The Real Baja, Part 1

Specifically, the Los Cabos Area…

"It is impossible to account for the charm of this country or its fascination, but those who are familiar with the land of Baja California are either afraid of it or they love it, and if they love it, they are brought back by an irresistible fascination time and time again.”

-Earl Stanley Gardner, 1969

I first went to the Los Cabos (southern) area of Baja California in 1988, when I got my first four-wheel-drive (Toyota Tacoma) truck. San José Del Cabo was a sleepy, elegant small town, and I fell in love with the area and its people.

Baja is many things to many people, much of it depending upon when they first arrived there. For example, perhaps the biggest change came in 1973 when the dirt road was paved from Santa Rosalía down to Los Cabos — a distance of 475 miles. Mama Espinoza, famous for her lobster tacos in Santa Rosalía said: “Bad roads, good people; good roads, bad people.“

I can only imagine how pristine and wild it was before 1973.

But even though I arrived in Los Cabos 15 years later, it seemed wide-open and beautiful and exotic and difficult and a bit dangerous.

Well, that was 37 (ulp!) years ago, and with all the changes in that intervening time, I’ve found that I indeed cannot go home again. The memory of what it was like back then is so bittersweet compared to what it’s like now — with the huge influx of people and hotels and tourists, that I’m looking elsewhere in the world for adventure these days.

I’m going to do a bunch of posts on the Los Cabos area, starting with this one. El Correcaminos was a bi-lingual publication I put together with my good friend Isidro (Chilón) Amora in 1999 that we intended to publish on a regular basis, but found that it took too much time, and so what you see here was the first and only copy.

I apologize for the poor quality of these prints, which were iPhone (14) shots of the newsprint pages, but I think you can get the essence.

Sometime in the future, I plan on doing a book called Deep in the Heart of Baja.

Above: the fascinating story of how California got its name and also, how it was considered to be an island for many years. Watercolor of Dutch cartographers’ 17th century map by Soraya.

With Chilón, I visited a number of remote ranchos, such as this one, Rancho Vinatería. The ranchos of Baja have changed very little over the last few hundred years.

Top: my “Baja Bug,” what was called a “pre-runner,” a VW bug especially modified to scout out the course for the Baja 1,000, an off-road race that goes from Ensenada to La Paz. The bug had fiberglass fenders and hood, a roll bar inside the cab, shocks that came up and tied into the roll bar, and a 15 gallon gas tank behind the rear seat. On the Rocket Box on the roof, I had a solar panel, and there were two batteries. It met a grim fate in the Great Flood of September 2001, when it ended up underwater.

Lower photo is a Schwimmvagen, a World War II VW amphibian with a rear-mounted propellor. (Nothing to do with Baja, I just found it in a book on the history of Volkswagens.)

Rodolpho “Pichi” and his pickup, “Trueno,“ with his mom, Professora Carmen Romero of San José del Cabo

Rafael “Fino” Green Romero, a 5th generation Josefino (native of San José del Cabo) and his wife Cleo at their Killer Hook surf shop. I hung out with Fino, who was a surfer, diver, hunter, and explorer, and we went on a number of overnight surfing/camping trips.

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The Pericúes were the Indians of the southern part of Baja.

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