Feliz Navidad

El Tríunfo

Located at 1,700 ft (518 m) on the Transpeninsular Highway between La Paz and San Jose del Cabo, El Tríunfo (The Triumph) was a bustling mining town in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Today it is much smaller (pop. 327) and quieter, and many buildings are just brightly-painted brick facades. The mining-era ruins are extensive and well known, and include a smokestack designed by Gustave Eiffel. Tourists are also drawn to the “piano museum” and the Café El Tríunfo, owned by an ex-biker from California (his motorcycle is in the lobby).

The Transpeninsular Highway through El Tríunfo

Descanso

Descanso is a place of rest, “a cross placed at the site of a violent, unexpected death, in memoriam" (link). Driving in Mexico you can't miss them – small (and not so small) homemade crosses, shrines and memorials to those killed in highway accidents. Roadside memorials are are often clustered around dangerous curves.

Dangerous curve on the Transpeninsular Highway

Roadside crosses belong to a long tradition of public memorialization of private grief (Everett 2002) and are found in many countries, including Chile, where they are known as animitas (link), Ireland (link), the U.S. Southwest (link) and Canada (Belshaw and Purvey 2009), but they are rooted in the Hispanic culture (link). During Spanish colonization of the Americas, people that died along the way were buried and the sites were marked with crosses sanctifying the ground. Descansos in New Mexico date back to the 1700s (Everett 2002).

Houses in Gringolandia

November is the beginning of the return migration of Americans and Canadians to Gringolandia. Most spend the scorching Baja summer in other parts of North America and have second homes on the East Cape. The return of the gringos marks the start of the real estate season with for sale signs popping up all over the place. The houses are generally large and fully furnished; some even come with vehicles and other toys (ATVs, kayaks, etc.). This is largely a market for gringos.

Having bought, remodeled and sold a number of houses, Rande and I have an interest in real estate. And having discussed living outside the US, we've’ve visited several nearby open houses to learn about housing and the real estate market.

If you’re wondering what your dollars can buy in Mexico, here are some pictures from a lovely East Cape house on the Sea of Cortez that’s listed for US$1,100,000.

Cañón de San Dionisio

The granite mountains of the Sierra la Laguna dominate the terrestrial horizon of the Cape Region in southern Baja. Running north-south about 100 km, they rise to over 2,100 m (7,000 ft) and cover 112,522 ha (278,000 ac). Access to the mountains is on dirt roads that follow river valleys and canyons from east to west on the Sea of Cortez side and west to east on the Pacific side. Trails over the high ridges begin where the roads end (link).

Looking down (east) Cañón San Dionisio

Rande and I drove up Cañón de San Dionisio from the town of Santiago on the east side of the mountains. The vegetation is arid scrub (“matorrales”) from sea level up to about 250 m (800 ft), dry forests up to 800 m (2,600 ft), evergreen oak woodlands (“encino”) up to 1,200 m (4,000 ft), oak-pine forests at the higher elevations and palm oases along the river channels (link). The variety of habitats and the area's isolation are reflected in its biodiversity – nearly 1,000 plant species have been recorded and 23% are endemics, including five endemic genera (link). Eight of the 42 species of reptiles and amphibians and eight of the 59 resident bird species are endemics (link).

Beachcombing

Wikipedia defines beachcombing as “...an activity that consists of an individual ‘combing’ (or searching) the beach and the intertidal zone, looking for things of value, interest or utility.” Rande and I have combed the intertidal from the black beaches of Costa Rica to the green beaches of Hawaii looking for "things of interest." Now, with more free time and many miles of beaches nearby, we're working on proficiency. Our favorite beach is an uninhabited stretch of white sand south of Punta Arena on the Sea of Cortez. It’s great for seashells and glass.

Rande beachcombing near Punta Arena

Rande collects sea glass, but she’s also attracted to shells, rocks, wood and bones. Beachcombing to her is walking meditation; listening to the waves and the sound of her footsteps in the sand is a way to focus on the present (known as mindfulness). She may be onto something. Dr. Deacon Ritterbush (aka Dr. Beachcomb) describes beachcombing as “…an inexpensive way to achieve better mental, emotional and physical health; and a spiritual means to weather life’s challenges.”

San Jose del Cabo Art Walk

Every Thursday night beginning in November, the streets in the Art District of San Jose del Cabo are closed to traffic and the galleries stay open late. They feature Mexican and international artists working in a variety of styles and media from beautiful crafts to high-end art pieces. Some serve drinks and food, and the event is popular with tourists and Mexicans.

We met Nancy Pridham in the Los Cabos Amber Gallery and Fine Art Annex. She’s a Canadian painter from Bahía Asunción and was having her first show in San Jose del Cabo. She and her husband live in a fishing village of about 3,000 people on the Pacific coast south of Guerrero Negro and Laguna Ojo de Liebre (Scammon’s Lagoon). You can see her paintings of Baja at nancypridham.blogspot.mx.

Gallery with a metal sculpture of "Catrina" in front

Scorpions

We found the first scorpion in the house a few days after we arrived. I was in bed arranging books on the night table when I bumped the small, wooden lamp; a scorpion dashed out from beneath the base and disappeared over the back. I moved the night table, but the scorpion was gone. In the morning, we moved the furniture, but couldn't find it. A couple days later, Rande saw a scorpion on the wall in the bathroom similar to the one on the night table. I dispatched it with a fly swatter. Rande identified it on the Internet as a bark scorpion (Centruroides exilicauda). So far, we've found seven bark scorpions (five in the house) and two unidentified scorpions outside.

Bark scorpion about 2.5 inches total length on the wall in the living room

Unidentified scorpion about 3 inches total length outside the house

Santuario de los Cactus

In 2011, Rande and I drove a rental car from Todos Santos on the Pacific side of southern Baja to Punta Colorado on the Sea of Cortez. Passing through the foothills of the Sierra de la Laguna, we saw a small sign pointing down a dirt road to the “Santuario de los Cactus.” We stopped for a short visit and returned to the cactus sanctuary this year.

El Santuario de los Cactus is 6 km off the Transpeninsular Highway between La Paz and San Jose del Cabo at about KM168. The 6-hectare (15-acre) forest-like sanctuary is surrounded by 50 hectares of protected land in ejido El Rosario, a small village of 25 families in the northern foothills of the Sierra de la Laguna [ejido is communally-owned farmland]. At an elevation of 425 m (1400 ft), the sanctuary is part of the dry forest ecoregion, the transition between the lowland xeric scrub of the southern Baja peninsula and the pine-oak forests of the mountains (link).

UNESCO designated the Sierra la Laguna a global biosphere reserve in 2003; 23% of the nearly 1,000 species found in the sierra are endemics. Human activities within the biosphere reserve include extraction of timber and other forest products, farming and cattle raising (link). 

Road to the cactus sanctuary with Sierra la Laguna in the background

Octave

While Colorado was bracing for snow, we experienced tropical storm (chubasco) Octave. Octave was a tropical depression on Saturday, October 12 and a tropical storm about 300 miles SSW of Baja the next day. By Monday (10/14), Octave was less than 200 miles from southern Baja with maximum sustained winds of 60 mph. NOAA’s National Hurricane Center predicted 3-6 inches of rain, storm surge with large waves and coastal flooding on the west side of the peninsula (www.nhc.noaa.gov). Octave made landfall Monday night (10/14) and early Tuesday (10/15). It was downgraded to a tropical depression as it passed over Baja north of us; by late Tuesday, it was a “remnant low” over mainland Mexico.

NASA Terra satellite image of Octave October 14 at 2:40 PM (NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team (www.nasa.gov)

La Mordida

La mordida, “the bite,” is a bribe in Mexico. While we were waiting for the ferry in Topolobampo, an American couple in line behind us told their story of being stopped by a municipal transit policeman between Los Mochis and Topolobampo. The policeman read a prepared text about their violation of the 60 kilometer/hour (km/h) speed limit. He showed them a radar gun displaying 80 km/h and said they were speeding. The driver, a recently-retired federal contractor, said that he was moving along with traffic, implying that everyone was speeding. The transit policeman told them that the place where they had to pay the fine was closed until the following morning. In the end, the couple gave MX$1,500 (pesos), about US$120, to the policeman so they could catch the ferry. La Mordida.

Sea of Cortez

We left northern Colorado early on September 28; it seemed fitting that the temperature was below freezing and there was ice on the truck. We arrived in Topolobampo, Mexico the afternoon of September 30 to catch the ferry across the Sea of Cortez to La Paz on the Baja peninsula. We were early, so I walked around the commercial fishing docks. Most of the boats were rigged with paired-trawls for shrimping.

Commercial fishing docks in Topolobampo

The ferry (California Star) sailed around midnight and arrived in La Paz about 7 AM on October 1. It took an hour to get the truck off the boat (we were almost the last vehicle loaded and the last to get off) and two hours to get through federal customs (even though we left from mainland Mexico). I drove the truck through a large "gamma ray" scanner and it was inspected cursorily by two young officers searching for contraband. 

California Star (from: Baja Ferries)

We arrived in Los Barriles ("The Barrels") on the East Cape in early afternoon. In all, it took us 3.5 days, 1,580 driving miles consuming 85 gallons of gas and a 7-hour ferry ride.

Arriving in Los Barriles