Up the Baja
Thursday, July 5th, 2007It was tough to leave Ajijic – we had a great apartment, kids in a good school, a lot of free time and met some nice people to hang out with. But our next stop was the Baja peninsula and Matthias and I were both looking forward to it very much. We had heard great things from a lot of different travelers and couldn’t wait to get there. What a huge disappointment we had awaiting us.
First we had a long drive to Mazatlan. Mazatlan has the reputation of being another Mexican resort town. It is true that there is a section of Mazatlan full of tourists and big resorts, but the old part of town is really quite nice and the view from the waterfront is spectacular. The hardest part of being in Mazatlan was the heat and humidity. The temperature was in the low 90’s, and the “feels like” temperature was just under 100, but after being in the cool mountains with a great climate, it took me a couple of days to adjust. We signed up for the car ferry from Mazatlan to La Paz (which is on the southern end of the Baja, about 1500 km from Tijuana). The ride was 19 hours, and we spent the night in a cabin with 4 beds. The ferry was brutally expensive (around $400) but I was kind of excited when we first boarded. There was a lot to explore, and it kind of had a Love Boat feeling with the narrow hallways, dining area, lounge and cabin areas. After just a bit of exploring we realized that this boat had seen better days (big on the Boat, low on Love) and there wasn’t really anything to do except start out into the Sea of Cortez. Never the less, we did have a good time and between nap time, dinner, breakfast and movie hour, we found enough stuff to do to keep ourselves busy.
