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Day One Seventy-Three
Entry 74 of 119 | show all | print this entry |
Another sunny day on a quiet, sunny beach.Our only neighbors at Campo Rancho Grande, some fishermen from Indiana, left at 6:30 so we had the sunrise to ourselves. Kudzu and I took a long walk on the beach and then us and the eurons headed across the street to the Rancho Grande mini market for showers, cokes, and calls home. At $1.31 per minute for the satellite phone, I'm glad I only got an answering machine back in Tennessee.
The road south from Bahia San Luis Gonzaga was much better then the road from Puertecitas. We felt like we had wings at 25 MPH. An hour of dusty travel brought us to Coco's Corner the approach to which looks suspiciously like one of the many military checkpoints throughout Baja ensuring that his landmark isn't missed. Coco is an Ensenada native who lost his leg in an accident and subsequently moved to central Baja to become a tourist icon. Coco sells cold cokes and Pacifica from a rambling compound of trailers and shacks festooned with many Pacifica cans, business cards, international currencies, photos, women's bras and panties, truckers caps, and assorted mechanical parts and pieces. Coco had gone to Tijuana today for medical care but his amigo Alfonse welcomed us warmly and sold us cold cokes for fifteen pesos each.
After several days of travelling at 25 MPH or less on dusty back roads, cruising onto Mexico 1 at Chapala and actually shifting in to third and then fourth gear seemed a great luxury. The so called "Transpeninsular Highway", the main road from Tijuana all the way to Cabo San Lucas, is frighteningly narrow but reasonably well paved and smooth. The pucker factor is an eight on a scale of ten when an oncoming convoy of tractor trailers pass but otherwise it's a joy to travel at the relatively supersonic speed of 80 km/h (50 MPH).
Thirty miles on Mexico 1, forty miles on Mexico 12, plus one military checkpoint brought us back to the Sea of Cortez and the town of Bahia de Los Angeles. One of John Stienbeck's stops with Ed Ricketts in the 1940s, Bahia de Los Angeles is now known for the Programa Tortuga Marina sea turtle research station north of town along with whale watching in the winter months. Arriving fairly late in the afternoon, we decided to camp at the thirty peso per person Camp Gecko eight kilometers south of town on another dusty, bumpy road. No one was around to take our money so we left it with a gringo customer who seemed to know everything about the place. Hopefully our ninety pesos will make it to the owner someday. Camp Gecko has a number of Caribbean influenced cabins complete with modest kitchens but we decided on a simple palapa on the beach. The beach around the bahia (bay) is nice but too rocky to spend much time in the water. Terrence, the gringo guest, informed us that sting ray mating season had started and that we should do the "sting ray shuffle" if we decide to go in the water.
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