Baja California!

Daryll writes:

We’ve been on the Baja for 7 days now and yes, we should have posted more often; however still trying to get into a routine.  I’ll pick-up where Ang. left off – in Ensenada, our first town after crossing the border.  Ensenada is on the coast and the second major town after Tijuana heading south and also boasts one of the biggest Mexican flags I have ever seen.

Ensenada

Initially, we didn’t have any real plan of how long we would stay, but after finding our hotel, checking out the town a bit, we decided to stay an extra day.  The extra day also gave us the opportunity to meet up with Lutz, a German motorcycle traveler that stayed with us for a few days while he toured through BC.  He is also headed south and stopped off in Ensenada to attend Spanish emersion school.  The extra day was also spent discovering the best fish tacos at the local fish market, fresh off the boats.  It is now my favorite meal.  Yum, yum!

The major attraction to northern Baja is whale watching, when in season (January), so we continued south and came across what Baja is famous for, cactus and a bit more cactus and it wasn’t till we hit Baja California Sur that we started to camp along the Sea of Cortes.  You can’t go wrong camping in spots like these.

Sea of Cortes

The downside though, it gets to around 40 degrees Celsius by 10am, and are now getting up around 5am to get an early start and make sure we are at our destination by noon, and just in time for a siesta.  Hence the lack of blog posts; this getting up early, riding in the sweltering heat and hanging out on nice beaches (when we find them) is all tough work.  The weather has been in the extremes though.  We got an early start one morning, and it was so cold, I switched on my heated grips.  Yes, for those non-riders that are reading this, we have heated grips on both bikes and trust me, once you’ve tried them, you won’t ride a bike without them on.  Heated grips on in the morning and several layers of clothes under our riding gear and by lunch time it is in the 40’s and we start shedding the layers and are dripping with perspiration.

We did have a little mishap though.  On one of the sweltering hot days, we were heading down a dirt road looking for a spot to camp and Ang. lets me know through the communicator that her bike was wobbly for a second, so she stopped.  I'm a bit ahead of her, so make a u-turn and head back and notice that one of her panniers has fallen off and laying on the dirt road behind her.  So after spending some time in the heat, lesson learned, check all the pannier fasteners every morning.  No serious damage.

We head off to La Paz on Monday morning to catch the ferry to Mazatlan.  So the 8 days that we would have spent on the Baja is definitely short; however not sure if I would want to come back here.  There are nice beaches; however there are nice beaches elsewhere as well.  Probably will see the part of Mexico that we missed by heading this way.

I have really slow internet at the moment, so haven't uploaded any new Mexico pics to the album.  Will try again tomorrow.