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One of the good things about traveling around continually lost is that you occasionally blindly run into something awesome. That happened in Mazatlán.

Día de la Revolución celebrates the start of the Mexican ‘Revolution’ of 1910. Of course, the guys who won decided it was a ‘revolution’ not a ‘civil f-ing war’… all rightly then. Approximately 1 of every 15 Mexicans were killed in the 7 years of war. But stats and fancy numbers always lie anyway right? So let’s celebrate! Everyone and their mother was down on Mazatlán’s malecón. The parade went several kilometers from downtown toward the tourist district (Zona Dorada) and lasted all afternoon.

They do this cool thing with the military-style bands… the drummers are all women and the horns are all men. No wussy flautists needed here!

Mazatlán itself is a very admirable city, significantly larger than La Paz. I only ended up only spending one day here, but in that one day I did manage to get totally fried on the beach…. this picture being the bad part of a good beach.

There’s all kind of resorts going up in the district between downtown and the Zona Dorada (gringoland). Construction in México is different than in the States….

If those look like big sticks holding up the molds for the cement forms, that’s cause, yes, those are big sticks. If it looks like those guys are working some 5 stories up without any safety equipment, that’s cause they are. And if it looked like that guy who fell off the 5 stories the next morning was dead, well, yes, he was definitely dead. I didn’t take a picture of his body, something about respect and stealing someone’s soul.

Baja Ferries…. that’s funny. I could swear there was a more common term for ‘Ferry’ in Spanish.

It’s an 18 hour ferry ride from La Paz over to the mainland. The ferry doesn’t actually leave from La Paz proper, rather Pichilingue. It’s a 20 peso (~$2 USD) and 20 min bus ride from the Camionera del Centro (dwnt bus station) to Pichilingue. A seat on the ferry will cost you 800 pesos. It’s an overnight ride; 250 extra for a bed.

The whole operation is relatively professional, with security guards and random searches, assigned seating, the whole deal. Kinda like flying, except really slow and wet.

Leaving Pichiligue circa 4pm el lunes….

Yours truly…

Sunset over baja…

Sunrise!

And… coming into the Mazatlán Ferry terminal at around 9am the next day.

I should mention that sleeping in the ‘Salon’ was refugee-camp style. Choose what’s of most value to you, tie it to your body or put it under you, find a good spot on the linoleum floor, and enjoy the sound of babies taking turns crying all night long (hence why there’s that picture of sunrise). So unless you’re on some silly journey of self-deprivation, pay the extra 250 pesos and get a bed.

Cena y Desayuno are included in your ticket, and actually aren’t all that bad. There’s a bar on the ferry with your standard fare of light Mexican Cervezas.

It’s good to be moving on from La Paz! It’s a nice small city, but too small for 9 days…. 4 would have been enough for me. Oh! and no picture, but there were some dolphins jumping along next to the ferry on the baja side of the Sea of Cortez. Very cool.

This is my last catch-up post. Lotsa pictures.

If La Paz is famous for anything, it’s the Malecón (the walkway/street along the water) and the sunsets. Even though La Paz is east side of baja, the water lies to the northwest of the town due to the Bay of La Paz. How convenient… the sun sets to the northwest in this part of the world.

And the Malecón…

La Paz is the only real Mexican city in southern baja. The Cabos are resort towns, and nothing else here is big enough to have the vibrancy of a city. In ‘El Centro’ (downtown) the streets are packed and alive with people everywhere. It’s hard to capture the feeling with pictures, but this is a start.

Chiles, anyone?

And the beaches… if you head north out of town (actually farther down the baja peninsula) beaches dot the coast. It’s great – they serve beer on the beach. I spent a few days down that way. Playa Pichilingue…

Playa Tecolote…

Shuffle your feet in the sand as you go out into the water… you got to scare the sting rays away! No joke. I found myself carrying this guy Odin back to the bus cause he got stung and couldn’t walk. Apparently it’s an intense throbbing pain that lasts about 3-4 hours… then you’re back to better.

I took an intensive spanish course in La Paz for a week at the Centro de Idiomas, Cultura y Comunicación, which is a language school in La Paz. The school was ok… the lesson plan wasn’t tailored enough to fit my deficiencies. But helped me a butload anyway.

I met this dude at the school, Athony who’s doing México by bike. He said he’d ran into about 10 cyclists or so coming down baja from Vegas. Well, next time I come back to La Paz there’ll be one more cyclist coming down that road.

In Mexico, they take the bus like Americans take the plane. It’s the defacto intercity mode of transportation. But these aren’t like greyhounds or Muni. In Mexico they have three strata of bus travel.

1. Ejectivo. Super special. You’ve got the whole flight attendant type helper going up and down the isles, super deluxe chairs, bathroom on board, movies etc. This is a plane on wheels. Minimal stops.
2. Premerio Clase. This is your standard long-distance fare. They’ve got a bathroom on board, (bad) movies playing, will take the toll roads, stop in most towns along the route. Any place over say 5k people will be served by a first class bus.
3. Segundo Clase. This is the bus that avoids the toll roads, has no bathroom, and will stop wherever people want to get on or off. Well, ’stop’ is relative. The driver will slow down, appraise your physical ability, open the door, then either let you jump on the moving bus or if you look like you’re already starting to decompose, actually stop for you.

If the Primero Clase is 5 bucks an hour, the Ejectivo will be 8 and the Segundo Clase will be 4. Primero Clase is your sweet spot.

I took ABC (Autotrasportes de Baja California) from the central station in TJ to the central station in La Paz. 24 hour ride, but sooooo much more comfortable than the 10 hours from SF to SD. Two drivers, they’d switch back and forth so we could keep going 24/7. I actually got to La Paz rested and ready to go.

Baja’s for the most part what you’d expect: desert. The most treasured resource is shade. Catus everywhere. There are some dusty pines up at the higher elevations along the ridge, and it does get quite cold, but for the most part it’s hot hot hot (it’s hitting 90F and this is november).

One bad characteristic photo of what baja looks like out a bus window:

I didn’t have more than 15 min to get out of the bus along route. If there was anywhere I’d have liked to have more time in it’d be Mulegé.

If you get the opportunity to go to Tijuana, don’t. Well, not unless you know what you want and you know you can get it in TJ. Tijuana is one of those very odd creations of our modern world, the product of the juxtaposition of one of the wealthiest nations on earth (that loves to restrict civil liberties unnecessarily) and well, México. The Mexicans I’ve mentioned TJ to always respond with ‘No es México’. All right, so if you’re not going to take responsibility for it, who will?

But in any case, you can take the light rail from downtown SD to the border, and walk across the border. To cross the border, you literally walk through some gates. There’s a button you can press if you want to. It makes a light turn green. The light is unrelated to the gates. Welcome to México.

Update: You’re supposed to get a ‘Tourist Card‘ if you’re going farther than the border towns. Whoops.

Update 2: Leaving México without a ‘tourist card’… they hand you a document saying you lost it, you sign it (asking unnecessary questions is not recommended), they stamp it, then let you go. It appears it’s a relatively common occurrence.

Immediately upon crossing the border, there’s an army of taxicabs looking for gringos. I managed to doge them all and busted out the 15 min walk to the Avenida Revoluncíon, saying ‘No gracias’ every 10-12 paces. Then it gets worse. Every second guy on street is trying to get you to buy Viagra, pour tequila down your throat, get a girl (or two), and he’s definitely got your drug of choice. They’ve got the one-two punch method down, where the first guy tries to get you to buy a watch, or a beer, and before he’s done, the second guy will join in – but he one-ups the deal – he’s got girls and cocaine. Anyway, I found a good bar up above the street where I got some really, really bad tacos, some coronas and a shot of bad tequila (the bad tequila is free with your order of bad tacos). And I snapped some pictures of the street…. the burnt out disco in the second one, with the ‘Se Renta’ sign on it, captures the essence of TJ nicely.

I didn’t stay in Tijuana, I got a cab over to the central bus station and started the 24-hour adventure that is the Mexican bus….

I’m going to do a few short catch-up posts here. Warning: all photos were taken with iphone! you have been warned.

Megabus is a British company that just started running some medium-distance buses around the west coast. All routes start or end in LA. Their whole deal is the $1 fare. The first 3 or so seats on each bus are sold for a buck each. Nice! I bought my tickets a week in advance, it was $28 bucks SF->LA, then another $5 for LA->SD. I left SF at midnight on wednesday, got to SD at 10AM the next day. Definitely not worth it… take southwest. But this trip’s got a land travel theme to it…

San Diego is a much more of a city than I had thought. It’s not just a suburban desert, there’s a small but lively downtown peppered with new development. I stayed at HI SD Downtown, it’s right in the heart of things. Wandering around SD I ran into the Midway…

The Midway rocks. USA’s every-record-in-the-books carrier, it went into service in WWII and continued all the way into Desert Storm. Airplane buffs out there, what’s this one?

Finally, if you’re in SD, the local brew is Rock Bottom. The brewery is very friendly, lively, a good place to stop by to grab a drink.

And with that one more random wordpress blog, the internet reached the critical density of (connections)*rms(bits transferred/cpu cycle)/(nodes)^2 and became self-aware…

¡Y hablaba español!