JONAH OWEN LAMB

Over a week ago, we were on our way south from the port of San Felipe. The road we planned to travel south on was marked as a ¨rural road¨on our map. It wasn´t a paved road, that was about all we knew. The locals we´d spoken to all said that it was ¨rough but passable.¨ Little did we know that we would come back the way we´d gone more than a week later with two of our number sick with the flew and our van on the back of a´flat-bed truck.

We started south one bright morning along a paved desert road that led away from San felipe. The road turned to dirt an hour later just south of a little town called Puertocitos. It was rough and slow-going as advertised, but passable. We had to swerve around big rocks and even sometimes get out and move them, but we were getting along. The landscape surounding us was little but dry rocky hills, eerily empty vacation homes and a few soaring frigates birds above.

Freda Drives

Things were going along swimmingly but slow when, on a big bumpy rise, Freda said simply that the car wouldn´t go any further. (She had just gotten her hands on the wheel and was going at a nice clip when the car decided to clunck out, so the disapointment on her face was understandable.) The look on her face said it all. We pilled out of the car and started peering under the hood and the car itslef, but nothing was amiss. No drips. No holes, nothing. So we turned of the ignition and waited. To our suprise it started up fine. We got to a flat spot on the road overlooking a big wash and all turned to one another and wondered what to do. Should we turn back now or go on? We decided to keep going.

Later that day we found a pleasant camp site on a clean, almost empty, beach and counted our lucky stars. We forgot all about the car´s problem we were at the beach with much more important things to think about, like, swiming.

We staid on the beach for almost three days, and besides the coyote raid on our camp, all was good. Tim caught a fish even. There was one glitch though, I got sick. In the middle of the night I came down with a splitting headache and it didn´t go away for the next four days.

When we left our beach several days later, we hoped to make it to the Transpennisular highway by night fall. Our car had none of it. The glitch that had killed the car´s power on the road a few days before came back with a vengeance. Tim was driving when it first died and his face turned into a mask of disapointment. By midday, we were stopping every 300 yards as dune buggies and cars passed us with their clouds of dust.

Luckily, one motorists stopped to ask how we were doing. Michael was a retired cop smoking a cigarette in the cab of his truck. He told us that if we could get to a town called Punto Bufeo there was a group of brothers that might be able to help us with our car. An hour later and a thousand stops too we rolled into the little settlement of Punto Bufeo. It wasn´t much more than a line of tourist beach houses, a closed air strip and a kitchen restaurant.

We came to find out that Punto Bufeo (Killer Whale Point) along with most of the settlements to its north and south had been founded by one man — the now deceased grandfather of Miguel and his brothers, the brothers Michael had told us about. Their grandfather had canoed up the Sea of Cortez from Loreto with his family some time mid’century and found Ganzaga bay and its environs to his liking. Now, his descendants own almost all of the land on this coastline. Miguel told me that his grandfather died at some insane age like 114. The day he died he knew his time on earth was done and he told his daughter as much, dressed in his finest close, laid down and died.

The front porch of Punto Bufeo´s little restaurant was filled with a group of laughing people when we rolled up, and one of them was Miguel who we were told to ask for. He said we´d have to wait until his brother Benito came back for a diagnosis. of our van. In the meantime we ate salty, oily fish and had a couple beers. Benito didn´t have a clue what was the problem, but he could tow us back to san Felipe for $400 dollars in four days.

The View from Camp

So, we made camp down the beach and suffered the flies as they rose from some hidden cavern below the beach to torment us, daily. By our second day on the beach Freda had come down with the flew that I had had for several days. Now Tim was the only one of us who wasn´t sick.

A nice Mexican family that was vacationing on the beach for the Semana Santa Week gave Tim and Freda a ride to the next town south for supplies and a group of middle aged women from Visalia bought us lunch and forked over more that $40 bucks as we sat waiting in our hot van the first day we arrived.

After what seemed like a week of pergatory, stewing in our own juices on that fly infested beach, I finally made it out of Punto Bufeo and back to San Felipe. On Monday, Migueal was heading into town and I got a ride in with him. (NOTE ON MIGUEL TO COME.) I was followed the next day by Tim and Freda and their van too. We had made it back. We found out from a mechanic that the road had nothing to do with the van´s problems, it was something with the computer. No matter, it was still nice to escape the feeling of helplessness on that fly filled beach.

 The snowy Sierra San Pedro

We crossed the border into Tijuana on the 14th and headed south along the ocean. After the Tortilla Curtain, the road passed along beach resorts and half built towers. It looked alot like San Diego aside from the shacks and dangling re-bar above the buildings. Just north of Ensenada we found a camp overlooking a desolate inlet. High cliffs wound around the waters and a few fishing boats sat off the coast. Our camp, called Playa Saldamando, was perched just above the Pacific on a bluff. No one was there, so we had our choice of spots. Each camp site was demarcated with rocks that had been painted white. 

Ensenada

The next day we drove on the toll road down to Ensenada. The city sits on the coast with a buisy port, cranes and ships fill the harbor.  This large town also climbs up the barren hills that suround it.

We shopped for supplies at a Gigante grocery store and walked around a bit. We bought some fish at the fish market, ate some ceviche from a street cart and then headed out of town. The road went south through the town’s suburbs and up into the hill country along highway 1. We were looking forwhat Freda described as Baja’s wine country. After a military check point we did see vineyards laid out across the valley floor of San Tomas. We camped on the valley floor in a nice camp ground and then we got rained on. The next morning it rained again. In fact, the rain followed us and turned to snow as we crossed the peninsula.

The Sea of Cortez

The road to San Felipe the next day took us over several dry scrub covered mountain chains and through flat table lands in between. After two hours, we finally dropped into desert country and then hit the coast.  

Our third night in Mexico was spent on the shore of the Sea of Cortez in a smallish fishing town called San Felipe. We camped at an abandoned camp site between a trailer park and some houses. A nice old Canadian women said we should be fine. And we were. The next morning the rain clouds that had dropped a good rain the night before were gone, but a nice wind had picked up and blew sand into our breakfast. Tomorrow we head south along the Sea of Cortez.

 The headlines are filled with the resignation of New York’s Governor Eliot Spitzer.   The talking heads, for their part, are blabbing non-stop about how Spitzer’s wife can stand by him after what he has done.  The LA Times had a front page story on the subject. Now it looks like New York will have a blind black governor which is an interesting fall-out from this scandal. Along with discussions on the ethics and morals of this scandal, prostitution has come up as a subject too.       (more…)

WE WAIT IN PREPARATION      

 Tim’s parent’s stucco house sits above town, looking west towards the ocean. From its perch on a hill, you can view much of the coast. South a few miles, the headlands of Palos Verdes rise up behind the haze. Besides the ocean and hills, an old power plant is the most prominent feature of the landscape.  Its five towers squat like some misplaced rust-belt factory right in front of the beach.  High tension electrical wires run away from the power plant  inland. And beneath the wires, curiously, are beds of flowers and nurseries. This swath of green goes on for blocks. 

The town, for its part, is mostly strip malls, stucco McMansions and the beach. The place feels like it was once a quiet beach get-away. Then, one day, it was invaded by builders and developers; turn-of-the-century beach houses that might have once sat on the beach alone, their white paint peeling, sit between newly constructed beach houses, three stories high, with glassed in porches. Down town is a block-wide strip that runs parallel with the beach. Old men in red shorts ride by slowly on their beach cruisers along the beach. Good looking girls walk here too. Tough-looking kids hang out smoking a few streets off the ocean. It looks and feels like part of the south land, which it is.

Local newspaper

FREDA AND JONAH DRIVE TO LA

 Freda picked me up last night in Vacaville. She was waiting under the arches of a McDonalds with her headlights on. She had just come south from the mountains and Ashland where she dropped Tim and her boisterous dog, Gypsy. The van was packed full of their stuff for the trip and I added my pack to the pile and we got back on the road.

We drove through empty quarters without the luxury of an NPR station to listen to, so we called Tim for the results of the primary. It was a clear night and most of the traffic was headed south, so the going was easy. Lines of lit up semis streamed past us like passenger trains headed north. Besides the lights from the road and the glowing agricultural lands to our east, all that marked our passing was the occasional rank smell of manure and death that came from some dark place away form the road. The big van kind of floated south with its quiet and powerful engine pulling us forward. Freda and I traded off driving from the high perch of the driver’s seat. We made the late night drive along I-5 in seven hours time.

When we rolled over the Grape Vine and into the San Fernando Valley, and all parts south, the megalopolis of L.A. was silent and still except for a dusty road crew working along the 405. Tim met us on the steps of his parent’s house in Redondo Beach at 3 a.m. We had a beer and fumbled around the kitchen for 15 minutes and then bunked down for the night. Now we pack and plot out our route south. With God’s speed we should be south of the border within the week.

An interesting website on I-5

 WHERE PREPERATIONS ARE MADE

 In just over a week Tim, Freda and I head south into Mexico, our neighbor to the south. Our route will first proceed south along the wilds of arid Baja and then on to the mainland. Our final destination, well, is south. To be more precise, or vague, it’s south of Guatamala and north of Columbia. And our trusty stead, so to speak, is an American-made 4×4 van. We have prepared its aft with a bunk and storage. It should get us south as good as any automobile, and with some comfort. It took Tim and I the good part of two days to shove that bastard piece of wood and screws in the back of that van. Now it can act as bed, hang out and storage. For all concerned, this blog will act as my acount of the journey south. So, if you want to know where I am and what kind of trouble I’m getting into, look no further. For now, I am signing off.

A website on Latin America