"Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with non sequiturs, shattering your concentration with 'Oh, look, it's raining' and 'You see a lot of trees here.'" —Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express (quoted in Theroux's The Tao of Travel)
We like The Tao of Travel for its menage of travel literature excerpts, but we don't subscribe to Theroux's philosophy of solo traveling. He seems to seek out life-changing cultural contrasts, experiences of strangeness and at times discomfort that perhaps jolt him out of everyday complacency. That is certainly one way to travel, and probably one that is best accomplished alone.
But our interests are very different. We aren't looking for strangeness and discomfort (hence all the pounds of dark chocolate and portable electronics we bring along with us), and we find cultural contrasts interesting but not the main point of going somewhere. We are interested in learning about and documenting natural history: critters, plants, landscapes, and seascapes. Add to this the fact that we really like traveling with each other, if only for the opportunity to lob our own corrupting non sequiturs: "It's getting windy again" or "Hey, there's a barrel cactus!"
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Cilantro anchored in Caleta San Juanico between
Wendaway and Qué Linda. |
We have said that we like remote anchorages better than busy marinas, but that doesn't mean we avoid people! Some of the highlights of our trip were the people we met and crossed wakes with along the way. The wind blew from the north for the better part of 9 days at
Caleta San Juanico, and we anchored for that entire period in a small bight
between two other boats:
Qué Linda,
winter home of Oregonians Doug and Linda, whom we met in San Carlos in 2012, and
Wendaway, crewed by Mark and Wendy from British Columbia.
Protected
to the north by the blocky headland of Punta San Basilio, we didn’t have any
swells or wind-driven waves at anchor, but on most afternoons 15 to 20 knots of
wind whistled through a cut in the hills and out over the anchorage. We divided our time between "keeping house" on board and going ashore for bird and plant hikes, which often included a stop at the local organic farm for fresh produce. The link below (if it loads) shows a panoramic video of the north anchorage at Caleta San Juanico.
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| Linda Reinthal on Qué Linda. |
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| Mark Schneider on Wendaway. |
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| On a headland trail overlooking the bay. |
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| Linda and Sue scouting for plants, bugs, anything interesting. |
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| Sand Verbena (Abronia maritima), a brilliant spot of color on the beach. |
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Linda and Sue in a sea cave we hiked to, about 4 miles north
of Caleta San Juanico. |
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| Wild Cotton (Gossypium species), collected by Sue but not yet identified. |
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Tube-tongue species (probably Justicia insolita) that Sue collected
on a hike to Ramada Cove. |
One of our favorite places to explore at San Juanico is a large brackish estero that harbors good birds and plants. We saw our first Xantus’s Hummingbirds here, a species endemic to Baja. The male is stunning with its iridescent green body, buffy belly, and bright red bill; the female has a strong white line behind the eye, buffy throat and belly, and the same red bill. Curtis tried hard to get a photo of a Xantus's here, but the birds weren’t particularly cooperative. Upstream of the estero, the channel dries out but eventually becomes a lovely lush canyon with 40-foot fig trees and dense undergrowth.
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Xantus's Hummingbird, a Baja endemic and life bird for us. Curtis
photographed this female at Bahía Concepción later in the trip. |
Rancho Escondido is an organic
vegetable farm and small goat dairy established by Jose Manuel about a mile from the San Juanico beach. We bought fresh cilantro, Mexican green onions, radishes, carrots, and Roma tomatoes,
all pulled or picked while we waited. What a treat, far from town!
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| Jose Manuel in his garden at Rancho Escondido. |
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| Thatch roof over at Rancho Escondido made from palma de taco (fan palm) fronds. |
The road from San Juanico to Loreto, the nearest town, is 7
miles of dirt, gravel, and sandy washes followed by 30 or 40 paved miles along
Mexico Highway 1. Not an everyday excursion. Beach campers who come to San
Juanico need 4-wheel-drive or high-clearance campers just to make it in
from the highway. All the more surprising that Curtis’s brother Morgan “dropped
in” during our stay, on his way from Bend, Oregon, to a surfing spot on the
Pacific coast. We knew Morgan was headed down Baja around the same time that we
were sailing across the Gulf, but it’s a big place, and we weren't sure we would meet up. Lo and behold, as we returned one afternoon from
a long hike, there stood Morgan on the beach, catching up with Doug and Linda, who
are also from Bend. Morgan has known them for years, whereas we had met them by
chance in San Carlos in 2012! One of those small world things….
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| Morgan (left) and Curtis in the cockpit of Cilantro. |
