Finding La Paz

As Emese (and a few of you) likes to remind me, if our blog were any credible reflection of time and space, we are currently driving into La Paz, Baja California Sur right about now - a harrowing journey of five weeks across relatively very little space.

Closer to truth is that we are currently in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the gorgeous state of Chiapas, 5,000 kilometers más o menos from La Paz - as the Crow drives - near the southern edge of Mexico. The intervening kilometros have landed us in: Topolobampo (By far the best Mexican town name to say repeatedly. Try it.), Mazatlan, San Blas, Tequila (a real Mexican town, and home of the other Crow - Jose Cuervo), Guadalajara, Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende (Can't throw a roca here and not hit an American, by the way.), Mexico City, Oaxaca, Puerto Escondido and Playa Zicatela, Puerto Arista, and, since Friday, San Cristóbal de las Casas.



La Paz was, you may want to know, a kick-up-your-feet town (see sandy toes), deeply true to its name. We spent a week there in the great company of our previously mentioned New York-based friends, Annah and McGregor, in our own rented Casa Nina a block from La Paz's beautiful malecon (long waterfront walkway) and mooring harbor. From our Nina roofdeck we could see beyond the harbor across the Bahia La Paz to a mountain-dominated horizon to the west. That combination and some help from the sun's reliable westward arc creates famous La Paz sunsets. Testament in the attached photos.



In addition to prolific consumption atop Casa Nina of Tecate cerveza, fresh lime margaritas, cheap sparkling white wine (not half bad) from up the Baja peninsula, totopos with homemade pico de gallo salsa, guacamole, and various grillables, we also had the distinct advantage of La Paz's reputed best (and 24-hour) taqueria, El Rancho Viejo, just a block away, and within blurry-eyed sight of our bacanal rooftop perch. Many a taco was consumed here. (By the way, margaritas, we hear from reliable Mexican sources, like the Cinco de Mayo holiday, is an American invention. Tequila - thoroughly Mexican.)



We did occasionally leave the Casa and El Rancho and venture about the southern peninsula to secluded, pristine beaches that have jumped straight out of Corona ads - Tecolote, La Ventana, Los Cerritos - to bask in the Baja sun, swim, eat ceviche, and tomar cervezas and margaritas (not necessarily in that order). Go see these beaches and La Paz sometime if you haven't. You can avoid Cabo San Lucas, a bit to the south, in my opinion and that of Lonely Planet, which I paraphrase: If you like having watered down tequila poured down your throat in loud, sweaty bars thronged with year-round spring breakers, this is your place.

I hate watered down tequila.



One quick background story leading to this part of the trip. Annah is Emese's dearest longtime American friend. Their sisterhood began at the tender age of 12 when Emese was sent - sans a word of English - to Connecticut to spend a year with extended family. Their bond struck quick and has lasted over 20 years of trans-Atlantic vacations, cross-cultural schooling, and co-conspired mischief that still today, in La Paz for example, locks them into convulsive fits of laughter. Annah's family is Emese's, Emese's Annah's.

Consequently, Emese's father, Dr. Jozsef Tóth, wanted to do something special in celebration of Annah and McGregor's recent (and excellent) North Carolina wedding. He asked our advice, and we did our best to help, deciding that the best gift would be to send the four of us somewhere fun. All agreed that this was a brilliant idea - even Dr. Tóth - and there, in La Paz, did we find ourselves together, drinking toasts to peace, health, matrimony, and Jozsef on the Casa Nina roofdeck. Egészségedre!



Saints are of course prevalent in post-Hispanic Mexican history and present-day Mexican culture. Many take the form of patron saints of life's key elements - communities, travelers' safety, lost keys, etc. Several weeks ago, you'll perhaps recall, we found our very own saint of grounded crows and stranded travelers in San Javier. A bit drunk on my own self-accredited sainthood bestowing authority (and a Tecate or two), I am hereby canonizing Emese the patron saint of your valuable time. She has implored me to shorten the blog entries and to be more crisp. I will attempt this, for when implored to do something by a saint/editor/wife/travel companion, one complies.

More (or less) and crispier verbage to come!

May the saints be with you always - and with us as the Crow flies onward, southward.

The Crossing

April 21, 2007

On a warm, clear southern California morning, we hurtled down I-5 to its terminus. The border crossing was unceremonious and deeply satisfying. The first day of driving got us from Oceanside across to Mexico, along the Baja coastline, and inland to Cataviña, on Baja’s high desert.

We camped at Rancho Santa Inez surrounded by truck-sized boulders, towering, eagle-perch Cardon cacti, and Dr. Seussian Boojum trees.

We feasted on pasta and a Trader Joe’s sauce and complemented the meal with tortillas and Tecates purchased from the rancho’s owner.

We dozed to the distant sound of downshifting semi trucks on Baja’s winding, narrow Mexico One, the peninsula’s single paved highway artery southward to our first key destination, La Paz. In 3 days we were to meet friends, Annah and McGregor, flying from New York to spend a week with us in that excellent seaside town – que bonito y tranquilo!

To the Sea

April 22, 2007

One way to the warm turquoise waters of the Sea of Cortez (also known more plainly as the Gulf of California) is to wind down that single paved artery along Pacific coastal bluffs, inward to the high desert interior, back to the coast, and then one relatively short, dramatically beautiful cut southeastward across the peninsula.

During the second brief interlude of Pacific proximity, and following the advice of friends with many kilometers and waves logged in Baja, we set out to find (me) a point break somewhere well off the highway. “Off the highway” in Baja generally means off pavement, so we put El Cuervo and ourselves to the test and rattled our teeth and our nerves down a rutted, rocky dirt road to the coast.

Due to the required intersection of so many variables, surfing is a sport left in many ways to chance – a critical part of its beauty and fascination. Most excellent surf breaks around the world are not located in plain view of a nearby highway. To catch the ideal combination of swell, tide, wind, ocean bottom, and coastal formation, you’ve often got to invest some time and take a chance to know what you might have missed. Or not have missed, as the case was on that day. Having explored nearly 10 Km of these “roads” along the coast, given our timetable and expected arrival in La Paz, and given a combination (led by a lack of swell) that equated to no waves, we bounced inland.

By twilight we had arrived in Mexico One’s northernmost town on the eastern peninsular edge – Santa Rosalía, a town founded by a French mining company that came to extract copper. The town deviates noticeably from Baja’s other predominantly adobe towns in its wood-based frame architecture. Given our day’s fruitless but beautiful and rather enjoyable detour, we sated a fierce traveler’s hunger with a surprisingly good thin-crust pizza topped with fresh caught shrimp at an outdoor café on the main plaza. We ate and watched town life move slowly and contentedly by.

An hour and another 50-plus kilometers down winding One, we set up camp by headlamp, having found a palapa-dotted beach on the western shore of Bahia Concepción – a long, gorgeous, and deeply tranquil bay separated from the Sea by a 35 kilometer-long peninsula that juts its sheltering, mountainous mass northward. We dozed in our tent to the lakelike sound of a water’s edge and slept deeply.

Back to Breakers

April 23, 2007

A morning on the beach and an amazing lunch of fish tacos at McLuLu’s sidewalk taco stand in Loreto sent us contentedly back across the peninsula toward the Pacific, through the towns of Ciudad Insurgentes and Ciudad Constitución and within striking distance from the highway to our third camping destination at Punta Conejo. A 15 Km drive off the highway sent us through a dreamlike cactus forest alive with the darting trail crossings of desert critters and the orange glow of sunset.

Nervous about our lack of any real knowledge about this place nor the quality of the road to the coast, and feeling the coming darkness, we pressed on. We arrived just past twilight to find a desolate, rocky point draped in a cold, looming blue gray and marked only by a mostly abandoned shantytown encampment for fishermen and a small makeshift “lighthouse” on a thin steel hatched frame. A couple of weather hunched men of indeterminable age and disposition and their scrawny barking dog eyed us as we passed. Perhaps they smiled and waved, but it was dark, and this place felt haunted.

We drove up the coastal dirt road to a clearing behind the dunes and uneasily set up camp. Across the dunes the waves beat the barren coastline, and nestled in our tent, we let visions of banditos and the desert night critters slowly fade beneath the Pacific’s persistent rhythm.

San Javier

April 24, 2007

Dawn brought hopeful light and despite the prior evening’s nerves we had slept deeply and well. A persistent morning wind through the tent indicated that the surf would be blown apart and not worth a paddle out. A short walk up the dunes confirmed. The point, though, had taken on a new feel, with late model SUV’s bringing lanchas to the beach north of the point to head out for the day’s catch. We made some of our Peets coffee stash on the Jetboil stove and drank it in the dunes with the warming rays at our backs.

We packed up camp and drove a few hundred meters to the point. From the plateau on the bluff at the foot of the lighthouse, we watched the lanchas head seaward and I assessed the worth of a surf in the choppy, mixed up water. I pushed El Cuervo through a short patch of sand to anonther hard packed plateau to check the south side of the point. No better, but I had to paddle out, and I did so to the north side’s break.

Though the waves were not perfect, it felt great to be in Baja surf and to rinse the dust from our travels and bivouac. Sated, I packed up the board and ignited El Cuervo to head back up toward the lighthouse and the desert road back to the highway.

A nagging fear realized itself as we crossed the same sand patch we had earlier traversed. El Cuervo spun its two-wheel drive self into the sand and in seconds our laden ship was beached – about 10 meters shy of hard packed freedom, the differential resting comfortably on the soft stuff.

At just that moment, a grizzled, sun-beaten caballero with work-worn hands approached us from up the point. He carried a driftwood walking stick the way a bishop would loft a ceremonial staff. He wore a ranchero’s shirt and sombrero, faded work jeans, and a pair of pretty cool sunglasses. This caballero we came to know as Señor Javier Hernández, the owner of Rancho Punta Conejo and our host.

We later canonized San Javier* the patron saint of wayward, unwitting travelers who take two-wheel drive Nissans where only 4WD should go. (Though obviously lacking any sanctioned authority to do so, it seemed to us a fundamentally appropriate recognition of his warmth, his welcome, and his tireless efforts to free El Cuervo and us from his soft, sinking tierra.)

Nothing better preps an unwitting adventurer with the knowledge to get out of a fix than getting him or herself into one. The apparition of a patron saint doesn’t hurt either. San Javier, without hesitation, told us we were his welcome guests, assessed our laughable situation, and without the slightest chuckle or judgment, he prostrated himself beneath the tailgate and began to scoop handsful of sand from beneath the lofted differential and El Cuervo’s rear axle to return the grounded bird’s weight to its wheels. We approached from the sides and did the same. We gathered seawater from the tidepools in our camp bucket and discarded soda bottles and wetted the sand around the wheels. We then constructed two soft driftwood tracks toward the hard dirt exit.

Our prep complete, I heeded San Javier’s careful instructions and delicately rocked El Cuervo forward and back – first gear, reverse, first, reverse – until our rusty Nissan righted onto level sand. Javier’s soft, confident, light-bearing voice guided me and El Cuervo forward in a series of rocking iterations, until the path of freedom – though perhaps not perpetual – was firm beneath our wheels.

Despite my insistence, Señor Javier Hernández refused even modest compensation for his graciousness and invaluable hard work and wise counsel on our behalf. He asked only our names and address and a post card from Buenos Aires.

Perhaps, supplied with our identities, he will put in a good word for two souls moving southward across a godly beautiful and varied earth.

* San Javier (or St. Francis Xavier) was actually canonized by Gregory XV in 1622.

Southbound

While the journey of 1,000 miles begins with one step, our six-month roughly 20,000-mile road trip to Buenos Aires began with five days in Alta California.

After starting the new "workweek" by loading up the rusty, trusty Crow (our ’93 Nissan, hereafter refered by the Spanish equivalent: El Cuervo), we made one last stop at a San Francisco Peets and began the southbound trip along Ocean Beach’s Great Highway. Google Maps directions to Buenos Aires, Argentina: South to Santiago, Chile. Turn left.

I’d be lying if I said the beginning of our trip was pure bold carpe diem, totally without pangs of apprehension, which, I guess, mark the beginning of all journeys. We dealt with this by taking five days to get from San Francisco to Thousand Oaks to LA to Oceanside to Baja California, stops along the way to reconnect with family and friends. We also had one last opportunity to top off the $1,000-plus we spent at the San Francisco REI store. We were gear-headedly excited and budget-mindedly dismayed to find the once-Toys R Us in Santa Monica a block from my brother’s place is now an REI, and managed to find a few additional must-haves.

Nothing cures buyer’s remorse better than putting a new purchase to good use. We camped the first three nights in Baja. Some of our favorite items: our light, side-accessible packs, Jetboil stoves, Thermarest self-inflating sleeping pads, headlamps, and ditty bags – those great, little multi-colored compartmentalizing sacks that simplify finding clean underwear deep in your pack.

One final purchase from my long-time friend Jim Phelps, was a 6-2 rocket fish surfboard – which found a few good waves at a remote point break two days deep into Baja. Emese side-glanced her wonder about the need for an additional surfboard – I had a 6-10 already tucked into El Cuervo – but Jim gave me a test drive and a great deal. Besides, any serious traveling surfer needs a quiver of at least two arrows.