Buenos días, Mexico! We’re back for more beaches and tacos. Actually, there’s way more to Mexico than tacos and beaches but it can’t be denied… Mexico is particularly good at these. We enter the country into Baja California. Our overlanding Baja features fabulous beaches, the Baja 1000 endurance race, a new Starlink, and fish tacos… did we mention the tacos?
Gringoland
Baja California (‘Baja’ to his friends) is the long, skinny peninsula dangling in the Pacific Ocean in the far north-west corner of Mexico. We’ve been overlanding Baja before. It was deserted last time because few travellers are stupid enough to come here in the crazily hot temperatures of mid-summer. Now we’re back for winter and it’s peak snowbird season. A very different experience.
For the uninitiated, Baja is known amongst many travellers as ‘Mexico Lite’. It kind of is Mexico, but not quite the real Mexico. Europeans might understand if we say that Baja is to Mexico what the Costa del Sol is to Spain: full of English-speaking tourists who flock down in their hoards for winter sunshine, beaches and a more affordable way of life. But we’ve said this before, and we’ll say it again… popular places are popular for a reason. It’s easy to say ‘oh we won’t go there because of the crowds… queues… whatever’. But the simple reality is… Baja is a great place! With a bit of effort, it’s easy to avoid the bars/restaurants with menus in English and prices in US$. And with a capable off-road vehicle, it’s easy to avoid the busy spots to enjoy your own little bit of Baja beach and desert wild-camping paradise.
San Felipe Starlink
Having gone on about avoiding the popular spots, immediately on our arrival in Mexico we had to put our principles to one side and headed to the Gringo hot-spot of San Felipe. There, in a commercial campsite, we parked-up in a regimented line with the numerous North American RVs at the beachside. Why? Why??? Baja has so many amazing wild-camp beaches. What the bejeezus were you thinking? Well… it’s all Elon Musk’s fault!
“Okay…” you’re thinking… “Elon might be a controversial character, but how this???” Well, we won’t bore you with the tedious details of our conversations with Starlink Support, but it turns out that when they’d said we could transfer our Starlink dish to set-up a new account in another country, what they had forgotten to add was ‘except to Mexico’. The result is that for our time in Mexico we need to sell our US Dishy and buy a new Dishy in Mexico. And San Felipe is the best place in this part of Mexico to arrange delivery. So we placed the order and then hung around San Felipe for a while.
Whilst we were waiting for the new Dishy, Marcus wanted to take the opportunity to do a bit of juggling-around with our in-house electrics and solar-system. This put our electric system out-of-action for a few days and we needed to find an external plug-in to power the fridge etc. So we had to swallow our pride and shack-up in a San Felipe RV park/campsite for a few days. Actually, it wasn’t that bad. Not our preferred overlanding environment, but the people were friendly and we could walk into town for decent shrimp tacos (bit over-priced, but decent and tasty).
Finally… our new Starlink Dishy arrived. One of the new-version rectangular dishes, 2.5kg lighter and using noticeably less power than the old one. Not only that benefit, but the monthly charge is around half that of USA, so after just a few months the cost of the new Mexican dish has been recovered. Marcus got it rigged-up (see here) and we were lucky to find a nice American family who wanted to buy the old one. Result 😊!
Views around Baja
Beach to Baja 1000
Once we escaped south of San Felipe, we didn’t get very far with our overlanding Baja trip. Just 35km down the road we met up with Peter and Michaela, German overlanders who we had previously met in Anchorage (AK) and Yucca Valley (CA). We parked-up with them for a few days in a classic Baja beach-dunes wild-camp. Then… just when we were going to set off south again… the Baja 1000 loomed.
The Baja 1000 is an endurance race of… surprise, surprise… 1000 miles through Baja California. It’s an arduous event for motorbikes, quads, buggies and trucks (that’s an over-simplification of over 30 sub-categories of vehicle types). Turns out, we’re just a few kilometres from the race route. We’re not really motorsport afficionados, but we enjoy the excitement of a fast race whooshing past us if we just happen to be on its doorstep.
Our (very) long-term followers may recall back in 2017 we had a real palaver rushing around the Bolivian Altiplano trying to catch the Dakar Rally… nightmare!!! Luckily, no such problem with the Baja 1000! Here, the exact route is on the inter-web far in advance of race day. It’s all on public land, so wannabe racers can drive the course and say they’ve ‘done’ the Baja 1000. And wannabe spectators (like us) can hunt out their own advantageous spot in the desert to view the racers when they come speeding past.
Now here comes the really good bit… all the competitors have trackers on their vehicles transmitting to the website. So once they’ve set-off, spectators can track the progress of each racer around the route and see exactly when they’re approaching your chosen spot. What a marvellous development in races-spectatorship technology this is!! The race website (which we can of course follow via the wonder of Starlink from a particularly remote desert spot) means we can put down our cup of tea, get our camera ready and climb to a vantage point on the rocks, just in time to see the dust-clouds of each driver getting closer.
Also amusing to watch on the tracker, is the odd competitor take a wrong turn and head-off in a random direction going further and further off-track, until they realise their error, turn around and get back on-course. Sometimes even simple decisions can be tough under race-pressure.
The 263 entries had up to 36 hours to complete the tough desert course. But the winners crossed the finish line after just 16 hours 37 minutes 45.704 seconds of non-stop gruelling driving. Only 137 entries completed within the allowed time.
Unlike when we saw the Dakar, there were no Brits in this race. But we were keen to fan-follow Aussie Toby Price. Our teeny bit of history with him is that we saw him in the Dakar 2017 racing a motorbike. He was the favourite in his class after having won in 2016. Unfortunately, he had a bit of a bash mid-way and had to be air-lifted out. Now jump forward to 2022: he’s five years older, no doubt a bit wiser and has progressed to racing trucks. Unfortunately, his luck wasn’t ‘in’ this year either. Hope we’re not bad ju-ju, but this time a catastrophic fire destroyed the vehicle mid-race. Thankfully the team escaped unharmed. But it totally destroyed his half-million dollar race truck and his dreams of winning the Baja 1000 😥.
Agua Verde
Race over, we push on overlanding Baja south again. With a few stops on nice beaches en-route, we finally settled on beautiful Agua Verde.
Agua Verde isn’t the most accessible beach in the world. It requires negotiating 40 km of rough dirt track, narrow with steep-sharp drop-offs, winding down a steep escarpment to the shoreline. It’s not the kind of route the average road-going car or RV would choose to enjoy (and non-4x4s who venture down there, sometimes have difficulty getting back up). Even if you have the requisite capable vehicle, it’s a bit of a slog to bother going there if you only have one night to spare. It mostly appeals to 4×4 vehicles who want to stay at least a few days. Consequently it’s quiet and unspoilt. A handful of off-road overlanders park-up on the beach. Also a steady trickle of yachts cruise in and out of the bay, dropping anchor for a few days in the calm blue water.
Facilities are minimal. A few local fishermen live there with their families. There’s a tiny store with a limited stock of essentials. And there’s a lady serving delicious fish/shrimp tacos with cold beer from a little beach-shack. Those tacos on the beach were veeeery good… we did scoff quite a few!
We went there for three or four days with Michaela and Peter, but ended up staying over a week. Kayaking, wandering around the beach, collecting drift wood for fires, and eating tacos (did we mention the tacos? 😉). At the end we were joined by Hungarian overlanders Ferenc and Evelin. We had a lovely evening around the campfire with them. That’s overlanding Baja life.
Lovely though Agua Verde is, it’s not the only nice place in Baja. So we’re off overlanding Baja southbound again. We’re heading towards the bright lights of La Paz in the hope of hunting out some goodies for Christmas.
