The week before Christmas I set off on a motorcycle trip to Baja. It was supposed to be the final ride on the motorcycle before I sold it. I haven’t been riding the motorcycle much this year and it seemed like a bit of a luxury to keep it around. Not to mention the fact that if you don’t ride frequently then your skills get rusty – and that’s not a good thing on a big motorcycle - on any motorcycle.
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| At the tip of Baja California with the BMW |
A ride from Sacramento to Cabo San Lucas, on the tip of Baja, seemed like a good destination and the timing was right, so I packed my bags and set off south on Saturday 11th December.
Day 1 - Sacramento to San Juan Capistrano
Interstate 5 south to LA is not a particularly inspiring ride on any mode of transport. On a motorcycle it is similarly uninspiring but it has smells – a lot of nasty smells (the worst of which is the Harris Feeding Company’s lot near Coalinga – so many cattle they are
visible on Google) and the smell is just disgusting. Riding through LA is always fun - heavy traffic, high speeds, very scary indeed.
I made it to San Juan Capistrano by late evening of the first day and did my final preparation for crossing the border. This included buying motorcycle insurance, arranging cell phone coverage and an e-mail data plan while I am there – all of which can be done very quickly from a web browser these days - how spoiled we are.
Day 2 - San Juan Capistrano to Vicente Guerrero
The next morning, Sunday, I headed for San Diego and the border. Going across the border into Mexico at the Tijuana crossing was not a big deal. I made it more of one by actively seeking out the purchase of a travel permit, which all the books say you need, though no one actually checked it while I was in Mexico. The permit involved queuing several times, filling out a form, paying over some money and dealing with a surly Immigration Man.
One wrong turn after the border led me into the chaos of downtown Tijuana. Not what I wanted to do before I got my foreign driving skills honed but I soon backtracked and got on the Toll Road that runs down the coast from Tijuana to Ensenada. That road was a much easier introduction to the traffic and roads of Mexico, though it is not very typical and you could still be in Southern California except not so much traffic.
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| The Pacific Coast south of Tijuana |
After lunch in Ensenada, I headed south on Highway 1 or the Trans-Peninsular as they call it. By this time I had figured out a few things about driving in Mexico, namely:
- watch out for the speed bumps or topes as they call them – they are large and they should not be taken at speed.
- be extra careful to watch out for these speed bumps as you leave town as well as when you enter town – they are there too and just when you think you are in the clear they have one last one to surprise you.
- keep a sharp eye out for the Stop signs - “ALTA” – they are not always conspicuous, they are not consistently placed on the left or right or even close to the road, and they don’t always need to be located at an intersection.
- all the gas stations are PEMEX and only PEMEX and they don’t take credit cards. It is cash only.
- outside of the towns themselves you don’t appear to have to worry about the speed limit. Everyone speeds, often quite excessively. Rule of thumb - use the same number MPH as the posted KPH and add 10 or 20 MPH.
The road south was in pretty good condition. Much better than I expected. But that first afternoon there were a lot of rough sections of dirt where the road was being rebuilt. On a motorcycle that meant the ingestion of a lot of dust.
I had planned to be in a hotel long before dark, but nothing looked good until, well after dark, I pulled into Vicente Guerrero and found a nice motel with a courtyard. I figured with a motorcycle, the last thing I wanted to do was to leave the bike unattended on the street at night so my choice of motel was usually dictated by the security of the overnight parking.
Day 3 - Vicente Guerrero to Mulege
The road south on Monday morning led just inland of the coast through a lot of industrial scale farms. I was quite surprised at the scale of the farming operations but I suppose it makes sense – a good climate, proximity to market, cheap labor, apparently good soil and availability of water. It looks like they grow a lot of berries for the US market here.
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| Cirios |
After passing through El Rosario, the road traverses inland across a sparsely populated desert landscape. The Saguaro cacti are spectacular but what is really amazing are the Cirios. These strange plants are only found here in Baja and in a small area of the Sonoran desert and they are the weirdest things as you can see. The English name is the boojum (named after a Lewis Carrol character in the Hunting of the Snark).
This section of road was the longest section between gas stations - 196 miles by my clock. That’s pretty convenient as I was averaging about 200 miles per tank. I was running on empty when I came into the gas station in Villa Jesus Maria. Of course I had bottles of gasoline in my bags so I had a little extra gas for a few more miles but still 196 miles is a long way.
The next major town was Guerrero Negro where I had a late lunch. Guerrero Negro is the jumping off point for whale watching tours in the Bay. No whales quite yet, and anyway, in the town itself you are a long way from the ocean so I don’t think you can see much without going out on a boat trip.
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| One of many roadside shrines/memorials |
From Guerrero Negro the road crossed to the other side of the peninsula, and dropped down into Santa Rosalia on the Sea of Cortez. Santa Rosalia is an interesting and atypical town - an industrial copper mining and smelting town. Built by the European Boleo Mining Company (a Rothschild company), it’s architecture is more European than Mexican and it is a lot more industrial. It has an interesting church manufactured by Gustav Eiffel for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris and later shipped over to Mexico in the late 1800’s. Of course the mine and the associated smelting is long gone now so the town is a shadow of its former self, but it still has a nice atmosphere despite all the crumbling industrial sites around it.
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| Gustav Eiffel's Church in Santa Rosalia |
I pushed on that evening into Mulege reaching there just after dark. The Hotel Mulege was in the center of town with a nice protected area for the bike so that was my home for the night. In the next room to mine were Ernie and Jerry - two contractors from the Bay Area driving to their coastal plot of land with a load of lumber and tools to continue construction of their vacation home. We had a nice evening sipping peach and vodka cocktails outside the hotel, followed by beer and tequila at the restaurant across the road from the hotel. Thankfully the tequila shots didn’t get too out of hand.
Day 4 - Mulege to Cabo San Lucas
The next day was an early start on the final leg down to Cabo San Lucas. Some nice riding across the peninsula to Ciudad Insurgentes. Such a long straight road - a chance to get the motorcycle up to speed. No one seems to worry about speed limits - they are so ridiculously low that just about all the time you are speeding - often significantly.
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| Somewhere south of Mulege |
From Insurgentes it was a short hop down to Ciudad Constitucion where legend has it the police shake down tourists for on the spot fines for missing stop signs or the slightest of speed infractions (check out the last paragraph in
the Wikipedia entry). I was especially careful and had no trouble. Actually a gringo in the local coffee shop said that the Mayor had been aware of his town’s reputation and had told to police to lay off - the dismal state of the tourism in Baja means that they can’t afford to annoy any brave tourists that do venture that way. One thing about the tourists - there just didn’t seem to be many of them. All the bad press about the crime and drug related violence near the border means that no one is coming here and all the locals are suffering from lack of business - lots of empty restaurants, bars, hotels, campsites and the like.
From Constitucion it was over to the Baja side of the peninsula to La Paz. La Paz is a nice town but I had visited it before on my kayaking trip in 2002 so I just filled up with gas and continued south. I took the dual carriageway down the westerly route to Todos Santos - a very nice and very underutilized road.
Todos Santos was a nice place too, but again it seemed to be suffering from a lack of tourists - and the town did not seem to have much else going on except tourism. I made the obligatory stop outside the
Hotel California - rumoured to be the inspiration for The Eagles song of the same name (alas its just a rumour) and took the obligatory photograph of the motorbike parked outside.
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Hotel California in Todos Santos
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From there it was a short hop over to Cabo San Lucas on the most southerly tip of the peninsula. I wasn’t impressed by the Cabo - arriving late to the chaos of rush hour traffic didn’t put me in a good frame of mind and the town has just made too many concessions to the tourist industry and to the particularly bad side of the tourist industry - the Spring Break crowd and the Cruise Ship crowd.
Day 5 - Cabo San Lucas to Mulege
On the road by sun rise the next day, a quick look around the now quieter streets of Cabo before heading east towards San Jose del Cabo.
San Jose is altogether a nicer town than its neighbouring Cabo San Lucas - a lot quieter, a bit more artsy with a nice old town area. I liked the town. I didn’t stick around too long and from San Jose, it was back north again to La Paz. There was some nice countryside north from San Jose on the east side of the Peninsula. Much more attractive than the westerly road I came down the day before. Again no stopping in La Paz, a short coffee break in Ciudad Constitucion, and then on to Loreto where I took a break and looked around town. A nice seaside town with an interesting old town area and a wonderful mission. I pressed on tthe last 80 or so miles to Mulege, arriving just before nightfall.
Day 6 - Mulege to El Rosario
Another early start and I was on the road north to have breakfast in Santa Rosalia. This is the Boleo Mining town, and I had heard of a French bakery there that was supposed to be quite good. The Panaderia El Boleo was now more a Mexican-French bakery since all the French miners left, but it was still well worthy of a stop. I took time to wander around the mining company artifacts scattered around Santa Rosalia. Lots of old steam locomotives, old smelting plants, office buildings from the late 1800’s. Definitely one of the more interesting spots on the peninsula.
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| The Mission in San Ignacio |
Next stop was San Ignacio. A delighthful oasis in the middle of the peninsula with a beautiful mission.
Guerrero Negro was next where I spent time chatting to 3 cyclists (on human powered bicycles that is) who were riding from San Diego to Panama. That is a tough road through Baja at least and I have a lot of respect for those guys. 60 miles or so a day, stopping by the side of the road and camping when it was nightfall. The 186 miles between gas stations, for me a 2-1/2 hour ride, would be 3 days of gruelling riding for them. Hats off to them.
Fish Tacos for lunch in Jesus Maria and then on with a full tank of gas to El Rosario where I spent the night at the Baja Cactus Motel - a fine place - cheap and surprisingly good quality.
Day 7 - El Rosario to Mission Viejo
The last day in Mexico. I had been told that the border in Tecate was an easier one to cross than the one in Tijuana where the backup of traffic can take 3 or 4 hours to get through, so I took the scenic rout from Ensenada through the wine country to Tecate. Tecate was a typical unattractive border town, and the line of cars waiting to cross the border was relatively short - probably less than an hour if you were in a car. That being said, on the motorcycle I just passed everyone and went to the front of the queue, so perhaps Tijuana would have been fine too.
The border crossing was straightforward, no baggage searches, just a scan of the passport and I was in. For the next 10 or so miles north of the border there was an amazing amount of law enforcement traffic of all kinds - Sherrif’s officers, Highway Patrol, Customs Patrol. That’s probably par for the course around our Mexican border these days.
Now I was back in California again, all I had to do was get home. Straightforward you would think - alas no - the rain started just north of San Diego. Not being dressed for the wet weather, I stopped at a hotel thinking the shower would pass quickly. When I checked the weather channel, this turned out to be quite a serious storm and the next break was forecast for some 6 days later. That’s too long to wait in a Motel 6, so I suited up with rain gear and continued on. I spent the night with my old friend Lynn in Mission Viejo.
Day 8 - Mission Viejo to Sacramento
The last leg home was nothing but a wet slog up I-5 to Sacramento. It was a major storm system and traffic through LA was mess - lots of accidents, lots of stop and go. I tagged on to a bunch of riders from the
Sons of El Shaddai Motorcycle Ministry going through LA up to the Grapevine. There was me on my BMW purring along and there they were roaring along on their Harleys looking as mean as could be. What an unusual pairing - but the weather was fowl and we were fellow motorcyclists - you have to respect that.
Here is a
link to the photos from the trip.
