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Electonic plates being what they are, Baja California will someday rest right alongside upper California. Today, however, it hangs off the state like an 800-mile-long tail between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortés, and getting to its northern edge from Los Angeles is still a two-hour drive.
My wife and I, our two children, and our dog have packed sleeping bags, plenty of fresh water, and toilet paper (educated precautions) for our trip through Baja to Mulegé, a little town on the Sea of Cortés, about 100 miles from the peninsula's tip. We aren't likely to get lost, because there's only one possible route: Mexico 1, the great thousand-mile-long Transpeninsular Highway that ends at Cabo San Lucas. We aren't likely to have car problems, either, because we're driving a machine for all seasons: the Audi Allroad Quattro, which transforms itself, at the push of a button, from a low-slung sporty family touring machine into a tall all-wheel-drive SUV.
Los Angeles to Punta Banda
Traveling with two teens means we don't get under way until late afternoon. Dusk is approaching as we drive through the big wicket that separates U.S. from them. Surprisingly, there is no border control on the way into Mexico. Up to a point a little south of Ensenada, U.S. citizens can travel with no paper other than a driver's license and some U.S. currency. This is the zona turística, or what you might call the Pounce Zone, where everybody and his brother is waiting to sell you a plaster Virgin or an Elvis on black velvet. Farther south you'll need a passport and a tourist card, which can be obtained from a Mexican consulate in the United States or from immigration offices in Tijuana and Ensenada or near the cluster of money-changing shops that you encounter just after you cross the border.
South of Tijuana, we take the toll road to Ensenada; it's a winding corniche with a splendid view overlooking the pacific and a rugged coastline that's mostly undeveloped once you escape Tijuana's beachside-condo suburbs. There are three toll stations along the way, each of them collecting $2.40. "Check it out!" exclaims one attendant, as he hands us our change. Startled, we look around, then realize he's simply proud to be using an American idiom in front of a couple of American kids. By the time we pass through Ensenada, it's evening. We turn off the main highway toward La Bufadora, and after picking up some tamales at a little roadside stand (bare bulbs, plastic chairs, and accordion music on a scratchy loudspeaker), we ascend the promontory ridge of Punta Banda and pull into the campground of the Ejido Coronel Esteban Cantú. This is simply a group of empty lots connected by deeply rutted tracks and overlooking the Pacific. The Allroad's variable suspension is awfully handy here: With the push of a button, our car climbs to SUV height. In Malibu, these lots would be worth millions, but here we pay $5 for the right to watch the moon silver the ocean, to listen to the waves below, and eventually to drift off to sleep.
Punta Banda to San Ignacio
It's just a couple of miles from our campground to the locally famous La Bufadora blowhole, an underwater tunnel through whose cracked ceiling a jet of water is forced by the momentum of incoming swells. One of the largest of its kind on the Pacific coast, the blowhole spews plumes of spray 80 feet into the air, soaking shrieking gawkers. When we arrive, the parking lot is still empty and the souvenir stalls are just beginning to open. We admire La Bufadora's violent exhalations, its intermittent rainbow, and the mossy cliff rising behind it, which it regularly drenches.
Shortly after rejoining the main highway, we encounter the first of many military checkpoints, this one marking the end of the zona turística. Khaki-clad young men, some carrying old-fashioned machine guns, are dismantling the door-liners of a northbound Toyota as its disconsolate owner looks on. Us they wave southward—not seeming to care much what we might be smuggling into Mexico. Even the other times when we're stopped, the men who cursorily search the car seem more interested in our dog and whether or not he is bravo—"fierce"—than in any contraband we might be carrying.
Once past this border, everything changes. The broad, dusty shoulders and the shabby buildings abruptly vanish, and there are miles of unexpected, unpunctuated verdancy. We twist through lovely hills, descend into fertile valleys, glide alongside bubbling streams.
The temperature rises as we move away from the ocean and drops again as we approach the semiarid coastal farmland north of San Quintin. Here, as throughout Baja, the closer we are to the coast, the more numerous the stands selling tacos de pescado, "fish tacos." This may seem an inconsequential detail, but the humble fish taco is a touchstone of the Baja experience, and the cognoscenti pace themselves to reach certain taco stands at mealtimes. We are, accordingly, careful to enter the town of Lázaro Cárdenas around lunch and head to La Pasadita, on a corner of Avenida Luís Alcerriga. Thanks to a mention in a popular guidebook, this taco stand has such éclat that it employs one person just to collect your pesos—seven of them, or about 80 cents per taco—while two others cook continuously. Persistent small boys clean your side-view mirrors with miniature squeegees, and old ladies offer to sell you beadwork. Adding to the utility of this all-purpose intersection are a Pemex station with clean bathrooms (which, like fish tacos, preoccupy Baja travelers), a Banamex office where you can buy pesos, and a stand—across from the park and just west of the Pemex—that sells frozen fresh-fruit confections not to be missed.
Pemex, the national gasoline monopoly, has spaced its green-and-white stations so widely along the peninsula that drivers learn almost never to come across one without filling up. Another rule: Driving at night should be avoided. Much of the highway, although well engineered and continually maintained, is narrow; it lacks shoulders and sometimes a centerline as well. Should you have to stop—say, for a flat—and should you pull off the road, you will likely fall into a ditch. Should you stay on the road, keep in mind that the big rigs hurtling up and down the Transpeninsular day and night are very good about staying in their narrow lane, but that they regularly hit things nonetheless.
The highway lacks not only shoulders but fences too, and grazing cows and horses stroll indifferently across and along it. Especially during the fall and winter season, when traffic is heaviest and rainfall brings out the tastiest grasses, the remains of the unlucky ones litter the roadside. At first they're shocking—not just little squashed possums and skunks but half-ton animals upended, ribs poking through torn skin. Sometimes an industrious passerby happens upon a freshly dead steer and butchers it in situ, but far more commonly the vultures do the work. You see them wheeling in the sky or hopping about on the ground and tearing at the carcasses. The birds and the sun are an efficient cleaning crew. Eventually, the stripped carcasses parch and mummify into ragged tents slung over frames of bones that ultimately collapse, sink into the earth, and disappear.
More numerous even than the carcasses of animals, however, are those of cars—victims of the darkness, drowsiness, cattle, or one another—crushed and scavenged from the outside in. And then there are the shrines that testify to human tragedy on the Transpeninsular: little roadside altars adorned with artificial flowers and a statuette of the Sacred Heart or a saint to memorialize a loved one who died here. Some are quite elaborate, such as one near Cataviña in the shape of a truck cab. Particularly perilous places may have two or three set side by side.
At El Rosario, the road bends inland, wending its way through a succession of oddly distinct, bewitching landscapes. There are forests of strange cactuses called cirio—towering branchless stems, hardly thicker than ropes, that give the impression of floating underwater. The cirio gives way to the cardón, a more classic cactus, thick, corrugated, branching, and 20 to 30 feet tall. The cardón in turn cedes to spiky datilillo, which resembles the Joshua trees of the Mojave; and finally, the fields are full of yellow-blooming agave. Near Cataviña, we see boulders wind-sculpted into strange smooth shapes and scribbled on by every passerby who happens to have a spray can handy. The interior of the Audi is an agreeable 68 degrees, but when we step outside for a closer look, the heat presses down from above like a collapsing tent. Back in the comfort of the Allroad, I see that the temperature outside is 103.
In the evening, we turn off the highway into the astonishing oasis of San Ignacio. After crossing the Vizcaíno Desert below Guerrero Negro, where the road doesn't bend for 20 miles at a stretch and the tallest plant might brush your ankles, we can hardly believe our eyes. Suddenly we enter a dense palm forest, pass a lake whose placid surface reflects a heron preening on a snag, and arrive in the tree-shaded central square of the town, with its pale pink stone mission church, where Mass has been said since before our Constitution was signed.
We stay at a La Pinta, one of a chain of slightly seedy, inconsistently but happily styled hotels that runs the length of the peninsula. This one, with whimsical courtyards, ambulatories, shaded garden fountains, and a chapel, is almost deserted. It breathes storybook romance, exile, the inexorability of time—well, maybe I'm getting carried away, but it does have a nice pool that reflects the thunderheads piling up their starched white in the southern sky. When the kids quiet down, all I hear is the moaning of doves and the hesitant tapping of a distant typewriter.
San Ignacio to Mulegé
The elephant tree is another otherworldly example of Baja vegetation. Resembling a miniature baobab, it flourishes where nothing else seems to live, on the jumbled lava flows of Las Tres Vírgenes, a volcano whose giant symmetrical cone is our beacon to the eastern coast. After climbing it, there is an initial steep descent, then the first glimpse of the pale blue Sea of Cortés. A little farther on is a second descent, appropriately called Hell Hill, which is steeper still and more winding, with trucks climbing from the other direction at about five miles an hour.
The Allroad has proven to be an excellent car for this rugged desert environment. Pumped up to its full height, it handles ruts and rocks imperturbably. As you accelerate on a smooth road, it automatically resumes its normal cheetah crouch. I feel sufficiently confident in its braking and steering that we do 100 miles per hour for long stretches. Despite the hours of driving, there are no complaints from the kids about the comfort of the backseat, from which they deliver antiphonal readings of John, Edwin, and Jason Minch's indispensable Roadside Geology and Biology of Baja California, a mile-by-mile commentary on everything we see along the highway. At Santa Rosalia we lunch on scallop tacos—in Baja, the scallop has lost its s and p and is called a callo (pronounced KAI-yo). This was once the company town of a French mining firm, and the tree-lined streets, balconied clapboard houses, and century-old bakery are said to evoke New Orleans. More impressive, I think, are the waterfront machinery—relics of the mining days—and a strange brown tower built of huge timbers and sections of railroad track that evokes Waterworld.
From here, it's less than an hour to Mulegé, and another 15 minutes south along the coast to our destination on a bay that has no name, as far as I know, but lies between the beaches of Santispac and Coyote. Here, we tumble out of the Audi and into the shady EcoMundo cantina, a tiny, environmentally blameless seaside retreat where we will spend the next few days nursing peach nectars between kayak trips to the nearby islands and drives into Mulegé for bottled water and to visit Blanca's ice-cream shop. The hectic Pounce Zone is a dim memory. This is the life—for us. The Audi looks forlorn parked sedately by the beach, but in a few days it will carry us back, comfortable and secure, clearing boulders and crouching into the wind, taking all the terrain in stride.
Behind the Wheel: The Audi Allroad Quattro
It seems that Audi can do no wrong these days as it unveils one terrific car after another. The Allroad is no exception; it looks good, feels good, goes easily almost anywhere, and exudes quiet authority. It's also the cleverest and coolest of the new breed of vehicles that claim to be part car, part SUV. Externally, styling cues added to wheel wells, kick panels, and bumpers create an impression of sporty muscularity.
Though basically a modified A6 Avant, Audi's excellent midsize wagon, the Allroad extends the Avant's capabilities in two ways. First, Audi has replaced the standard A6's 2.8-liter engine with a 2.7-liter, 250-hp twin-turbo powerhouse whose dual overhead cams and five valves per cylinder haul the none-too-light machine to 60 mph in a little over seven seconds.
The Allroad's roadholding and handling characteristics are those of a bona fide sports sedan: Manual and automatic transmissions are available, the latter with optional Tiptronic clutchless manual control. To these performance enhancements, Audi has added variable ride height, with ground clearance adjustable from 5.6 to 8.2 inches. Normally, the car runs at 6.6 inches; at high speed, it automatically lowers itself to 5.6 inches to reduce drag and increase stability. When driving at 20 mph or under, the driver can push a button on the dash and an almost silent air compressor will raise the car to its full height to shed the thin veneer of civilization or to clear the odd curb.
The downsides are poor gas mileage—we got about 18 mpg in Baja—and some reports of high repair costs and difficulty in obtaining parts. But maybe that's not too high a price to pay for a car that rises so well to any occasion.
Pit Stops
Guerrero Negro La Sureña ("The Southern Girl") is on the north side of the main road through town; Ceviche Loco is around a sharp right turn behind the Pemex station. We particularly liked La Sureña's carne asada tacos and tacadillas—a kind of Philly cheese steak sandwich on a tortilla (no telephone; tacos, $2). At Ceviche Loco, the specialties, besides the eponymous, are fish and scallop tacos prepared with a light, fresh-tasting crust. At about 80 cents each, you can eat quite a few, and probably will (no telephone).
Mulegé EcoMundo, located 14 miles south of Mulegé, offers kayaking expeditions, meals, and campsites in a complex of thatched buildings on a pristine beach (52-615-15-30320; home.earthlink.net/~rc mathews/EcoMundo_.html; cabana with two cots, $20). The Hotel Serenidad is a time-tested favorite, with simple, air-conditioned rooms surrounding a pool (52-615-153-0530; serenidad.com; doubles, $73). Dinner at Ray's Place includes the fine spectacle of pink-granite rocks and turquoise water changing colors until darkness falls. Superb calamari and the catch of the day are skillfully prepared. A kayak trip back to EcoMundo through bioluminescent waters is unforgettable (no telephone; entrées, $10).
Punta Banda Accommodations are limited to campsites. The Ejido Coronel Esteban Cantú, on the west side of Punta Banda, is serene and has a splendid view of the Pacific (no telephone; $5 per night).
San Ignacio The La Pinta is simple and clean and would most fairly be described as a motel. The pool and grounds are quite inviting, however, and room service is a welcome treat after a day on the road (800-800-9632; lapintahotels.com; doubles, $69–$84). |
