Marta and Chester's Maleficent Adventures

Baja 2024 Part 4 – San Evaristo to Los Barilles

From San Evaristo we have an easy 120k drive south to the capital La Paz. Can’t be too challenging since fish trucks make the trip 3x per week to bring ice and take fish to market.
We’ve seen a massive facility on the satellite map. When we get there – it’s a huge shrimp farm, shut down for the year. Security guard has no answer why.
We stopped on a lonely beach and met four women struggling to put up their huge tent in strong winds. This lady owned the plot they were camping on – 10x50m and it wasn’t cheap.
La Paz is beautiful – could be any American city on the west coast, just with no homeless people.

Seeing La Paz makes us realize that the real economy that keeps the lights on in the Baja is tourism. Lots of room for small business too.

My credit card company nailed me with 20% currency conversion fee, so I use a Wise card for travel and foreign currency purchases. Highly recommended.

Almost feels like science fiction being able to smoothly convert Polish Zloty to Mexican Pesos on your phone, and immediately pull cash out of an ATM

We stay on a random beach recommended by IOverlander. Loud music moves us on at midnight, but we do see a beautiful fox getting into the garbage.

The drama on our Baja trip has been so much lower than India. Chickens/dogs/teenagers make too much noise at 1am? Just slide into the front seat and drive away.

The next morning we wake up to this. Cars queueing up to pay money for a beach. The line went for miles…
On the free beach Marta does a survey – most cars are from Quebec. You’ll be surprised to learn this rig is from Germany. Germans do seem to get serious about things.
As we are settling in to sleep, our neighbours shout about a rocket. We see the last 10 seconds of a Falcon 9 launch out of California. An object 200km away travelling at 25000kph is really fast.
One of the bigger cactus species is flowering and starting to fruit.

The natives in Baja had one good time per year – when the pitaya dulce fruits were in season. Similar to dragon fruit. Everyone would gorge on the fruit for two months – and then it gets gross. Defecating was done in specific places, and the dried poop would be washed to recover the undigested seeds. Which were then smashed up and eaten – the second pitaya harvest. Missionaries were not impressed.

We stop at an old silver/gold mining town called El Triunfo. (The Triumph) This city was massive in its day – can you imagine the expense of bringing cast iron park benches from Europe 130 years ago?
On the opposite end of the spectrum from the 8X8 Mann overlanding rigs, these Germans are pedaling from Alaska to Patagonia

Surprisingly they tell us that they feel safer on Mexican roads than in the USA. Which seems impossible but we do see much less aggressive driving in Mexico than USA/Canada.

We did a little mine tour – was very surprised to see Chinese characters on the rail carts. How did this happen?

The most interesting part of the mine museums was learning about silver – how China tax policy caused a nearly infinite demand for silver that vacuumed up all the supply around the world for 300 years. And America dealing with deflation in 1890 caused a collapse in the silver market that doomed many mines.

It’s spooky how we make fiat currency now, but the old system had its problems too!

El Triunfo has a museum for cowboys – vaqueros. After hiking in the desert, I understand that riding a horse through the shrubbery would absolutely require very heavy leather clothing

After looking at Cowboy clothing, I’ve resolved to rethink how I dress for scrambling here. I’m fighting through cactuses like I’m strolling up Johnson Canyon. Time to go shopping for armor and weapons.

Los Barilles. Where every third car is a side by side full of gringos.

A Mexican schooled us that Canadians are not gringos – Americans are gringos. We have to wait until January 24th when we become the 51st state. Funny guy.

New Years was spent north of Los Barilles. Crashed a private catered party. The host was a Pakistani – Canadian – American venture capitalist. They were a bit shocked when they learned we weren’t homeowners in their community, we were homeless van scum squatting on the beach.

Chester Fitchett
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