Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Bye Bye Baja












Ahhh the holidays. Its hard to believe we have already passed through Thanksgiving and we are on our way to Christmas in the tropics! In Cerritos we had one of the best out-of-US Thanksgivings ever. Somehow through the grapevine we heard that a restaurant called “Don Felipe's” would have a T-day event. Little did we expect that Don Felipe would cook seven turkeys with stuffing, two kinds of potatoes, vegetables and cranberry sauce! There were lots of gringos, a gringo band, and food, then Don Felipe ended the night with a little mexican table dance to celebrate!

The next day we packed up and headed over to Los Barilles to see what the start of the kite-boarding/windsurfing season looked like. People were slowly arriving to the arroyo in the middle of town setting up their palapas next to their trailers and waiting for wind. Unfortunately while we were there the wind came, but it was offshore, which meant it was WHIPPING down the arroyo to the ocean carrying a ton of sand and dust! We tried to ignore it by going on bike rides with our friend Dave from Montana who was very happy to see us again though unexpectedly, and meeting up with Bill from well, Montana. It was very hard to leave John, Marcie and Reece and go our separate ways, but we had booked a trip on the La Paz-Mazatlán ferry and we had to stick to our plan of getting out of Baja and onto the mainland.

Last year we took the shorter ferry ride to Topolobompo but this year we decided the extra price was worth the miles, the road tolls and skipping the uneventful highway south. Poor Lobo had to hang out in Tonto for 18 hours and we took some precautions in the van in case he just couldn’t contain himself. Meanwhile we enjoyed a pretty uneventful trip in a beat up ferry with a small sleeping cabin (actually, it had a shower, that’s luxury!) and terrible food. The arrival into Mazatlán at eight the next morning was very picturesque and we were hardly surprised that our kick-butt travel dog hadn’t made a mess of anything and predictably he just took the longest nap of his life. We spent a very pleasant morning in one of our favorite Mexican cities hiking up to the top of the 2nd tallest lighthouse in the world (on a natural formation that is) and having a nice breakfast on the boardwalk.

We looked at the map, and although we knew our destination was Sayulita we tried to make it a little interesting by doing a side trip to what one of our guide books described as miles of deserted, beautiful beach. It even appeared in one of two maps that the road continued across an inlet of water, by some bridge or something, so we wouldn’t have to do an out and back. So much for guidebooks and maps. Here’s the perfect example why we often prefer to just go. The miles of beach were there, they were beautiful, we drove all 14 miles on them setting the cruise control at 40 mph, getting passed by buses all on the beach! Then we hit this HUGE inlet of water, and no hope of crossing with the vehicle. Then we turned back, decided to camp on the beach and consequently got chowed on by jen-jens, nats, midges, no-see-ums, whatever you want to call those flesh eating blood sucking invisible flying objects. There was nothing man, woman or dog could do to keep from getting every part of the body swollen in bites. Lobo had to be let inside because he was crying from the stupid things biting him in his “guard chair” in the middle of the night. John was the hero in the morning when he went outside to get the vehicle ready while Lobo and I cowered in the van. We high tailed it out of there and found our way to Sayulita. Not even a mosquito in site. Just beautiful surfing waves, palm trees and hibiscus trees, clean bathrooms and showers, and lots of new friends. That was over ten days ago..