The rundown on our Mexico transit, part one

[Above: Rolf and car-mate Justin Mounts taking a break from the road near Mulelge, Mexico.]

As my lack of recent blog entries will attest, the last couple weeks of traveling through Mexico has not left me with much time to wax lyrical. This is one of the things I am learning about vehicle-based expeditions with tight itineraries: There is not much time away from the vehicles, either for writing or experiencing cultures. I am currently coming to terms with the fact that I am going to have to find the “adventure” on this expedition in the transit itself, rather than the places we stop, since we rarely stop anywhere for long. To add to the difficulty, our expedition left two days late, and we’ve had to steam our way through Mexico to stay on course for a pre-planned Panama-to-Ecuador ferry date.

I’ll probably roll all of this into some future article about the logistical difficulties of major international vehicle expeditions – but for now, here’s a taste of where I’ve been and what I’ve seen so far. Pardon the abbreviated and decidedly non-literary format.

[Above: A rainy morning wakeup on the first day of the expedition.]

Los Angeles, California to Ensenada, Mexico Due to an ill-fated (and, to my mind, horribly naïve) effort to get impromptu expedition publicity by sitting in the audience of a Jay Leno Tonight Show taping, the expedition leaves two and a half days late. We pick up my friend Mitch Mulanix (our first “Take Me With You!” guest) in San Diego, and negotiate the Tijuana border at around midnight. After the standard no-man’s-land routine of vehicle carnet forms and drug-sniffing dogs, we head off into Mexico, following the well-lighted triple-fence that separates the border west from Tijuana. We veer south and cruise the wee hours down to the beaches south of Ensenada, where we sleep in our safari tents in a steady rainstorm. Ensenada to Guerrero Negro We wake up wet from the rain, but happy to be in Mexico and on the road. Today is our chance to make up some mileage on our late start, so we head for Guerrero Negro, far to our south on the Pacific coast of the Baja peninsula, past gigantic organ cacti, rusting roadside trucks, and small white-cross shrines to people that have died on this highway. We’re still getting used to the routines of convoy driving, as it can be challenging to make driving decisions that affect not just your vehicle, but the three other vehicles around you. Oddly enough on this night, the biggest road danger is not bandits or bad roads, but the free-range cattle that tend to wander onto the warmth of the blacktop at night. If would be embarrassing, after all, to wreck one’s vehicle and ruin the expedition by accidentally plowing into a side of beef.

[Above: Rolf on the beach at Mulege, where he appears to have learned to shoot fire from his head.]

Guerrero Negro to Mulege I am quickly learning that a vehicle-dependent expedition is as much or more about the vehicles as it is about the places you drive through – so pardon me if these entries are heavy on driving and light on culture. Simply stated, our Land Rovers separate us from the local culture. We’re also in the process of learning hard lessons about the intricacies of convoy driving. Today, for example, two vehicles stopped to help a Mexican man who’d run out of gas, and radioed that they would meet the other vehicles in the town of San Ignacio. I was in the advance group, so we went to San Ignacio to have lunch and wait for the other vehicles. Unfortunately, the other vehicles didn’t know where San Ignacio was (it’s a sleepy little colonial town set in a palm-studded valley away from the road), and they blew right past us. We ended up spending the afternoon trying to find each other in the barrens of central Baja, and we unnecessarily rolled into Mulege late at night. Driving lessons learned? (A) Don’t stop or split a four-vehicle convoy on a busy highway to help a motorist who isn’t explicitly injured or in danger; and (B) Know your route and read your guidebook each morning, so that you know where places are, and pay attention to road signs. Cultural lessons learned today? None. After a day of driving around Baja looking for each other, we rallied on the Sea of Cortez coast and camped for the night on a beach north of Mulege, where we drank beers and smoked cigars around a campfire. Mulege to Loreto For the first time on the expedition, we have an easy driving day. The stretch of Mexican highway takes us along a coastal route, giving us soaring views of the Sea of Cortez, as well as the cactus-clogged desert-mountains to our west. At one point, the film crew turns the convoy around to film a road-kill cow carcass, as well as the team members interacting in a stand of organ cactuses. It’s a weird, post-modern moment, with the film crew shooting the road-kill, the cacti, and the team -- and the team making awkward conversation and photographing the film crew filming the road-kill. It makes you realize how non-spontaneous everything is on travel-oriented television shows, and – since I’m not one for artificial moments – I suspect I am not going to appear much in this documentary film. Fortunately, we arrive at our destination during daylight (a first), and have a full evening to wander the streets of Loreto. It’s a warm, quiet, and friendly coastal town – the kind of place I could see myself stopping at to experience for a few months (and, from the looks of it, many gringos are already doing this here). It’s also our first night sleeping in a hotel since we left the United States, and the bed and shower are blissfully welcome.

[Above: A cactus sunset off the coast of La Paz, on the eastern coast of the Baja peninsula.]

Loreto to La Paz Back to the long haul: After seeing Mitch off (he flew back to San Diego this morning), we hit the road to make up ground to La Paz, where we will catch a ferry to the Mexican mainland. Because we spent some time driving in mud near Mulege – and since we can’t pass the agriculture inspection on the ferry with muddy vehicles – we stop in Ciudad Insurgentes to clean the convoy up. It’s a nice little moment in the afternoon, scrubbing down the Land Rovers as little Mexican boys at the carwash try to make simple conversation and show us their puppy dogs. As we go south from Ciudad Insurgentes, Justin (my car-mate) and I discuss the logistics of our itinerary. In short, it looks like we’re going to have to drive like mad to make our Ecuador ferry in time (December 5th), and there’s no way our current itinerary will allow for this. We elect to drop Belize from the route, and schedule more long driving days. Traveling fast is not something I enjoy doing, but it’s a necessary evil if DATW is going to make it around the globe in nine months. I’m still coming to terms with this breakneck aspect of the expedition, after years of languorous vagabonding. Once again, we arrive at our destination after dark, and everyone piles into a La Paz Internet café to get caught up on emails. Near midnight, we drive on to Tecolote Beach, near the ferry terminal, to pop the safari tents and get some sleep. A day at the La Paz ferry terminal On a day that promises a lot of “hurry up and wait” moments as we go through the paperwork process to ship our vehicles to the Mexican mainland, we get an unexpected shock: Since the Land Rovers are all registered in Nick’s name, we need a notarized document authorizing other people to drive them. Unfortunately, Nick forgot to do this, and no notary offices are open on Sunday. In a last-ditch effort to make the ferry, we take out a laptop, a printer, and a rubber stamp and try to forge the documents ourselves in the parking lot of the ferry terminal. It’s a rather hilarious moment -- and document-forgery in bureaucracy-heavy countries promises to be a big strength of our computer-savvy expedition team. Sadly, our forging skills aren’t fast enough, and the ferry leaves before we can board. Stuck on the wrong side of the Sea of Cortez, our expedition falls three days behind on our race for the Ecuador transit in December.

Help support our cause: Drive Around the World aims to raise money for Parkinson’s Disease research by taking four certified pre-owned Land Rover Discoverys around the globe following lines of longitude. Readers are encouraged to pledge small amounts of money per expedition-mile via a pledge form that can be found on our Parkinson’s page by clicking here. Everyone making a pledge of $10 or more to raise money for the Parkinson’s Institute will be put in a raffle to win an expedition-style Land Rover.