Baja California

by Duane Dier and Aregnaz Mooradian

Don't plan--just let the weekend flow like water and take the path of least resistance. This was the general tone (and key to success) of the weekend trip Aregnaz and I just finished.

Originally we were to go camping with Rob in Death Valley, but work conflicts and camp site reservation problems kept that from happening. Fortunately Aregnaz and I were resolute in "planning to do something spontaneous"--or something. The evening of the 28th found Aregnaz freshly home from Las Vegas, decompressing at home. I called her and posed a road trip down Baja California in which we would up and leave the next morning, most likely unprepared (that's the adventure, no?). She had been to Mexico; I hadn't. This should be fun.

While packing my things I unpleasantly reminded myself that my camera (Nikon S1 point-and-shoot...I loved that thing) was officially game-over since Fern and John's birthday party. I didn't want my first trip to Mexico to go without visual documentation...what to do? Fern and I have talked for over a year now about purchasing (and sharing) a DSLR--we were going back and forth with different models and such. Anyway, her coworker offered to sell her his Canon EOS 350D / Digital Rebel XT with lens, case, UV filter, two CF cards, USB cable, and battery charger, all in good shape and for cheap. I didn't know if she had purchased it yet, but it was worth a call. Turns out she had just picked it up and was playing with it...so I wrote her a check for my half, stayed for some "after stealing my new toy away from me" chat with her and Eric, and away I went. Oh, and I delivered a wonderful birthday present to Aregnaz (from Fern)--a covered Wok! What a great gift--too bad it was wrapped in all that is unholy...Michael Bay's Transformers wrapping paper. I forgive her: the RiffTrax version was hilarious (thanks Randy!). I am digressing so much it hurts. Let's continue with the story about the perfect weekend.

It's still the night of the 28th. I got to Aregnaz's place in Long Beach and we get ready to leave bright and early.

Stoked, pumped, ramped up, and...stoked we head South in the Prius the morning of the 29th. Brief bathroom/gas stopping included, we got to the US border town of San Ysidro (South of San Diego) in about 2 hours--8:00 AM or so. Alright. We're at the border. Cool. Let's rent a car, ditch my brand new high-performance machine, and pay good money for a shit-kicker that we can drag through whatever filth we find on our visit to our southern neighbor. Sounds like a plan.

A call to 1-800-GOOG411 went like this:
GOOG411 bot: City and state?
Duane: San Ysidro California
GOOG411 bot: San Diego California
Duane: Cancel!
GOOG411 bot: City and state?
Duane: San Ysidro California
GOOG411 bot: City and state?
Duane: San Ysidro California
GOOG411 bot: San Martinez Texas
Duane: Cancel!
Aregnaz: Let me do it...
GOOG411 bot: City and state?
Aregnaz: San Ysidro California
GOOG411 bot: San Ysidro California
Duane: [rolls eyes, slaps forehead with open palm]

Anyway, the first listing for "car rental" was International Car Rental right off the last US freeway exit. Nice. They had one car left: a Kia Spectra (manual transmission) with over 96 thousand miles on it. Wow. Hey, we wanted a shit-kicker, didn't we? He gave us the low-low price of 60 USD/day (by low-low I meant WTF) down from 75. Meh. Oh, and the engine check light was on. The guy there (named Angel) was super nice and gave us some tips in Baja. There was a money exchange place right below his office, so we emptied our wallets of whatever money we had for pesos. International Car Rental even has a little fenced-off skeezy lot where I left the Prius. Pride: swallowed. Let's get a case of USA bottle water and get gone.

Crossing the US/Mexico border was a breeze at 9:15 AM. Now I know what all those Republicans are talking about. We need to tighten up the border, man! Oh wait--we were going South. A quick glance to the left showed a mile-long line of idle cars northbound with twinkles in their eyes. I don't know how they were able to drive, what with the milk in one hand and honey in the other. Everyone going South just had cell phone in their hands.

It's a good thing Aregnaz knew her way around the border towns--she is an Angeleno after all--her fast thinking and decision making got us on Carretera Uno heading South into Baja Norte. Let me tell you: there are some shacks on the side of the road heading out of Tijuana, man. Corrugated metal is not to be used for one's floor, walls, and ceiling, much less 10 feet off the side of the freeway. The chronic health implications alone are depressing.

We did stop at a gas station to buy a map. This is worth noting because it color-coded the roads based on their conditions, a standard for mapas in general. I say this now because those color codings come into play later.

RED: State highway, paved, smooth (like a CA freeway)
YELLOW: Road, not necessarily perfect condition, in practice it's full of potholes (maybe yellow was as close to Swiss cheese as they could get)
White: Only considered a road because it leads somewhere. I wouldn't recommend any non-4WD vehicle to drive on one, and even the 4 wheelers should stick to 10 kph or less...

So we're cruising out of the city, heading first to Rosarito. The beach looks nice from the road, but everything else looks run-down and desolate. I don't have to elaborate much on the conditions of the border towns--apparently anyone who has visited Mexico briefly knows this (and maybe only this) part of the country. Dust, dirt, and people.

We stopped in Rosarito for a brunch of juevos rancheros, beans, salsa, and TORTILLAS. Wow those were some good tortillas. When the guy came by to ask if everything was OK we asked for some more! That was enough of Rosarito for us. We really wanted to get out of the border towns and into a more country-like, friendly Mexico. I didn't want to be a typical tourist, and I was hoping to get by on mine and Aregnaz's Spanish alone. Good luck being greeted in Spanish when you're as pale as me. I needed to get somewhere where nobody spoke it.

Once you get South of Rosarito you get into the cliffy shores of Baja. Wow! The scenery was amazing. We stopped to take pictures a couple of times, but we probably should have taken more. Oh, and there's a gigantic fucking Jesus statue in full technicolor. It's apparently 75 feet tall and weighs 40 tons.


Mexico: Let's fill the potholes and feed the people. I mean shit, they're living under piles of used building materials in those border towns.
GOD: Building a statue of my son is a better idea.
Mexico: [rolls eyes, slaps head with open palm, builds 40 tons of Jesus]

Not too long down the road we end up in Ensenada. The freeway reduces to a busy boulevard with invisible stop lights and hidden stop signs (ALTO). I am such an idiot. There were two cops in front of us and my tourist ass was not even paying attention as I cruised through a busy, stale, red light. A genuinely friendly cop pulls us over, gives us a little spiel, and tells us to follow him to the police station. D'oh! Apparently out-of-towners don't get tickets in the mail--they have to pay fines immediately. I think this applies to more than just American tourists...I got the feeling that the Baja police system might not even communicate to the other states' systems (just a hunch). Anyway, we get escorted through town (carefully not running any more lights) and end up at what looks like a military base. Seriously. There was a fully armed camouflaged Hummer with similarly camo'd Ferales, complete with rifles. Jeez! Talk about intimidation! The cops wrote down all of the information about the oh-so-sweet Kia Spectra and the friendly guy who pulled us over walked us to the DMV-looking building. This was the center for infracciones where they processed our information, issued the fine, and had us pay. It was $250...that's pesos. Not such a big deal. Aregnaz asked them if it would show up on my record and he assured us that it's only internal, and I believed him. Hell, it takes 4 hours to do anything at a California DMV, so I imagine even if they did receive something from Ensenada it would be processed somewhere in the year 2145, long after I'm dead. We basically got a back-end tour of Ensenada (via police escort no less!) and a souvenir infraccion for 25 USD. Not too shabby. At this point we are pretty happy with how the trip was turning out, and it was the early afternoon of the first day.

I haven't mentioned this yet, but at this point in the trip we have driven a bit in highway and city settings. What I want to note here is that the shit-kicker Spectra we were driving had a bad clutch that almost gave out several times in the trip. Before we even got into Mexico I had already gotten into the habit of skipping second gear because of the annoying grinding sound it made. Yeah. Just thought I would throw that little tidbit in there. It's hard to keep your cool when you're trying to park next to Mexican military dudes in third gear.

I think the reason why I got pulled over in the first place was because I was staring at the largest flag I had ever seen. This thing made the giagantic fucking Jesus statue look like a little altar boy, minus the psychological damage. Seriously you can tell you're approaching Ensenada because of this flag. Using it as a beacon, we navigated back to what we thought was highway one...remember it was just a big street when you are in town.

The ambiguity of the road/highway led to a disagreement between me and Aregnaz as to where the hell we were. To settle our dispute, we took a little dirt road that headed West to see if there were any other major streets, thinking that the most westward major road would be the coastal highway (we're so smart!). The dirt road instead led us to a secluded, empty soft-sand beach. Wow! I swear everywhere we turned we found little gems like that. We stood there for a bit, took some pictures of the beautiful scenery and a beautiful girl (Aregnaz in case you didn't catch that), and got back on the highway heading South. It was about 1:30 PM.


The coastline beauty seemed to be an inversely proportional function of latitude, meaning that it got prettier and prettier the further South we went (latter explanation for the nerd-impaired). We cruised away from the shoreline into a more canyon-carved region described by Aregnaz as, "Hawaii without the green." It really did have the steep verticals and the round-topped mountains that I have come to know through pictures, but alas I've not been fortunate enough to visit the islands. Let's take a break with some more pictures...




Our drive was pretty leisurely through the afternoon. Short stops at corner stores, restroom breaks, general stopping to enjoy the scenery, and slowing for random feral dogs kept us 'busy.' There was one interesting highway checkpoint run by the Federales somewhere near Santo Tomas. A small troop of camouflaged, rifle-laden young men had fashioned a booth out of sand bags and tarp in the center divide (OK there was barely a line painted in the road). Their presence was slightly scarier than the Hummer Federales at the Ensenada police station, perhaps due to the 'one hand on the rifle, the other hand pointing, bandana covering the face' motif they had going on. We were heading South; they were only stopping people heading North. The checkpoint coincided with a little convenience store (5 pesos to use the restroom, unless you buy some fresh churros...which do you think we chose?). Funny thing--there were a few Federales laughing it up playing the most bootleg-looking arcade Marvel Superheroes I've ever seen. There they are, leaning on their rifles, smiling and laughing. Can you see them?

The girl on the left (obscured by the post) took an interest in us, asking if we were reporters for an American newspaper or magazine. I was kind of taken aback by it, mostly because my rockin' sweet new SLR had stayed in the oh-so-secure Spectra during our brief pit stop. Was it because we're pale gringos speaking pretty crappy Spanish to everyone? Did our pimped-out ride make her think we were looking for celebrities (the only subjects of photos in American media nowadays)? Just as I'm writing this I have another theory. This girl was pretty young and cute. She was wearing makeup and had product in her hair. I think she was looking for a way out of her situation...I would too if I lived/worked at a little mini market on the side of the road in El Nowhere, Mexico. She did sell us some damn fine churros! Oh, that picture there was taken in haste...I didn't want the Federales at the checkpoint confiscating the new camera...so it was from a moving car as we were pulling away.

OK here's where the poor conditions of Mexican roads starts coming into play. The highway we've been on this whole time (1) has been more or less a well-paved US-type freeway. No railings when you are rounding a corner on a mountain, doing tight turns in anything but 2nd gear, but a nice road nonetheless. At one point we decide to head toward what looked on the map to be a scenic lookout point on the coast (head West) to possibly rest our heads for the night. Remember the sun sets pretty early and it was already mid-afternoon. We take the road to Santa Tomas and after a quarter mile or so realize that this pile of sharp rocks they call a road is running right next to a pile of waste tires. Hmmm...we wondered if there was a connection. If we're to be stranded WAY out in the middle of nowhere we might want to be on a red road, perhaps even a yellow one (see definitions above). A quick glance on the map shows that we are on a white road. This is the poorest quality of road on the map...great. We ask around the several locals sitting outside the small residences erected around these rocks (read: on the road), and one seemingly knowledgeable tourist told us it wouldn't be worth it to head out there. Good enough for us! We kept marching, now armed with potentially life-saving information about white roads. OK it wasn't that big of a deal but you get the point.

At this point we realized we needed to find a place pretty fast because the sun was starting to set over the hills. Further down the freeway there was a yellow road leading to another white road (gulp) that led to Erendira, which looked fun--it was on the coast anyway. The yellow portion had its share of potholes in the beginning, but toward the end it was more pothole than road. The yellow-white transition was heralded by the deathly sound of more sharp rocks crinkling and popping, jumping up under the car and saying hello. A drive through the little community of Erendira (soccer fields, market, houses, little 'hotel,' and a pizza place)--all with sharp rocks and potholes--took us to the beautiful coastline right around sunset. It was nice.

There was a sign as we dogleg turned up the coast for a half mile: Coyote Cal's International Hostel -->

A short drive over some rocky, hilly terrain (in third gear) took us to a nice little hostel, just in time to catch the sunset. We got the last room, too...which was lucky for us. We did not want to brave more unknown potholes in the dark without a vehicle upgrade. Turns out this isn't just a regular hostel but more of a hostel/Thai massage parlor and school/Sioux sweat lodge/great place to go sight seeing. We knew immediately this would be a great way to plan the rest of our trip. Oh yeah, we aren't planning anything. Let's try to be spontaneous here!

Oh, yeah...they serve drinks, too.



We spent a little more time putzing around the area taking advantage of the sunset and our new beautiful surroundings...all the pictures below are immediately surrounding the hostel. Yeah...it's that nice.











The other guests at the hostel were very nice; we shared some conversation and stories about driving along the autobahn in meine Porsche. Turns out there were Americans (capitalist scum-bag pigs!), some kinda German guy, and some Portuguese San Diegans.

We had a little time before our Thai massage appointments (that's right, we both got massages), so we played around in the hostel's game room and grabbed some pizza back in town. There didn't seem to be a good local Mexican food place that was convenient and fast...don't hate cuz you can't relate; we really wanted those massages.

On the subject of playing games, Aregnaz won the day's ping-pong, but I cleaned up later that night at hold-em.





The massages were great--I hadn't had the Thai-style applied to me before, and boy is it rough (just like I like it). The masseuse was named Ta and was married to the owner of the hostel. She had been in Mexico (from Thailand) for a year and a half and had a pretty thick Thai accent (her husband's name was "Licky" erm "Ricky"). Her hands were amazing and she spent Aregnaz's full hour (as well as mine) turning us into butter. What a way to end a day, and a helluva day it was. It seriously seemed like a week...we had left Long Beach that morning without knowing where we were going or how we would get there, and there we were, spending our after-massage time with a couple of beers by the fire, a stone's throw from some of the most picturesque coastline I have ever experienced.



Room 2 was situated right in the game room, which actually was quiet and without activity when we finally settled in to sleep. There were lockers in the room (probably safer than leaving things in our impenetrable armored vehicle), and a quaint curtain fashioned from a little blanket. I've slept in a lot of hostels in my day (all of them in Europe), and I do think this one was the most peaceful and serene.

The sunrise over the terrain was almost as impressive as the sunset, which does say a lot. Unfortunately, my experiments with the new co-owned DSLR the night before left it in a white balance setting for incandescent light...so some of the morning's pictures were sub-optimal (I did use the auto-correct white balance feature in the GIMP, but that's as far as I went).



The hands that melted us like butter the night before (Ta the masseuse) were the same that buttered our pancakes the next morning. Aregnaz and I had an engaging discussion of academia, geography, and a little politico-philosophy. Sipping coffee, chatting, and gazing at the views above are a great way to start an easy-going morning. We took our sweet time, making sure we didn't rush a thing. Three of the four showers at the hostel had hot water, and neither one of us had a problem finding an empty (hot) one when the time came.

Refreshed, stoked, clean, pumped and...stoked, we took a walk down the beach a little further than we had gone the evening before, on recommendation of the hostel owner when we checked out. The area was called 'The Vortex' which we figured was a name hostel-goers gave it. Down at the water's edge is a weird mixture of geological phenomena, most of which I haven't a clue what they are. There were what looked like lava veins, sedimentary shelves, and some interesting geometric shapes produced by perhaps thermal vents. I only say that because of my visit to the Giant's Causeway. Check it out:










The picture below was a closeup of a very small feature, not some giant arch or something...I don't want someone to think it's something it isn't.




The tide pool below is shown behind Aregnaz in the picture above. It was an amazing find--nowhere else around us were these little critters...it was awesome.





There were a few spots around the beach that seemed to be dumping grounds for fishermen or restaurant owners. Our reasoning was based on the large piles of mussel shells near tire tracks (elementary!). There were a few pieces of garbage strewn in them as well...



After walking back to the hostel where the high-performance machine was parked, we gathered our wits, our groceries (obtained at the market next to the pizza place), and our courage to drive on the white and yellow roads ahead. Where were we to go now? Well, we decided that we would cruise back up North and see what we could see, eventually trying to get to Agua Caliente (hot springs, not just hot water apparently), also on the hostel owner Licky's suggestion. From the map and the word of mouth we were to drive back to Ensenada, head East on highway 3, and take a white road a ways into some ranch that had no electricity, running water, or anything. Two seconds of thought convinced us that we should get going if we were to settle in before dark. Great!

The drive back was very uneventful, but just as beautiful the second time: nice brown hills, Federales at checkpoints, you know. We got to Ensenada, we found highway 3 (just stopped for directions once...I swear the highways are just big streets in that damn city, and gawd forbid they be marked) and eventually found the start of the white road. When we stopped for directions in Ensenada I noticed a little dandy of a photo opportunity that would make a good print at work...check out that satellite dish! Oh, the rather clean-looking Spectra in the picture was ours. It was actually a lot dirtier at that point than it looks there.

Rancho Agua Caliente (RAC was the big metal branding on the gate) was chained up and it looked like it was open by appointment only. Meh. We decided that since we had already had such an amazing time we could call it quits a bit early and still claim victory, so it was back to Ensenada for us.

I turned around on the freeway rather sharply (for dramatic effect; you can do that sort of thing in a luxury sport car like the one we were driving). For some reason when we got going back into 3rd gear again it sounded like we had a flat tire. D'oh! Turns out we didn't--the mystery noise never entirely went away, but we didn't worry about it. I think the clutch was still on the top of our car worries.

We didn't have much problem getting back through Ensenada, and we were of course greeted again by our friend, Christzilla.

Let's talk a bit about going North across the US/Mexico border. According to the on-board clock and odometer in the car, it took us two hours to go less than a mile. When you don't have any utensils, don't try dipping bread into a jar of Nutella. It doesn't work.

This sunset was...underwhelming compared to the night before. Instead of being greeted by sea birds and once-in-a-lifetime photographic anomalies, we got beggars and starving kids. Some of the merchandise being peddled was enticing, like the gigantic technicolor Jesus on the cross (reminded me of the statue we saw) and some of the statues/vases/toys. After curing cancer, turning water into wine, and performing other various miracles--oh wait, we decided to ignore everyone--we finally got to the customs guys. It went pretty smoothly with just a pop of the trunk and a scan of the passports.

Goodbye Mexico!

I love 'merica!!