Baja 2022: Places We Visited

Weather in the 70s. Cheap rental car. Mostly on the East Cape. Mucho tacos. Followed the dirt roads.

Secret Garden AirBnB above Costa Azul beach. San Jose del Cabo.

Secret Garden AirBnB.

San Jose del Cabo.

Sol de Mayo.

7 Palmas Cocina, San Jose del Cabo.

Gorgeous high grade metamorphic rocks at Sol de Mayo waterfall near Santiago.

Migmatite(?) at Sol de Mayo / Canon de la Zorra, Sierra de la Laguna (one of the Peninsular Ranges)

Oh look, rotation relative to the enclosing matrix during metamorphism! Snowball structure at Canon de la Zorra. #geodork

Canon de la Zorra.

The Canon de la Zorra hike is short and pretty. Pay the fee and enjoy. Hiking in the Sierra de la Laguna do not include cross country treks. The vegetation is incredibly prickly and irritating. Impassable, really. Inquire about the trails when going inland in Baja. There aren't that many.

Sharp corners and broken appearance in what is a ductile shear zone? A visual trick played by white, crosscutting intrusions through dark chunks, which appear to be older layers where dark mineral were segregated, but might be xenoliths of wallrock.

Canon de la Zorra.

Igneous rocks at Punta Pescadero north of Los Barilles.

The twisty road from Los Barilles to Pescadero is lined with spectacular roadcuts through basin-fill deposits of this tectonically-active region.

El Moro Hotel is on the malecon in La Paz. Its awesome.

La Paz.

Taller Gallery, La Paz.

Jacques Cousteau in copper on the malecon, La Paz.

I see a buffalo.

We hiked a few miles along the rocky beach beyond the touristy Ballandras Beach parking lot. No one was around after a few hundred yards. The perfect white sand beaches were empty, the boulder conglomerate is spectacular, and the view out to the islands where the whales are ain't bad either.

"You must hike beyond the Ballandras hongo, Grasshopper."

The Hongo at Ballandras Beach.

La Paz backstreets.

Fancy dinner place in La Paz.

The coffee is great. The cream isn't. Its always that shelf-stable milk from a carton.

Architecture around fast-growing Cerritos Beach has a clean, simple style. Modern, stucco, livable.

Rooftop lounging at the Sunset Beach Hotel at Cerritos Beach. Construction is booming here. This ain't the place Yvon Chouinard saw back in the day. Still very nice, but its changed.

Cerritos Beach.

Strongly foliated metasedimentary rocks at Cerritos.

Felt like off-season.

Cerritos Beach.

Todos Santos is cute and predictable. 2 hours to see everything.

Hiking the high bluffs at Punta Lobos.

The fisherman's beach at Punta Lobos with the San Cristobal Hotel in the distance.

Todos Santos is licensed for tourists. We liked the new cafes out on Las Playitas better...

...but I could have eaten here every day.

Sort of fancy dinner place, Il Giardino at the top of the rough little road outside of Todos Santos.

Lobster tacos in the hilltown of Miraflores.

Punta Lobos.

We always walk marinas when we travel. They're usually quite friendly, pleasant, and designed to be walkable. Typically, there's a good cafe tucked away somewhere. Marinas are also a window into the current economic health of a community. Marina services are provided to non-resident yacht owners (the investor class) by local entrepreneurs (tradesmen, fishing guides, couriers, equipment supply houses). If the marina is busy, things are good. Along the waterfront at San Jose del Cabo, its a bull market.

Hotel Punta Pescadero Paradise longs for days gone by.

Dave Ramsey is always telling people to save their money by adopting a diet of "rice and beans, beans and rice". But some people take his advice too far. Some move to Los Barilles, buy a $40,000 Honda Talon side-by-side, and just hang out at the Bean & Rice Tako Bar. Hey man, three thousand cargo short-clad Boomers can't be wrong.

Bustling Los Barilles is home to ATVs, world class tortillas, mediocre sushi, retirees, great beaches, wind, ironing boards, and store dogs. The new golf resort being built at Ribera, a few miles south, will change this place. You can see the mark of retiree money going back a couple of decades, but today its the corporate investment dollars that are beginning to leave their mark on the East Cape. Buy now.

Pescadero. We literally had the place to ourselves, except for one other couple. But they looked really famous.

Pescadero. Go fishing or don't.

Stumbled into La Fortuna, a tiny beachside community located a long, sandy drive from anywhere. La Fortuna is home to Zai Sushi, an absolute gem of a sushi joint. This is East Cap Baja today.