Baja Road Trip
Rob Forbes | 6-5-2023
The Maine winter had convinced a couple of friends to join me on my quest to find my ‘95 Toyota 4 Runner which was residing somewhere in Todos Santos, a small coastal town way down the Baja Peninsula. The car had been sheltering in place with Santiago, a Mexican architect pal, since the pandemic curtain had come down on all things travel. He loved the car and wanted to buy it, so he was understandably a bit disappointed when I told him I had promised the car to my goddaughter as a college graduation present (if she could make it through Princeton, she could learn to drive a stick shift, I hoped). Santiago had agreed to get the car tuned and prepped at my expense before we arrived.
His sparse text advised us to pick the car up from a mechanic named Victor whose garage was across the street from the “Mercado del Sol”. An address would have been nice, but there are no street addresses in Todos Santos. We found the Mercado, but there was no garage across the street, so we were reduced to driving around and attempting to find it visually. A few bumpy dirt roads later, there she was in an alley across from a sort of open-air garage.
We got the key from a friendly guy after ponying up $1000 (which is a lot for a tune-up anywhere). I was in no position to negotiate, however – Santiago had arranged the tune-up with Victor, who had left for the day, and my Spanish was/is pathetic. I was just happy that they took my VISA card as we were out of cash.
The car had not been cleaned (no big deal), but the engine fired up immediately. Yay. The sound of that venerable engine and the fact that all my maps were still in the side pockets, untouched, gave me a fleeting feeling of confidence. But the gas gauge was below empty, and the dodgy clutch would not allow me to get it into first gear. So we lugged through the bumpy town roads in second, rolling through stop signs, headed (I hoped) toward the one Pemex gas station I thought I remembered.
It dawned on me (perhaps a bit tardily) how profoundly unprepared I was for the impending 1000 mile road trip back up to San Francisco through an uninhabited landscape where you cannot drive at night for fear of drug gangs, in a 30 year-old vehicle that I had not driven in three years.
After filling up, I asked John to see he could get it to shift. He’s a bike and motorcycle dude, clever with mechanics. He got it into first, and we drove the ten miles back to our hotel without incident. The ‘plan’ was to leave the next morning and drive 300 miles north to Loreto, a charming, historic port town on the Sea of Cortez where I had stayed five years before when I originally drove the car down from San Francisco.
The car handled like a champ on the first day, though the AC was shot and Beth (who was in the fetal position in the rear seat, suffering from food poisoning) didn’t altogether appreciate the bouncy suspension and full-throated engine. But we got to Loreto in one piece and now had only 700 miles left to the border! I felt like we had a fighting chance to make it home, and – to commemorate that feeling – I got my first decent night’s sleep after three previous nights of insomnia.
Baja has extraordinary beauty, full of dramatic contrasts: deserts, oases, endless fields of cacti, rocky moonscapes, the glassy Sea of Cortes. You feel like you are passing through an older permanent geology, a landscape content to be neglected by human beings.
A driver can be seduced into a light trance by the dreamy landscape and hum of the engine – until a semi, growing larger and larger, finally roars by on the shoulderless two-lane highway. Gas stations are spaced erratically, sometimes 100 plus miles apart, and there is no signage advising you about the next one. There is no signage at all really, and we forget what a luxury a little graphic encouragement can be.
Besides watching the landscape unfurl, we saw a few fellow travelers: mostly older Canadians in vans, younger people on motorcycles, and locals in beaters. It was Road Warrior pleasant solitude. Unable to book hotels in advance, we had to arrive at our destination before nightfall and get lucky. Accommodations were sparse and sketchy, and I was happy to have my own pillow.
On day three, halfway to the border, we spent our sketchiest night in the other worldly Mexican salt capital Guerrero Negro. Happy to flee the next morning, we hit an unmarked pothole doing 70. It was a collision-like impact, and we felt lucky to have a solid truck with oversized tires.
The jolt must have affected the vintage Alpine CD Player nestled in the dashboard that we had written off as dead, and Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind came on. Unsolicited, but welcome. I must have left the CD in there three years ago.
Our last night was in San Felipe, a curious fishing village on the Sea of Cortez with a preppy rowing club and a beach sprinkled with used nets, plastic bottles, and unidentifiable dried sea creatures. San Felipe is only a day‘s drive from the border and is accessible to Americans – notably college students looking to drink and party. It was a little sad to be back in ‘civilization’ with its shops selling NFL caps, menus in English, goofy Yoga signage.
We used our last pesos for our final and best meal at a tiny truckers’ café just south of Mexicali. The menu had no prices. The place was run by four women whose ages spanned about 80 years. Their spirit and laughter were reminders of the general rule of thumb with Mexicans that we had been noticing for the entire trip – they are about 65% more content than most Americans.
This Baja road trip has had an enduring effect on my mental well-being. A month later I still feel lighter, more optimistic about life in general. Why? Maybe four days away from news media, immersed in a beautiful, surreal environment. Maybe quality time with good friends. Maybe the relaxed, friendly, hospitable Mexicans.
But I think, maybe, it was that this spontaneous, out-of-control trip sent me back to my youth – hitchhiking around the US and Europe not knowing where (and with whom) I’d sleep the next night. Now (either because we’re older or because it’s not the late ‘60s) we typically set up our travel to avoid uncertainty, spending hours researching the perfect hotel, airplane seat, lunch spot. But giving up control brings a kind of freedom and peace all its own. The vulnerability and the lack of specific expectations seems to have released me from my habitual circular patterns. Here’s to more road trips.
