has a scorched landscape, quite barren, punctured with the occasional vineyard and sporadic bolders. For those of you who´ve seen it, it was like something straight out of the film Tremors. With a basic map and the security of the vehicle we left a lot of our destinations to chance, deciding we liked the name of a town and heading for it. We first stopped in La Bufadora, then on to Sierra De San Pedro Martir National Park the following night, which we took a wild guess might take around thirty minutes to reach from the main road. Three hours, and countless bends later, we reached the entrance to the National Park. This is by far the most remote place Abi and I have ever visited. This is a land of Coyotes and condors, scorpions and stags, and apparently even the occasional puma. There wasn´t a single other person visiting the area, and the only sound to be heard for miles around was that of the wind blowing through the trees. It was quite magical. Despite being captivated by the serene nature of our surroundings we were faced with the slight practical dilemma of not having a tent, or in fact any real food with us and the fact that it was far too late to drive all the way back down the treturuos road that had led us there. But often the best adventures had are those that are unplanned, so we set to work making a roaring fire under dazzling moonlight, and creating a 'soup' which consisted of one remaining carrot, two tomatoes, a cucumber and a few olives left over from lunch in a pan of water. We slept the night in the car and although we all nearly perished from the cold we still managed to fully explore our surroundings the following day.
Once we reached civilisation we stocked up on Baby Ruths and Sugar Daddies, amongst other sweet treats garaunteed to rot your teeth with one bite, and set off on a road that leads straight through the desert. This new landscape left me utterly gob smacked, much like the first time a child sees snow I imagine, and several times we had to stop the car to examine the obscure variety of cacti we'd been observing from the car window. That evening we stayed in Guerro Negro where we accidentaly stumbled into a brothel and a rather plump older lady took a shinning to Abi and spent the evening pursuing her on the dance floor! We also met a young Mexican man who went by the name of Martin who promised to take us whale watching the following day. However Martin never showed up, which I felt I had to mention was hardly surprising considering we met him in a brothel, at which point Shai rather astutely pointed out that he did in fact meet us there also, and I refrained from judging him too harshly.
The following night we stayed in San Ignacio, a little oasis in the middle of the desert. Here we traded in our night in the car for a night in a rather plush yurt which is best described as a grand circular tent with all the provisions of a real home, including bath robes! We spent the afternoon kayaking down a palm lined river to a hot spring where small fish came and ate the dead skin from our feet! This was a rather surreal but pleasant experience until the larger fish thought they´d give it a try and we swiftly got out. Unbeknown to us at the time, this was actually our last night with Shai, and the car, as the following day he had to catch the ferry to the mainland sooner than we had anticipated. At this point it seems our fate changed and we were quite abruptly faced with several unwelcome challenges, one of which I will briefly explain in the following few paragraphs.
After waving goodbye to the creature comforts and convenience of the car we bused our way down to a small town called Mulege. Finding little there to entertain us we headed straight for our next destination, Loreto. Let me briefly explain that although the land scape of Baja is quite exceptional, the towns themselves are not. They are pit-stops, the sort of places Americans find themselves using as a winter base in search of the sun but other than that are quite deserted. There are no hostels and the likely hood of meeting other backpackers is rare. Despite our disappointment with the latest of these towns Abi and I endeavoured to keep ourselves busy. In an attempt to evade home sickness, which was inevitably going to pay us a visit once or twice during the festive season, we took ourselves on a beach walk. This proved to be the perfect distraction from thoughts of loved ones, as we came across several dead puffer fish and manta-rays washed up on the Shore and flocks of pelicans bobbed up and down on the oceans waves. That evening we went out for a drink in a bar which turned out to be full of gringos, owned by a particularly offensive fat middle aged manager who insisted on kissing each of us on arrival, breathing sweat and alcohol onto our cheeks as he did so. This was shortly followed by an equally inebriated middle aged American woman pulled up a seat next to us and slurring that she had three sons our age and we simply must join her for dinner. Intrigue and hunger got the better of us, and we accepted without too much consideration of the consequences. On the way to the house our host very brashly exclaimed while trying to light a cigarette 'my boys won´t try to sleep with you I promise' which was shortly followed by a story about how she was friends with the girls at the local pole dancing club, and really we should go visit them after dinner. Thankfully her sons were indeed the gentlemen she had promised them to be and did not share their mothers enthusiasm at the prospect of having a family night out at the local strip club. We spent a rather amiable evening playing cards with them and it was only when their mother returned from the club with a local timeshares salesman she'd met a matter of minutes before, dumped an over sized sombrero on our heads, plonked herself down next to me and exclaimed ´let mumma play' that we felt it was time to make our exit.
We made our way back to our accommodation, which was naturally the cheapest in town and resembled a 1950´s style motel, much like the one in Hitchcock´s Psycho. Our room was quite far removed from the main road and we were the only guests in the establishment, which we hadn´t considered to be a problem until the following occurred. While entering the motel we had noticed a young guy hanging around outside. We thought little of it until we noticed he was pacing back and forth outside our door. The door itself was made of frosted glass and pretty quickly the pacing turned into window tapping, and eventually he grew bold enough to press his face right up to the glass. Unsure of his intentions, but damn sure they weren't pleasant, we armed ourselves with various 'weapons' including a picture frame, some mozzie repellent and a lighter! Although we screamed countless obscenities in hope of scaring him off/waking the guard he continued to scare us half to death until 4am, when I suddenly remembered I had my English sim card somewhere in the depths of my bag. After some desperate searching through our phrase book we managed to communicate to the police 'malo...hombre...habitacion...exterior' and eventually they turned up and thankfully scared him off. Despite this being a truly awful experience, we only deemed it the worst 24 hours of the trip the following day, when our bus out of this hell hole was cancelled, and we had to wait three hours to get on the next one. Finally what finished us off was the drivers decision to play Celine Dion 'My heart will go on' so offensively loudly that she permeated right through my earphones, leaving Bob Dylan's familiar and consoling lyrics lost and distorted. A single salty tear trickled down my cheek as I gave in to four full hours of power ballads.
Feeling more than a little sorry for ourselves we arrived in La Paz and headed straight for a centrally located gay friendly hotel we´d found on the net. Sure enough when we arrived the guy manning reception was as camp as could be, as if by magic he´d been plucked from the streets of Soho and sent to us by an angel. As we walked to dinner that night we passed a bar with live music blasting out a fantastic rendition of Bob Marley's ´don´t worry about a thing... coz every little thing is going to be alright' And indeed to the large extent it was, La Paz was a charming city and we even managed to coax out the Christmas spirit in us and buy a pinata. We spent Christmas in Los Cabos with Whitney, a friend we made in LA who is on a three month placement working on a resort. Unfortunately Whitney´s flat mate kindly offered to drive us to the beach on Christmas day which turned out to be tourist central, with a Father Christmas sailing up and down the cost on a speed boat and a drinking contest going on twenty meters behind us, with a constant chant of 'drink drink drink' ringing clear. Still we ate like Kings, made a sand man with a carrot nose and swam in the sea, so the day wasn´t altogether lost. On boxing day the three of us hired a car and headed for a totally deserted beach where the only thing hollering was a near by sea-lion. We followed this up in a local bar with a live band and merenge dancing. Finally we made peace with Southern Baja and its people.
