Mexico 1

They let us into the country!  We did not properly exit the country when we were here ten years ago and had doubts.  We did not turn in our vehicle permit through a curious set of circumstances and hot weather.  But that is another story.

We entered through the border station at the town of Tecate, the same place as the beer of that name is made.  We broke camp in Potrero County Park early and were at the border about 7:30 in the morning.  We spent the next two hours getting the immigration papers and insurance.  American insurance is not good in Mexico.  We did not need a vehicle permit this time because we are only visiting Baja.  There is a zone for about 50 km. along the border and including Baja that does not require them.  Maybe that's why we got in!!!

We easily found our way onto Highway 3 leading to Ensenada and headed south through a fertile valley famous for it's wines.  There are large vineyards here like we saw when we were leaving Don's house.  We didn't stop though.

The highway was excellent as we left Tecate.  We travelled along a smooth, wide, highway with large shoulders.

This soon came to an end!

We are now at the end of our third day, about 700 miles down, and the roads have varied from excellent to terrible.  Thankfully the excellent far exceeds the terrible.  In general the road has been good.  There are stretches where the highway has been rebuilt and are excellent and these are growing each year.  The few patches of terrible have been short.  The road mostly is a two narrow lanes with no shoulders.  Most curves are marked with a sign.  Some are marked with multiple signs and stripes in the road for a dangerous curve.  Then you get to one that was as bad as the one marked "dangerous" and it is totally unmarked!

The speed limit is most commonly 80 kph (50 mph) and is completely ignored by everyone.  I have been travelling at 90 to 110 and have been passed by everything that shows up in my mirrors.  Usually it looks like I am standing still as they go by.  They must be doing over 120 (75 mph).

Then there are the "topes".  These are speed bump that slow traffic down to about 2 kph.  They are most commonly at the highway entrance and exit of towns or on the town streets.  These come in two styles; on town streets they are 6" high and 12" wide, and on the highway they are 6" high but about 6 feet wide and are preceded by "vibradores" (see picture).  Those are about twenty 1" high, 6" wide bumps that are spaced 30 feet apart and reduce down to about 5 feet apart just before the tope.  The topes would ruin a vehicle's suspension if hit at speed.  For us they would probably send us into the roadside brush, airborne.

We have been in Mexico before and they were not a surprise or problem to us.

We spent our first night at a very nice campground run by a Canadian and owned by a religious non-profit group.  It was an old olive orchard and had nice grass for the tents.  It also had a large play area as they often have groups of kids from back home come for a week's retreat.  It is near Lázaro Cárdenas and is called Los Olivos.  We highly recommend it.

The next night was spent at Guerrero Negro at an RV park.  It is near the Pacific coast and the wind howled through the town.  Sand was blowing everywhere, even through the fine mesh screen of our tent.  We were set up on gravel behind a 12' high brick wall and tied off the tent to trees and stakes to keep it from blowing away.  We wished we were back at Los Olivos.

The first day was spent mostly in farm and orchard country.  There were many huge, hundred-acre, greenhouses along several miles of the highway.  As well as small family farms.  The picture is of a cactus farm where they grow and harvest "nopales", the flat round cactus leaves that are eaten about the same way as we do green peppers and with a similar flavor.

The second day we were in desert.  The traffic dropped to a very small fraction of what we had seen in the farm country.  And this has gone on ever since.  Now as a retired forester I like trees.  There are none here except for the palms in the built up areas and resorts.  It is a different desert than the ones we have visited before: Sahara, Sonoran and Okanogan.  Lots more rock.

Our first, and so far only, stop at tourist attractions has been at "La Bufadora", a Pacific cost water spout near Ensenada.  It is out a side road along the south side of the bay and is a Real Tourist Trap.  To see the ocean waves come into the narrow channel and blow water into the air you must walk from the parking area through the gauntlet of tourist junk booths.  Both going in and going out.

The days have been tiresome riding so we have been stopping early, between 2 and 3 in the afternoon.  It is getting hot then and the stress of riding the Mexican highway tires us.  Today we are near Puerto Escondido at the Tripui Resort where are again camped on grass in the shade of a large tree.  This is a very nice resort but, like our other camps, is nearly empty.  It is late in the season but we think the news, back home, of the drug wars are hurting the tourist businesses hard.  In the morning the sun was hitting the mountains with the moon still up as we left Tripui.

The road to La Paz was like the others, in good shape but narrow with spots of construction.  There seems to be no reason to where they are improving the road.  They are improving it in sections here and there, not concentrating on the dangerous corners or the worst surfaced areas or they most heavily travelled.  It is going to be a long time before they are done. 

A U.S. contractor would use a big concrete form, a concrete pumper and several concrete trucks to pour the culvert facing in one day.  The Mexican contractor has provided his crew with a couple barrels of water, a pile of sand, bags of cement and a rotary mixer.  The guy in the center, by the sign, has a large rock on his back.  He, and two others, are scrounging on the hillside for large rocks to embed in the concrete so that they don't have to make so much of it.  They will be hand building the facing of the culvert for quite a while.  The contractor has road graders, bulldozers and excavators for the heavy work but most of the finishing is done by hand.

We reached La Paz early in the day and found another nice campground.  This one without grass but with nice facilities.  We did our laundry and in the late afternoon went to walk the Malecón, along the waterfront.  We stopped at a restaurant for a bucket of beer and two huge shrimp cocktails and then went out to watch the sun set over the bay.

We are off early again on the last of our days going south.  Here you can see the hand laid concrete roadside ditch.  A U.S. contractor would use an expensive machine to do a continuous pour doing hundreds of feet a day.  The Mexican contractor does this the same way as the culvert facing, except for the rocks.

We stopped at the town of Todos Santos to look at the city's art work and the art produced by the local craft persons.  Kathy fell in love with a nice pendant made of silver with a Labrodite stone in the center circled by flowers and hummingbirds worked into the silver.  So we bought it.

This is the famous Hotel California, supposedly the one in the Eagles song which was supposedly written after a stay by the Eagles in the hotel.

We have reached Cabo San Lucas!!!  We have run out of dry land so after we visit for the weekend we will be returning north.  It took us a day longer than planned to get here so we will have to leave a day early to get back to the USA on time.  We have reservations in Las Vegas that are paid so we want to be there on time.

The tires on the trailer are not surviving well on these roads.  We will not be able to make it back to the U.S. on the remaining tread.  In the U.S. we can buy them at Walmart.  There is a Walmart in La Paz.  So I went to it and found out they do not carry my size.  So the first thing I did on arriving in Cabo was go looking for a tire at this town's Walmart and at Costco and at the Bridgestone tire shop.  Bridgestone does have one, but it is at their dealership in La Paz!  I had them hold it in my name and we will pick it up on the way back.  As there is only one road down the peninsula we have to return the way we came.  Stopping in La Paz is no problem. 

We will continue this in Los Cabos.