We topped off the gas tank of my truck and filled two five gallon cans with gas. I’m not fond of the town of Tijuana and wish that I could pass through it at 20% of the speed of light. (That is the speed at which a red stoplight will be blue-shifted until it is green). We did the next best thing and drove across the border through town and onto the toll road at the speed limit without stopping. On mainland Mexico, they require tourist cards and make you fill out some forms that promise you will take your car back out with you when you leave. (Otherwise, a large auto import tariff is required). But in Baja they don’t keep track of cars and a tourist card is not necessary if you stay for less than 72 hours and don’t drive south of Encenada. We were going too far south and staying more than 72 hours but I have noticed that nobody asks for tourist cards anywhere except the border between the Mexican states of northern and southern Baja. We were not going that far south and could probably get away without a tourist card.
Tourist cards used to be free, but they have started charging around $25.00 US for one. I don’t mind paying for a card, but there is a regulatory requirement that you are not allowed to pay the fee to an immigration official! You must get the card stamped by an immigration official, and THEN you must take it to a bank to pay for it. I assume the reason for these two stops is to prevent graft on the part of the officials. But this would require TWO STOPS in Tijuana! Something I absolutely hate to do! You can purchase the tourist cards in the USA before hand, but we had planned this trip on short notice and did not have time to wait for these to arrive in the mail. Even if you have pre-paid cards you still have to get them stamped by an immigration official and this requires stopping in Tijuana. You can get them stamped at the immigration office in Encenada, but it is reported to keep irregular hours. It was unlikely to be open on Christmas Day when we drove through town. In Mexico you get stopped all the time by army roadblocks looking for drugs (your USA tax dollars at work) but those guys never ask for a tourist card. We figured we could sneak in and out without getting caught.
So we drove south through Baja stopping only to top off our gas tank and eat lunch. We had lunch at Mama Espanosa’s restaurant in El Rosario. This restaurant feeds lots of tourists on their way in and out of Baja, and their prices are high even by USA standards. We had lobster burrito plates for lunch, which were very good, but paid around $15.00 US each.
El Rosario is the town with the LAST GAS STATION for some insanely long distance. The road maps all show a station at Catavena and at the turnoff to Bahia de los Angeles, but these have been abandoned burned out hulks of building as long as I have been going to Baja. We were worried about our gas situation. With no more gas stations we did not have enough fuel to get to San Francisquito and back to El Rosario, even with a full tank and 10 gallons in cans. The gas stations in Mexico are all “nationalized” and only official government “Pemex” brand stations may sell it. Teenage boys often illegally sell it out of 5 gallon cans off the back of a truck in Catavena. There is a mechanic at Bahia de los Angeles who sells gas out of a big above ground storage tank. I was reasonably sure we could find someplace to get gas on the way in or on the way out. But the Christmas holidays made getting it on the way in less likely. We drove on anyway, hoping for the best.
Every trip into Baja that I have taken, I have stopped at “The Shrine of the Virgin” in the beautiful bolder fields near Catevena. This trip we had another reason to stop, as we wanted to get our little statues of The Virgin blessed. John held his up under the painting of The Virgin on the rock. I had mine buried in a dry-bag and could not find them. But it turns out I did bring the right drybag out to the shrine so John assures me they got close enough to be blessed, even inside a waterproof bag. The shrine has recently been re-painted and I feel that the new painting of The Virgin is not as nice as the previous job. I took some pictures so I could compare with older pictures I took at the same place.
We considered stopping and staying the night at the Saint Ynes Rachero for dinner and a bunk bed, where I have stayed several times before. But the sun goes down early in the winter and we felt like we had hardly done any driving since lunch. Everyone universally says that driving in Baja after dark is miserable and scary but we decided to find out for ourselves. We had a very easy time of it, perhaps because the big truck traffic may have been less on Christmas Day then most other nights. So we kept going to the turn-off to Bahia de los Angeles. There we discovered that the road had been re-surfaced since my last trip out here, and it was possible to go 65 miles an hour! Until you came upon the occasional mine fields of potholes. But even with these we made it to Bahia de los Angeles before dinner time! Just outside of town we found gasoline for sale, dispensed by a real gas pump with a digital meter and everything! The gas pump was not a “Pemex” brand and was probably illegal. When we figured the price out later, it turned out to be over $3 a gallon, a dollar higher than the high price at the Pemex stations, which was a dollar higher than the cheep gas in the San Diego area.
We had dinner at Guillermo’s (fish tacos!) and considered staying in one of his hotel rooms. But we were still awake so we decided to drive a few more kilometers to Camp Geko, where I stayed last time I was here. The dirt road to Camp Geko is the same road that continues on to San Francisquito, so when we got to the turn-off to the camp we just kept going. Finally after 9:00 at night and sixteen kilometers south of Bahia de los Angeles, we pulled off into a flat section of desert and camped on the side of the road. Nobody else came down the road in the night to bother us in our sleep.