by Colleen Houlihan
Hello Travelers! We have been down to Baja several times, and it gets easier each year as the road is continually improved. From Berkeley to Los Barriles it is 1510 miles; we go there in the winter for windsurfing. This little town is about 65 miles south of La Paz and still quite sleepy. There are a few hotels and places to rent; people come for fishing and the Vela Windsurfing center is located here.
Anyway, traveling into Baja is interesting for the desert landscape, the delicious local food, and the experience of being in Mexico where one should definitely go with the flow. Bring a good Baja California Map; AAA has good ones.
A few tips: always bring a good flashlight because there are occasional blackouts and/or the electricity is shut off from 11:00pm 'til 7:00am. We discovered this in Cataviña when we awoke at 4:00am wishing to get on the road fortified by tea and cereal. Well, no electricity meant we could barely see and our hotpot was useless! Luckily we had the flashlight and a candle.
Always bring toilet paper in your car and purse or backpack. Many Pemex stations have fairly nice bathrooms, but not always paper. Do not throw in toilet; put in the trash can; their septic systems can't handle a lot of paper waste.
Get a simple language/phrasebook and learn some basic food requests so you can eat in small towns. At Cataviña the Hotel Pinta was booked solid for a tour group, and the small cantina across the road had menus only in Spanish . We could cope but the four older guys touring on motorcycles from Colorado at the next table had a hard time; and do not expect hamburgers. Fish is usually fresh, local and excellent.
If you drive down bring some bottles of water from the US; once we get beyond Cataviña, the water is safer to drink. In Los Barriles we have never had a problem. The town was a water stop for sailing ships in the old days, as there are natural springs underground (hence, the name which means "The barrels"). There is now a filtering plant for city water, but occasionally the water is shut off for plant maintenance, so it helps to have a few plastic bottles of water to make coffee.
Some Pemex stations are not open in the early morning, so if you get into town in the evening and the station is open, better fill up. Even with the Y2K fears, we found gas at every station along the entire Baja highway, and trucks were rolling right along!
There were the usual military checkpoints, where our van was cursorily examined. We are middle-aged folks with a van full of windsurfing equipment, so not very likely to be smugglers. At nearly every stop, however, the soldiers wanted to buy our boom-box!
Road report: The toll road from Tijuana to Ensenada is excellent. First rough road was south of El Rosario all the way to Cataviña. South of Cataviña there were potholes. The road improved until Punta Prieta where it got rough again and more potholes. Arriving near Guerrero Negro the road was good. Watch out at Vizcano as the topes (speed bumps) are not marked well. The road continued good; at San Ignacio again the topes were not marked. At Mulege, we always get tacos and bean soup at Ramon's in town. The road was very good all the rest of the way to Los Barriles.
Generally we try not to drive when it's dark in Baja. That means before 6:00am in winter and after 5:00pm. This time we did and had no trouble. One must go slower, especially where the road is curvy. There seems to be more fencing along the road to keep cows off the road, though we did see a couple and also a herd of goats on the side. I would not drive after dark if you are not certain of where you are going. If you are trying to find a ranch or campsite off the main highway, the roads will likely be dirt and if you get off on the wrong one, you'll be lost in the desert which is very dark at night, and it will be hard to tell the road from the rest of the sand!
Baja California is a delightful place and every time I go down that highway I want to learn more about the geology of the landscape, especially where those huge boulders came from around Cataviña! Enjoy your trip.