Many years ago I was tent camping with my motorcycle in an oasis in North Africa. I was shockingly young, possibly 21 and on my second African ride. Tozeur in Tunisia is the sort of Saharan oasis about which they make romantic movies, the date forests were irrigated by water courses built into the tops of the adobe walls and from time to time these open channels would fill with water rushing busily on its way to someone’s precious fruit. I drank mint tea in complex rituals with men in turbans and shared their rice and camel meat (stringy and tough as I recall). By the time I got to Ain Salah in central Algeria, on my way across the Sahara, I was used to these extraordinary sights. That was a long time ago, so when Layne told me she’d found a good place to camp in San Ignacio we simply drove into the RV park and I was equally simply transported directly back to my traveling youth.
San Ignacio is a genuine desert oasis and has been inhabited since long before the Spanish came by in the early 1700s and proceeded to wipe out the locals.
The date groves produce fruit in the dry climate and the sandy floor of our shady campground was littered with the fruit. Date palms grow in the Keys but never produce dates, I’m told, owing to the wet summers. They need arridity to ripen the seeds.
We settled in and we’re told the lagoon was eminently swimmable which convinced Layne to mutter something about spending two nights here. Rusty was ready to stay and after I got the chairs and table out we looked like we were never going to leave.
The swimming was surprisingly good once you got used to the cold water. The lagoon was quite deep on the further side and the breeze blew across the water making the palm fronds twinkle in the sun. Who would have imagined we’d find this desert haven in Baja?
Layne wasn’t terribly fond of the fish we’d ordered on our first visit to the campsite restaurant but my fillet was fine. We tottered back to the van in the profound desert darkness and discovered we had new neighbors, a VW Vanagon camper and a Toyota pickup with a tent next to the surfboards.
Ramon came by begging some water for coffee so we were soon engaged in exchanging our life stories and travel tales. Ramon is Puerto Rican living in California and working as a software developer while his girlfriend develops her acupuncture practice. He and his Peruvian buddy Miguel were away from San Diego for a few weeks surfing on a boy’s trip.
They had been out at the Seven Sisters surfing area along the coast and some incautious fast driving in dirt had loosened Ramon’s exhaust. I helped reflate his tires which he had to air down for the washboard on the dirt road.
He pushed his muffler into place and figured he’d find a welder on his way north to do the job right. His pop top was held on with string (!) thanks to a strong gust of wind that blew the roof of his van down the road as he was driving. Nothing daunted he tied it on and kept going. Miguel with the perfectly functional Toyota was asleep in his tent.
In his own way Ramon took me back forty years, the simplicity of making do and getting it done. I read the anxious twittering of would be travelers to Mexico and this man, not yet forty doesn’t bother his head with details, he gets going. He had stories from all over the place but he also harbored an ambition.
He owns a piece of land near San Jose Del Cabo, a town he says is worth visiting as it has some soul desire the floods of visitors. He wants to set up a self sustaining farm, one of those increasingly popular organic retreats for traveling farm workers. I first heard of them from my sister in Scotland who has woofers on her farm. https://wwoof.net/
He says he’s close to convincing his girlfriend it’s time to move…The conversation meandered and we discussed travel as a Puerto Rican, which gives him an entree to societies across Latin America. It was a great encounter and I was sorry to see them go next morning.
Our new neighbor in his place was another San Diego resident cut from an entirely kind of cloth. His van was a half million dollar land yacht.
It’s called an Earthcruiser and is designed to travel the world. This couple use it to visit their grandchildren in winter in Colorado and are considering making their first ever visit east of the Mississippi. They wanted me to summarize in 15 minutes how to visit the Keys in an overland truck. I hope I helped. Basically I said make your reservations now.
We met some other nice people in the campground but we were on different wavelengths. It is inconceivable to me to spend thirty years visiting Baja and never once to visit the mainland. I think it was something to do with fear of cartels, which if you have been following our travels you now know is nothing for bona fide tourists to be concerned about.
We enjoyed the sunny evenings with powerful margaritas conversation and music provided by a man who traveled the Sea of Cortez for a while by sailboat and has since settled in Loreto. He was traveling in an SUV with s bed in the back, going to see friends on the Pacific Coast there to hunt down music gigs in the cooler summer months on the windy coast.
We found ourselves enjoying Pacific Coast weather in the mornings with classic gray skies of marine inversion blowing up the valley of the San Ignacio river from the west coast. By noon the sun burned through and the gray overcast lifted and we were inspired to swim in the lagoon.
It was Sunday, the national day off and families were gathered by the lagoon. Layne noticed their apartness a feature of life we had not seen in the mainland. I have told of the curiosity, kindness and conversation we have d joyed with local families. In this campground they played and ate and we existed apart.
We had a goodbye dinner of ribs for Layne and an actual Mexican burrito, a food I thought existed only in its country of origin: the US. The tomatillo sauce was tart and delicious.
I mr tipped the family fun to the campground manager when I handed over our daily 250 pesos and he hurried to reassure me they would leave soon even though I tried to reassure him in turn I enjoyed their fun. It was an unfortunate separation of cultures we did not enjoy.
As we sat out planning our departure Monday morning, a drive across the middle of Baja, across the state line out of Baja California Sur, something else distracted us.
A motorcycle pulled up and without hesitation the rider came over to ask about the campground and swimming and stuff. Nick is a New Zealander who has lived in London for more than a decade and is a contract employee in the software industry. I guess most young travelers are these days!
He was riding a 200cc adventure bike by Italika he’d bought for $1800 ready to go from a man in Oaxaca. He was on his way to Tijuana to sell it before returning to Europe to attend a wedding in Poland and visit his uncles in Switzerland before getting another contract for work in London. He had been on the road a while traveling by bus through Central America before the need to buy a motorcycle overcame him in Southern Mexico.
We drank our Indio beer together and exchanged travel stories well into the night. He put up his tiny tent and instead of using that as an excuse to say good night he came back and we enjoyed our conversation till well past eleven. He laughed at his living space in a tiny tent and I told him how I rode across the United States and Mexico in 1981 with no tent and just a sleeping bag!
He was a newer version of my young self, the motorcyclist riding around oases in North Africa in 1979 before Nick was even born!
We were away before he woke up in the morning but that was okay. He is a traveler and we don’t say good bye. We say “see you later” and mean it. Definitely, Layne and I are getting into our stride on the road.
