I have been remiss about updating about the latter half of our Mexico trip! But first, something I forgot to mention in the entries about the BajaProg Festival:

As I said, we were groupie/roadies for Forever Twelve, selling their CDs and otherwise keeping their almost-famous lead singer happy (or at least mildly amused). It all got very silly, you see, as we took pictures of the munchies she’d brought (“What Ms. Ellen requires backstage” and whatnot). I pretended to walk around with a headset, letting the rest of the crew and bodyguards know what was going on, and Ken was one of the bodyguards, of course.

Ken and I set up the CD table while Forever Twelve was performing their soundcheck. At one point, I noticed that Eilidh had headed back into the hotel. I touched my pretend headseat and intoned, “Note: “The Swan has flown from the pool. Repeat, The Swan has flown from the pool.” (Cat’s SCA name is Eilidh Swann, so it seemed an appropriate code name.).

This running joke followed us through the entire festival, with me wandering after Cat announcing what The Swan was up to.

Maybe you had to be there.

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On Sunday, 7 March, we said our farewells to Cat and Mexicali and headed south and east to San Felipe, on the coast of the Sea of Cortez (or the Gulf of California, depending which map you look at).

Now, before I moved to CA, my concept of a desert was rather Saharan—of unbroken, rolling dunes of sand. I was rather astonished to discover that this isn’t always true. I’ve ridden through the US Southwest twice, and found that it’s very different: cacti, scrubby flora, mesas and mountains, even flowers and fauna.

The ride was through something similar: flat, with scrubby brownish-green plants, or mudflats. The hills/mountains looked like bits of rock stuck together, as if they would just collapse any second. I saw nothing live, not even hawks. When we finally spotted the ocean, it seemed like a mirage. We paralleled it for a time at that distance. Surreal.

San Felipe is a tiny, tourist-oriented town. We had picked one hotel out of the guidebook, but it was farther south of the town centre than we thought (we wanted to park the bike and walk to dinner, etc.), and more expensive than we expected. So we tried another place, which we dubbed the Spring Break Motel (and indeed, the guidebook intimates the same). No art on the bare hallway walls; limited facilities in the room (one piece of crap art, a TV way up high, a tiny table and plastic chairs, etc.). But it was cheap (Spring Break starts the following week) and convenient and clean, and that’s all we cared about. We were issued wrist bands with the name of the hotel on them. I guess in case we got too drunk to find our way home. (Seriously, it was probably to ensure that drunken teens didn’t bring 50 friends back to the pool.)

We wandered on the beach into town, and ate amazing (and amazingly cheap) shrimp tacos and fish tacos and beer while sitting on a balcony overlooking the street. Two—count ‘em, two—mobile piña colada stands/trucks went by. We then wandered farther, up to a shrine to Mary, and then wandered back through a parallel street lined with shops selling mostly crap, and back to the hotel.

We napped for a bit, then swam and lounged by the pool and read magazines until it got mildly chilly. So we changed and wandered down to a nice restaurant, where we drank margaritas and Ken had fish vera cruz and I splurged on lobster fajitas. Then we wandered down to the Rockodile Bar, and had more margaritas. We sat on the balcony, admiring the just-past-full moon over the still ocean, and watching all the cruising cars. After that, we staggered back to the hotel. I confess I’ve never seen Ken drunk, so it was all very amusing.

The next morning, we suited up and headed slightly south to Valle de los Gigantes, which, according to the guidebook, was an area of massive cacti, some more than 100 years old. The wizened Mexican man requested three dollars, but lost all knowledge of English when Ken tried to ask if the trail remained hard-packed sand.

The short version is, it didn’t. To the point that I had to get off the bike and he had to use the electric reverse to get out of the powdery sand before we sank through and were found 50 years later. I had to trudge back after him, with my helmet down (to avoid the sand he was kicking up)—I thought I was going to collapse from the heat (black riding suit, closed helmet, a thousand-degree heat…okay, I might be exaggerating slightly about that last bit). We did see two impressively tall cacti, thought.

At this point we escaped and headed back west and north to Ensenada. First it was desert, then mountains, which were at least not oppressively hot. Eventually we descended into a verdant valley (read: well irrigated), which was lovely, but that lead into Dead Car City (miles of junkyards) and into outer Ensenada, which had a lot of dead cars and smelled bad. Happily, Ensenada proper was not smelly.

I’ll mention here that we had to go through a number of military checkpoints, which were disturbing in concept but reasonably mellow in execution. They usually had us dismount and wanted to look in the trunks (but sometimes not all of them), and asked us where we’d come from and where we were going. One guy outright asked us if we had drugs. I’m still not sure what the right answer is to that. (Do we offer him a cut?) They had guns (the very disturbing part) so of course we said no, which was the truth, natch.

Anyway, Ensenada. We chose the Villa Marina Hotel because the guidebook said it had views of the harbor, which we thought would be nice. It’s also the only highrise in Ensenada, which made it easy to find. Happily, it was cheaper than the guidebook said. The room was again sparse, but it was clean, and there was indeed a view of the harbor.

We grabbed subs for a late and much-needed lunch, then strolled along the boardwalk, which has been recently renovated and fixed up, and was quite lovely. We bought tickets to go whale watching the next day, and then bought a bucket of dead fish for $1 so we could feed the sea lions that swam in the water just below, barking endlessly at the prospect of more munchies. There was also a pelican, and I got lots of pictures.

On our way back, through the streets this time, we were accosted by one of the carriage drivers (there were 5 or 6 horse-drawn carriages in the city, to take tourists on tours). He spoke good English, and we’d considered a ride anyway, so we agreed. Our driver was a total trip. He had his spiel, and if you interjected anything, he sort of forgot what he’d already said. I will never, ever forget, not even when I’m 90, that the giant flag in the harbour weighs 100 lbs, and is 100 feet long and 80 feet high.

We had Chinese food for supper, and it was good, but not great, largely because I asked what someone else was having (because nothing on the menu was really shouting out to me), and so the waiter gave us the locals’ menu, which was all in Spanish. It was far more food than we could eat, but we didn’t have a fridge in the room so we couldn’t take any back with us.

Tomorrow or the next day, I’ll post about the final day (whale watching!) and the trip home.