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GoGo Bike on the road

Get your­self a big cup of cof­fee, this is prob­a­bly the longest blog post I’ve ever writ­ten! So, here goes!

Suf­fice it to say, I’m pretty crappy about get­ting our blog updated in a timely man­ner and this is no excep­tion! So many things hap­pen so fast around here that I often don’t know if I’m com­ing or going and that’s part of what made this most recent trip to Baja so special…

The Per­fect Baja Day

Let me start with the most remark­able part of the trip… for almost a week, we were com­pletely dis­con­nected from the rest of the world. No cell recep­tion any­where and vir­tu­ally no inter­net con­nec­tion. The one or two times I man­aged to get online at the local inter­net “café”,  which was actu­ally a tiny store sell­ing Bar­bies and cloth­ing and had a rotary dial tele­phone on the wall for peo­ple to use and no lights on to speak of, it took me one hour and twenty min­utes to con­nect via dial-up ser­vice. We don’t ever really pay much atten­tion any­more to how graphic inten­sive web­sites are because most com­put­ers are so fast that you just don’t notice but when you’re in the mid­dle of nowhere and you are using ancient com­put­ers and dialup ser­vice, you real­ize just how slow the world used to be. When you’re com­pletely dis­con­nected like this, an entirely new world opens up to you, that is, IF you choose to open your eyes…

So let’s go back to the begin­ning… last Sep­tem­ber, I rode the entire Baja Penin­sula with four ter­rific guys, one of whom was John Welker. Well, about a month ago, John emailed me ask­ing if I wanted to ride down to Baja again because he had a place on the Sea of Cortez and was going down one last time before mov­ing to Florida. I had to think about it for all of a nanosec­ond before say­ing YES, YES, YES!!! The other GoGo Girl, Desiree, decided she wanted to go too so the three of us set off en route to Bahia de Los Ange­les on Sat­ur­day, April, 2^nd.

Desiree and I met John at a gas sta­tion just north of the US-Mexico bor­der in San Ysidro. We offloaded my bike, Desiree dri­ving the Jeep with the bike rack on it and John fol­low­ing in his SUV filled to capac­ity with all the things he was tak­ing down to Baja.

We started the drive at about 9:30am and began the slow crawl through Tijuana, down the coast through Rosar­ito, and then down into the ever busy Ense­nada. It took for­ever to get through Ense­nada as this is the place where every­one in the north­ern part of Baja go to get every­thing they need. The addi­tion of a Costco and Wal­Mart have changed every­thing on the Peninsula!

Threat­en­ing Skies in Baja

Once through Ense­nada, we picked speed as the traf­fic tapered off but we were on to the long and very wind­ing roads for the next hun­dred or so miles. At cer­tain points, I was able to travel at 72mph but the sus­tained winds just beat down on us and I was aver­ag­ing about 55mph through the head­winds. As we worked our way down the coast, we hit a stretch where it was cold and rainy, or I should say, misty. It was misty enough that every­one but me had their wind­shield wipers on and since I don’t have any on my hel­met visor, I was wip­ing my visor every few sec­onds. No mat­ter the weather, I couldn’t have been hap­pier because I knew I was going to spend the entire week rid­ing my lit­tle bike and so I hap­pily went along my way. Now keep in mind, there’s Desiree and John strug­gling behind me because they are in cars capa­ble of going a zil­lion miles an hour and they’re stuck behind me on a lit­tle motor­bike, but they were com­plete troop­ers and stayed behind me the entire way.

It’s a Baby! The GoGo Bike Meets the Hogs

After a full day of rid­ing some 320 miles, we arrived in Catavina, the same place we stopped dur­ing our Sep­tem­ber trip. Upon arrival at the small hotel there in the “mid­dle of nowhere” desert, we pull up and see eight Harleys parked in the front way of the hotel. Of course, want­ing to be the cen­ter of atten­tion with my lit­tle bike, I man­age to squeeze in between two of the Hogs and park my bike know­ing that within a short amount of time, a gang of Harley rid­ers would emerge and won­der what the heck that lit­tle bike was doing out there in the mid­dle of nowhere! Well, imag­ine my sur­prise when the Harley rid­ers all turn out to be from Switzer­land and Ger­many! I knew they were the own­ers of the bikes because they were all crowded around my bike so of course, I can’t resist and I sneak up behind them and hear the women remark­ing “It’s a baby!” and some guy chimes in and says “Junior!” I got the biggest laugh as I intro­duced myself as the owner and explained to them that I had rid­den that bike the entire 1,100 mile length of the Penin­sula! They were all shocked, most of all the leader of the “pack” because he had been doing the Baja ride for the past 20 years and couldn’t imag­ine it on such a lit­tle bike! We spend the next half hour swap­ping sto­ries about Baja and then, sev­eral mar­gar­i­tas later, we all retire for the evening, exhausted from the day.

The Cove in Baja

Sun­day morn­ing greets us with yet another cold, windy, cloudy day and we’re up early to get on our way. We only have about 120 miles to go to our des­ti­na­tion but we need to get there early because John has a lot he has to do to get his house oper­a­tional, includ­ing hook­ing up the solar pan­els and every­thing needed to get the water run­ning and every­thing else. He hasn’t been to the house in over a year so there’s no telling what we’re going to walk in and find and much to my dis­may, we didn’t know what we were going to encounter OUTSIDE the house! More on that in a minute…

The 120 miles from Catavina to Bahia de Los Ange­les is long and bumpy and you feel as if your teeth are going to be knocked right out of your head from how bad the roads are but I was just as happy as could be because I was back on my lit­tle bike. I had really pushed it the day before and prob­a­bly went a lot fur­ther than I should have because within about 60 miles of Catavina, every

Cacti on the rock

part of my body was aching from such a long ride and Desiree com­mented that I should have just put the bike on the back of the Jeep but I wasn’t about to give up one sec­ond of rid­ing and so on this day, I was def­i­nitely pay­ing for the plea­sure I had the day before! I didn’t care because this part of the ride is one of extra­or­di­nary beauty because you see boul­der fields that are so enor­mous you feel as if you have entered a land­scape found only on the Moon or Mars. You then come out of the boul­der fields and into an end­less stretch of cac­tus fields that are so tall, they are higher than most houses. It is this part of the Baja Penin­sula that I love the most! It is quiet, peace­ful, strange yet beau­ti­ful and some­thing I will always look for­ward to on each trip to Baja.

Sun­rise in Baja

Sand and Moun­tains in Baja

Com­ing up over the hill into Bahia de Los Ange­les, you catch a glimpse of the bay and you are imme­di­ately trans­formed. What­ever stress you may have been feel­ing, instantly dis­ap­pears because you are truly in a dif­fer­ent place, one that is so remote you can’t help but feel­ing like you’re on the TV show Sur­vivor! Now, for many peo­ple like myself, the prospect of being on Sur­vivor is the last thing in the world you want because wired up, plugged in, city folk like me have a hard time dis­con­nect­ing and set­tling down and relax­ing into the rhythm of such a remote place and to be hon­est, I nearly had a melt­down when I dis­cov­ered I didn’t have any cell recep­tion and only inter­mit­tent inter­net access with dial-up! THIS is a prob­lem for some­one like me and also for some­one who is still run­ning their busi­ness while on vaca­tion. Per­haps THAT was the les­son for me from this trip… I don’t have to answer every email as soon as it comes in, I don’t have to return a phone call within five min­utes, I don’t have to get a jacket out the door as soon as the order comes in, I don’t have to respond to any­thing and every­thing the moment it’s hap­pen­ing and yet, that is how many of us have learned to live these days with all this tech­nol­ogy and I’ll tell you what, IT’S EXHAUSTING!

Well, noth­ing shocks you out of your exhaus­tion like an encounter with a rat­tlesnake! And that’s exactly what hap­pened next! Our good friend, Joe Berk, from Cal­i­for­nia Scooter Com­pany and fear­less leader of our Sep­tem­ber trip, sent me an email back in Sep­tem­ber telling me all of the things I needed to bring with me “just in case”. He took great plea­sure in pulling my leg about all the crea­tures I might encounter while in Baja and that I had to come pre­pared for any encounter, includ­ing that of a rat­tlesnake! Well sure enough, we arrive at John’s house, the neigh­bors have come over to greet him and while stand­ing there, some­one makes a joke about rat­tlesnakes and Desiree laughs and says “why don’t you turn over that tire over there, there’s prob­a­bly a rat­tlesnake under there”.

The Rat­tlesnake

So, some “smartie-pants” turns over the tire and THERE lies a rat­tlesnake! I swear to the heav­ens, I never wanted to run for the hills so fast in my whole life yet no such run was going to hap­pen because if there was a rat­tlesnake right there two feet away from me, there were cer­tain to be more of them all over the place and that was it for me! No stay­ing at John’s house, I had to go to a hotel, not that the “hotels” would be any bet­ter in such a remote place but at least I would feel like there was a big­ger bar­rier between me and the snake so off to the hotel Desiree and I would go! I don’t think the snake really got to me, well, yes, he did… BUT, it really got to me after dark that night when we were prepar­ing to leave John and the neigh­bors. I bounded out­side of his house, into the pitch dark toward the Jeep and stopped dead in my tracks because I real­ized I might just step on a snake out there and a 180 degree turn and I was back in that house! Now I was trapped on all sides by rat­tlesnakes even though there wasn’t one in sight and per­haps THAT was the prob­lem! Oh, the tricks the mind can play with you in the dark!

The GoGo Bike Wait­ing to GO

Mean­while, as I’m hav­ing the rat­tlesnake shakes, we are told by the neigh­bors that all of the whale watch­ing tours ended on March 31^st. We had missed it by three or four days and this meant that I wasn’t going to be spend­ing the week rid­ing my bike because we were sup­posed to be rid­ing all over the place to get to where the whale watch­ing tours would leave, so that meant, the rest of the week we would just be stay­ing there in rat­tlesnake cove!

So there I am, hugely dis­ap­pointed at no whales, dis­con­nected from the world, sur­rounded by rat­tlesnakes in my head, and what am I sup­posed to do if I’m not rid­ing my bike the rest of the week?! Well, this is where a per­son either freaks out or they set­tle in to where they are and start to open their eyes and see what the world has to offer and what liv­ing is all about so that’s what I did…

My Corona Beer Com­mer­cial Photo

For the next three days, I walked the miles of beaches just to see what I would see. The one func­tion­al­ity I still had avail­able was the cam­era in my iPhone so I spent the time look­ing for things I might want to pho­to­graph. I guess I wanted to cap­ture this mag­i­cal place in a way that would visu­ally express how

A Baja Tree

extra­or­di­nary it is because so much is said about Mex­ico in the media and most of it’s bad and rarely do you get a story or report out of the place that make peo­ple feel like it’s a place they’d want to visit. Now mind you, a trip like this would not be com­plete with­out the req­ui­site mur­der which is, in fact, what hap­pened on the night we arrived!

Low Tide in Baja

Most media reports of crime and mur­der and drugs in Mex­ico have cap­tions that read some­thing like “Amer­i­can Mur­dered in Cold Blood by Mex­i­can Drug Lords” BUT in OUR mur­der story, it actu­ally goes some­thing like this… “Amer­i­can liv­ing in Bahia de Los Ange­les shoots his Mex­i­can girl­friend in the head, bul­let richo­chets inside her head leav­ing her per­ma­nently dam­aged, leav­ing two sons, aged 14 and 17 to fend for them­selves. Mex­i­can author­i­ties do not pros­e­cute the Amer­i­can, they only make him leave the coun­try and tell him never to come back so he leaves Mex­ico, returns to the US and then turns right around and goes back to Mex­ico only to be con­fronted and killed by the woman’s sons who were appar­ently in a drug dis­pute with the Amer­i­can and, of course, a bit unhappy that he destroyed their mother’s life.” Never a dull moment…

So, of the other sto­ries I dis­cov­ered along my walks were Mauro, the Ital­ian, who had been liv­ing there for almost 20 years and decided to open a pizze­ria, mar­ried a marine biol­o­gist from Ari­zona who was there study­ing the tur­tles and built a house into the moun­tain­side but not before import­ing his nephew from Italy to be the pizza maker, much to the dis­may of the boy’s

No idea what this is!

mother. On the evening we had some of this Ital­ian pizza, an SUV pulled across the street in which sat two police offi­cers. I instructed the boy pizza maker to take a pizza and deliver it to the police in the SUV to which they turned on their lights and siren as a “thank you”. One never knows when they’re going to need the local police for some­thing in Mexico!

And of course, there is always rivalry in a small town and this one was no dif­fer­ent. For years, there wasn’t a gas sta­tion for miles and then one day, there were two; one, owned by the woman who owned the “hotel” we were stay­ing in and the other, by the woman who owns the “yel­low store” (the local gro­cery store). The rivalry between the two is appar­ently quite fierce and well

Town cemetary

known through­out this town of four fam­i­lies and so the story of the “Hat­fields and McCoy’s” is prob­a­bly apro­pos in this sit­u­a­tion! And before we leave the rivalry, let’s not for­get my hav­ing to pay for our hotel room by going to the gas sta­tion! No one has credit card machines in this lit­tle town except for this one gas sta­tion and that’s where all of the credit card transaca­tions are done for the hotel so for future ref­er­ence, if you ever go to Baja, BRING CASH AND LOTS OF IT!  And of this gas sta­tion and the credit machine, we find a young woman of about 20 years old who speaks flaw­less Eng­lish when I present my credit card and I ask her where she learned to speak Eng­lish so well and she says she’s Amer­i­can and from Ohio and the owner of the gas sta­tion and hotel is her grand­mother! Never a dull moment in this lit­tle town of four families!

The estu­ary

Now, in the mid­dle of all of this small town drama, I have become sick from eat­ing some­thing one night and am sure I am going to die in the mid­dle of the night. No such thing hap­pened and once every­thing “cleared”, so to speak, I was ready for the next adven­ture which con­sisted of John and I dri­ving along the rock­i­est, dusti­est road known to man only to come upon a small enclave of

A Baja Tree

“Grin­gos” (Amer­i­cans) liv­ing in trailer par­adise! Some 54 “houses” right on the beach on the edge of an estu­ary that was absolutely mag­nif­i­cent. As we approached the enclave, we were sur­prised to come upon a guard shack which was manned by none other than “Juan Carlo” which seemed to be just about the only name of every man in town. Appar­ently, the enclave inhab­i­tants had expe­ri­enced some theft dur­ing the year and decided to put up the guard shack and gate and when­ever any­one would approach the gate, Juan Carlo would put down his Cerveza and come out­side his trailer to see who the intrud­ers were. In the same moment, an Amer­i­can on an ATV dri­ves up ask­ing us what we’re doing there. After explain­ing I was on a photo mis­sion to bring home pho­tos of what a beau­ti­ful place it is, he invited us into the enclave and started telling us all of the sto­ries asso­ci­ated with all of the own­ers. Talk about Pey­ton Place!

Mis­ter B

Mean­while, “Mis­ter B.” arrives to greet us and show us around. Mind you, Mr. B, was actu­ally a black dog of some unknown vari­ety and spoke no Eng­lish, had the run of the place and lived almost two miles down the beach at the last house in the enclave. Mr. B. and I explored the estu­ary while John and our new best friend, Les, enjoyed a beer. Soon, Juan Carlo joined the beer party and it looked like we were going to be there all night! Sev­eral beers later, John and I headed back to town but not before the sun was going down and our offroad trek became more chal­leng­ing as there were NO roads to speak of out by the estu­ary, only land­marks like bushes and trees. Oh lord, I thought to myself, how on earth are we ever going to get out of here but sure enough, John, a mas­ter­ful nav­i­ga­tor, drove us right out and back to civ­i­liza­tion, such that it was.

Enrique’s truck and boat

On the last day, John hired a boat for a four-hour tour of the bay. We were taken to the boat launch by Enrique, whose last name was Dag­gatt of all things. Appar­ently, his ances­tors who founded the town were British and had set­tled there as part of the gold rush in the late 1880s. Enrique and I drove inside the truck while Desiree and John rode in the boat on the trailer! Down the road we went, right past the police who waved as we went by and I won­dered if they and the pizza recip­i­ents were one and the same.

The boat was launched at the dock and Enrique and I hopped in to join Desiree and John. Off we went on our big adven­ture which would include some of the most mag­nif­i­cent sights, not the least of which was the sea lion pod frol­ick­ing in the water and then chas­ing us as we started to leave the area. Nor­mally, the sea lions are sun­ning them­selves on the big rocks but this day, they were all in the water and we got the ben­e­fit of a beau­ti­ful dis­play of syn­chro­nized swim­ming AND, the big moment of the trip came when I just hap­pened to look up

Sea lions with their heads out of the water

beyond the front of the boat and out of the water came the back and then… a whale’s tail! As quickly as he emerged from the water, he was back under again, but I had seen it and now, my whale watch­ing tour was com­plete as was my jour­ney to Baja! Noth­ing could have been more per­fect in that moment!

Head­ing back to shore in Baja storm

There were count­less other moments on this trip worth not­ing such as the hail that began to fall while we were out rac­ing back to shore in hopes of escap­ing the oncom­ing storm, sun­rises that can­not begin to be cap­tured ade­quately by a cam­era, brief encoun­ters with strangers on the beach and in the streets, hav­ing only one chan­nel on the hotel room TV show­ing an end­less string of episodes of a Mex­i­can “novella” (soap opera) and the only way to change the chan­nel in the room was to go into the hotel bar and ask them if they could change the chan­nel and being glared at because the novella is some­thing every­one is engrossed in there, includ­ing the 20-something Amer­i­can at the gas sta­tion, meet­ing dozens of Grin­gos who had cho­sen to come and live in this place sev­eral months of the year, all mak­ing for the most amaz­ing adventure.

GoGo Bike on the road

Who needs the inter­net and cell­phones and email and text mes­sag­ing and noise and busy­ness and tele­vi­sion and free­ways and cars and expen­sive gas when you can get on a lit­tle motor­bike and just drive for a day and end up in a place like this. That’s what I call “living”!

Arlene