The Viscaino Desert-Dream Realized

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Guerrero Negro to Bahia de Tortugas

Date: ‘not sure, it was a week or so ago, and we are really starting to lose track of time - FINALLY!‘
We did go on a whale watching outing in a panga from Guerrero Negro. It was a little expensive, but so great to spend four hours on the water with the wind and sea spray kissing our faces.
And we did see whales. None were breaching but they were impressive. It’s too bad all the pictures just look like big rough rocks in the water. I took a couple of teeny movies with my camera, they give a better sense, but just barely.
We left Guerrero on the 24th of January, leaving early anticipating a long,100 km stretch of dirt road before the end of the day. There is no way to tell how good a road is going to be. We have three guide books and all of them suggest that the only way to survive this particular road is to deflate your tires a bit then go a little faster to skim over the interminable washboard.
Beautiful country - true desert. We hit the end of the pavement, and about 35-40 km later stopped at the side of the road for lunch and to take some pictures. That’s when we realized that this was the fulfillment of a dream. Dainius has always wanted to explore the Vizcaino desert on motorcycle, ever since he and a friend came here to see the whales, thirty years ago. And here we were right in the middle of it, on motorcycles.
It is a good day when such a lifelong dream is realized.
Back on the bikes we were just steeling ourselves - ok, I was just steeling myself, Dainius loves this stuff - for the second 50 km of gravel when it ended. The gravel ended. The road, without warning was slick asphalt - perfect and new. We had only completed about 50 km of anticipated 100 of gravel, washboard road. And the washboard hadn’t even been that bad.
In a way, it really didn’t feel the same. Not that I was complaining, my shoulders relaxing as we sped through the landscape, but it didn’t feel as much like we were out in the desert anymore.
It is a stark landscape in the Viscaino Desert. But it is not uninteresting. It seemed like around every corner to topography or the vegetation, or both, changed. Flat desert salt pan turned to mountains covered in 20 different types of green to dusty cactus or brush in the space of a few kilometres. Then it went to deep arroyos between sandy eroded sloping hills. Have I used the word amazing yet?
We found the little hotel in Bahia de Tortugas called Hotel Nancy. Lupe, the proprietress checked us in, a tiny little woman with a serious tone.
The next morning, she and her husband Jose invited us for coffee in their kitchen - good coffee, I must say and asked us many questions and told us all about their family, one son, the lobster fisherman, another daughter married to a doctor in La Paz, another, Nancy, who lived here with her husband and children.
Before we knew it, Jose told us he was going fishing at Malarimo and would we like to come with him ‘por conocerlo’ - to sight see. Hard to say no. The Malarimo is a notorious beach that has the reputation of being the receptacle for all the flotsam of the north Pacific. Like a scoop its shores gather up all sorts of debris from ships even halfway around the world.
Another part of the dream, so we climbed into Jose’s old Explorer and took off.
The whole trip was a running commentary, in Spanish, on Jose, his family, the Bahia, the fishing, the local fishing industry, great really. As we passed by one of the many ‘houses of the dead’ along the road, Jose slowed down, crossed himself, muttered a short prayer then looked at us, shrugged his shoulders and with a sheepish grin said, “Soy Catholico” - “I’m Catholic”, then went on with the commentary.
The tour was interrupted every kilometre or so as we pulled up to a little opening in the rocks or a stretch of beach. “Sometimes, there is fish here, sometimes,” he would say as he jumped out of the truck, grabbed his rod and lure and headed out towards the surf at a clip we would have to give effort to keep up with.
Jose is 71 years old, only 2 years beyond major open heart surgery. He seemed strong as a horse to us.
After a dozen or so casts and no fish, he’d come back, “No hay” “There isn’t any.” and we’d be off to the next spot.
Midway into the day, that we had thought would only be a morning outing, and at a point where our stomachs were starting to complain, Jose stopped in a fish camp, maybe 20 or so fishing cabins, and introduced us to his friend and his wife. “He is a lobster fisherman!” Next thing you know, his friend’s wife is showing us a bowl of maybe 10 freshly cooked lobster tails and asking us if we would like some? Like, yeah!
She pulled the meat out of the shells and broke it up into bite-sized chunks, gave us each a paper plate and a fork and motioned for us to go ahead and eat. I asked if they ate lobster themselves often, and they said yes, up to several times a week. It was wonderful. No butter, no garlic, no sauces or spices - no need. Only two hours out of the sea, all on its own, it was amazing - oops, I already used that word for something else didn‘t I.
After some chatting and thank you to our hosts, Jose herded us into the truck once more, to check out several more spots where, ‘sometimes, there are fish.’
He ended up catching a couple of small yellow tail, but too small to keep, so we went home fishless, but having had a great day. Dainius must have taken 150 photographs of the ocean and the surf and Jose fishing.

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