A Day in the Reaper

Short Version:We drive a long way.

Long Version:
Early start on the long drive was thwarted initially by sleeping through the alarm, then delayed further by Senor Moctezuma*. We eventually got underway around 0700, and were in San Ignacio for delicious eggy breakfast by 0930, having seen our second roadrunner just before the incredibly stinky fishing town of Santa Rosario. On our way south, Santa Rosario had appalled us with the miasma emanating from the dump on the northern edge of town, but this time it was the fishing industry which kicked us in the noses. Indeed, the lack of smell round the dump was cause for comment as we passed by, mainly around how glad we were we'd managed to get away as early as we did, before the heat caused the filth to start wafting particles towards travellers' nostrils.

As it turned out, it never did get hot - quite the opposite! After photos with the whale skeleton at San Ignacio and a bird strike which came close to claiming our windshield, we carved further inland, and the temperature dropped, and dropped some more, and by the time we reached the west coast at Guerrero Negro it was 16 degrees, down from the 42 we'd been basking in at Playa Buenaventuras. The windows, which had been down while moving since we left San Diego, were clamped tight, and the soldiers at the highland checkpoint had their khaki polar-fleece scarves on. They still had their senses of humor, though, as evidenced by the ones who gave us the score update of the elimination match between Mexico and Argentina (0-0 after 5 minutes), then brandished their machine guns and asked who we were supporting. We said "Mexico" quite quickly, which made them so pleased that they stopped searching the Reaper and waved us on through with big smiles and some laughing.

The rest of the day revolved around kilometres of Mexican desert driving, with trucks at close quarters on the open road interspersed with dead dogs in and around the towns**. We saw some beautiful scenery, including various desertscapes and some comparatively fertile valleys, which looked a lot like Central Otago.

Eventually we were waved though our last military checkpoint of the day after a perfunctory search, and it was onwards and into Ensenada, where we found but didn't quite manage to stay at the Colon Motel for our last night in Mexico.



* = Aztec ruler at the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Lent a variant of his name to "Montezuma's Revenge"; the colloquial term for any episodes of travelers' diarrhea or other sicknesses contracted by tourists visiting Mexico.

** = Still not entirely sure whether that's because they're the only critters around, or because there are so many dogs around that they eat everything else that ends up dead on the roads. Either way, we saw heaps of them, including one that had been burned after it died. We also saw some evidence of why there are so many dogs around the place, with every male dog fully-equipped with massive testicle sets, and one pair going at it in a service station forecourt. Admittedly, the receiving puppy was more interested in eating something from the ground and kept wandering off looking for more snacks, but the protagonist was undeterred.