I lack enthusiasm for Baja. We both are glad to be back on mainland Mexico and the change in our attitudes came as a surprise; we found ourselves unaccountably buoyed up as we drove into Sonora. We have completed our winter’s exploration of Mexico and where we travel now will be a return to a some favorite places we wanted to explore again. And as we find our way back to San Carlos, Alamos and Huatabampo in Sonora we are glad to put Baja behind us.
Baja inspires desire in outdoor enthusiasts and surfers and people who like to sit at desert campsites and go to bed smelling of bonfires. It is a peninsula with beaches and mountains and rocks and a great deal of desert devoid of human beings. If that sounds appealing you will love Baja.
To see the peninsula through my eyes is to see a thousand miles of rock and cactus and sand bisected by a thin strip of asphalt dotted with very occasional small towns of little architectural merit.
Baja is a playground for Americans. In this context I mean Canadians and US citizens. I am well aware that Mexico is geographically located in North America and Mexicans are Americans. But to call someone American is shorthand in my mind for people living north of Mexico.
Americans have bought second homes and retirement homes across Baja. Many Mexicans who made money in the US have returned to their homeland in an unnoticed reverse migration from the US and the net result is a bi-cultural state of affairs in Baja.
You could view Baja as Mexico with training wheels for those keen to learn how to travel in Mexico. You don’t need to speak Spanish, use pesos or even check your vehicle entering Mexico. All Baja is in the Hassle Free Zone which means you only need a permit for yourself and insurance for your vehicle which you can buy online before you enter Mexico. It couldn’t be simpler to get past the wall.
However limiting travel to Baja means missing out on all the mainland has to offer. We like swimming but what we had expected to find in Baja we found on the mainland. Endless swimming beaches in Baja are either rocky or if sandy sold by the day with guards at gates. The rugged Pacific coast of Baja has the waves surfers need. We found better beaches on the mainland of Mexico for our style of wild camping with easy access to long sandy beaches and swimming. Baja was a surprising disappointment. I had imagined endless wild camping and swimming and beach idleness.
The mainland offers mountains, rivers, canyons, cathedrals, history, art, museums, music, beaches, assorted climates and people who aren’t steeped in the bi-cultural economy of Baja. No one starts a conversation in English in mainland Mexico. Make an effort in Spanish and they may courteously reply in English to relieve you of your difficulties but Spanish is definitely spoken.
When I was training new dispatchers I used to tell them everything happens on Duval Street in Key West. I remember a 911 caller telling me he’d had an accident, he’d been rear ended. I asked where he was and his answer was “somewhere on Duval Street.” He was two miles away from Duval at the Shell gas station up the street from the police department. That sort of lack of awareness is normal in a tourist town especially in those moments of stress and it gets tiring dealing with tourists when you live in vacation land. I understand the burn out.
I like being a tourist. Actually I love it. For me it is a life free of responsibility and it creates a daily kaleidoscope of experiences. To go on vacation for me was a small taste of the life I live now, the permanent tourist. And I am well aware of the disdain the term tourist carries with it. I used to hear locals in Key West, world weary and squirting disdain from every pore, refer to the visitors as tourons. Tourist morons. I never allowed my exhaustion with tourists to be seen on the streets of Key West but that was easy as I knew where I was going to end up: as a touron myself! I tried to answer worried queries without being mean to anxious visitors.
Baja has what appears to be a touron economy. I can only describe the vibe that way not because anyone was nasty or even unkind but there was a sense of that irritated dependence on tourists. And like the Keys, Baja’s success has brought gentrification wealth and higher prices for the people who live there trying to make a better life for themselves. Those daily tensions are not exactly unfamiliar to me.
I’ve always been skeptical of the relationships people claim to create on their vacations. I expect that’s just a reflection of my lack of salesman-ship, my shyness or my self sufficiency that I’ve often been told is unnatural. I’ve never made friends with a bartender, though I have had convivial conversations. The life of the tourist is the life apart which suits me now. Perhaps it won’t suit me in a while but for now I thoroughly enjoy being a feckless nomad. I have wheels and I use them. If you make me feel like a nuisance touron I accept it or move on.
Mainland Mexico is not in general a touron economy. Obviously there are places where tourists and foreign residents predominate. Google will reveal all of those places if you want to look them up. Pátzcuaro, Lake Chapala, Mérida, San Miguel de Allende, Puerto Vallarta etc…Mexico is vast and a tourist can get lost on the back roads and small villages far from the centers of tourism.
Even in cities much enjoyed by Americans like Pátzcuaro you can be a touron and tramp the streets and barely notice American residents living around you. And yes, the locals are there to sell to you but across the mainland of the country we found low pressure sales to be the rule. You don’t see streets like this in Baja and I miss these cities and the life of Mexico as lived by ordinary people.
If it isn’t obvious we aren’t four wheelers or rock climbers or windsurfers. We like to travel for other reasons. One of the things I like about being on the road is similar to the pleasure we found traveling by boat and that is the discovery of places. I love not knowing what’s over the horizon. Having a destination is critical, it’s not enough to drift. Webb Chiles has mentioned this aspect of travel in his own life in his writings. For me it’s simple: when I am no longer curious about what’s over the horizon I shall stop traveling. Or if travel becomes too arduous. Or prohibited by who knows what dystopian future awaits us. Until then I want to taste variety and we are both glad we gave Baja a try but I doubt we will return.
In the end Baja just ended up looking like Arizona with a coastline. With the towns amounting to dusty desert villages we looked at each other and decided we missed the mainland. We saw the national park in the mountains and loved it. We enjoyed the valley of the grapes. But we ended up driving a lot and swimming and wild camping very little. We’ll leave it to the adventurers and their surfboards and mountain bikes and jumars and hiking boots. Baja is theirs.
