Hoorah, hoorah, hoorah, nous sommes a la plage!!!

I had a highly romantic vision of the Baja California with azure sea, white sand and all the things the brochure promised.  Leaving Mexicali in throbbing heat to cross grubby salt flats, featureless but for a few skeletal remains of long-abandoned projects was not in the script.  It's been a seven day stretch, starting down the east coast where things steadily improved and two nights camping on the beach, swimming in the soft warm waters of the Sea of Cortes brought the dream a little closer.  It was fun to watch pairs of pelicans fishing industriously; floating on my back watching frigate birds glide elegantly above was a perfect antidote to sweating away the miles on the bike.  Temperatures have often been in the upper forties centigrade even in the morning.  Don't mention the mosquitoes.

Salt flats south of Mexicali

Entry to the southern region.

Getting greener

Cactus forests on all sides as we go further south.

White sands at last.

Camping on the beach.

They're far faster and more agile than their rather gawky shape suggests.

The road from San Felipe across the peninsula to Guerro Negro on the Pacific coast is yet to be completed and included an 'exciting' section of rough dirt on our way to the middle of nowhere.  The camp site was posted as Rancho Laguna Chapala and we arrived in high hopes, unfortunately a few millennia too late for the lagoon.  Undoubtedly the grottiest place we've camped and the total absence of any competition was evident in every sphere.  Guerro Negro itself is a centre for whale watching in the season but other times a desolate place, its only saving graces a good coffee shop and a hotel bed for the night!

Travelling off the beaten track is what I love and the occasional physical discomforts are entirely compensated by everything I see and, above all, the people I meet.  In the absence of any public sites, Victor, the General Manager of a huge tomato and cucumber growing project, generously allowed us to camp on his land.  His wife offered us the facilities of their beautiful straw-built house, made us cold drinks while we waited and the little boy showed us around, confident and sociable, aged four.  It seemed a hostile environment for such water-hungry plants but underground resources are the key and the climate allows for two crops a year.  Victor employs three hundred workers and explained that he has twenty big supermarket customers; between them they demand fifty different types of packaging....

Camping at Victor's - the tent the only thing without a fly....

Each day of the trip is only possible because of my bike yet it hardly gets a mention!  Last rest day I cleaned it, changed the oil in the Rohloff Hubgear, replaced the back brake blocks and adjusted the chain and that is the first serious maintenance since I started over five thousand miles ago.  Apart from pumping the tyres, cleaning the chain and the occasional sluice down it has required no attention whatsoever and runs ever more smoothly.  Marvellous.

On the road in the early morning.

Anxieties about riding in Mexico have been allayed so far and drivers have been consistently considerate. The next few days take us down to La Paz on the east coast of the peninsula and from there we take the ferry to Mazatlan and, hard to believe, begin the final three weeks of the tour.  

It's strange to think that autumn is upon you and difficult to imagine mellow fruitfulness!  

So long

Viv x