Wed 30 Jan 2008
Day 137
Catavina, Baja, Mexico
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We went for breakfast at the hotel where Rob worked and filled up. The place was pretty quiet, which probably makes it a good place to work, or rather to sit and read and get paid. They even had a ‘mall’ ie a room with stuff to buy. Rob was a great host and really showed us a nice time in La Mision, I can see why he came for 2 weeks and stayed for 3 years. I’m not sure I would find it completely authentic or comfortable to stay in such a ex-pat community but it would be tempting. I want to get a taste of the real Mexico though, dirty toilets and all. We gave Rob and Nathan a hug and once again it was just me and Sheena. We had to get her a tourist card in Ensanada which was an hour down the toll road but they decided that since she didn’t get one at the border she would be fined $5 for the day. We tried lying and saying we just drove down but they wouldn’t budge. We didn’t tell them we’d been in the country for 4 days and it should be a $20 fine… The stupid thing was that we couldn’t pay at the bank which was 3 meters from the office but had to drive into town to pay it before returning to get the card. Stupid bureaucracy isn’t limited to Mexico and you can’t argue with such stupidity…
We followed the road south for a few hours along the coast, stopping for some nice fish tacos in a converted bus when we got hungry but we had gotten up too late to make our goal of Guerro Negro that night. We would have to stop and there wasn’t a Couchsurfing host for a hundred miles to throw ourselves on. It was hot and dusty and we had left the deserts near La Mision blooming emerald green in the late winter rains far behind. Now we were back to classic Texas landscapes with huge deformed boulders punctuating the fields of cactus and hardy desert plants. We stopped for photos and in a bout of foolish bravado plucked 2 cactus in a stupid attempt to look like mickey mouse, getting a few bloody fingers for my interference.
Just before the sun went down we made it to a small town called Catavina and it seemed like a good idea to stop for the night. The first hotel was very basic and was $350 for a night, the next place was $1000 for the night so we went back to the first one, but when we checked the rooms they had all been recently painted and I wasn’t going to spend money to get an overnight headache and cancer in 20 years. Why they chose to paint them all at once is beyond me… I think I was saying something about painting a smell instead of talking about the smelly paint but they understood me enough to direct us to another place 1km away where you could camp. Sheena didn’t understand the whole bed in the van idea but I soon showed her the way it fitted together.
It was far too early to go to sleep though so we went back into the town to sit in the expensive hotel to drink a few beers and wait impatiently for our free nachos! Back at the campground we admired the lack of light pollution out in the desert and lay in the back watching movies on the laptop. For some reason I put my boogie board back on the roof…
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la mision breakfast/sheena FMT/bannk/coast/tolls/hot/cacti/boulders/catavina/smelly room/expensive/camping /beers in hotel/setting up the van/watching redition
