ODO: 312,410
It was time to say goodbye to our favorite beach, so after one more chilly swim, we got back on the road heading for a concert at Buenaventura. Our experience with concerts in Baja is that they start way earlier than advertised, and this one was no different. The band: The Soulfire Project, start time: 3pm, but they actually finished up a little after 3pm. The few songs we saw were pretty good, if we run across them again, we’ll try and be aggressively early so we can see the whole show. After the show we spent a little time making new friends at Buenaventura (one very cute new friend) before heading off to Playa de Coyote, our home for the next handful of days.
Coyote is a beautiful campground beach full of Canadians. We were able to find a spot all the way at the end next to some people with an adorable and giant Rottweiler. We spent the first day knocking out the last of our sewing projects, mostly customizing our straps to strap down various things around and onto our house. The next day was filled with swimming (the water was much warmer here), and trunk tamales. There is a cool service industry that has sprung up in these campgrounds, just about everything comes to you. On any given day, people will drive in offering any of the following and more: tamales, vegetables, fresh seafood, horseback riding, blankets, jewelry, hats, fishing tours, RV tank pumping. It’s wild. KoKo also went for her first walk since The Incident. It went well, but she was very stressed because there was a dog in just about every spot on her 1.5mile journey.
Feeling slightly better, KoKo decided to try a walk two days in a row. Bad news, there was a dog a few camp spots down that came rocketing out of it’s RV at her, to which she burst into tears on the spot. Maybe going for walks in Baja requires an escort, or at least a big stick. On a happier note, our campsite was full of hummingbirds because, from the looks of things, the RV to the right had been feeding them all season. We decided we would stay as long as the weather held, which turned out to be about four days. We spent most of our time swimming and enjoying how lovely it was. KoKo even managed another walk unmolested by dogs!
Once the wind set in, we packed up and headed for the other side of the bay of conception peninsula. It was pretty different over there, mostly rocky beaches. We tried to drive to a spot on the map that looked neat, but instead ended up weirded out and heading back the way we came. We followed a track until we ended up stuck on a private airstrip next to a couple of really nice buildings. We were in the middle of nowhere, so this felt like drug dealer territory. We skedaddled quick as we could. On our way back, we discovered one of our front bumper mounts was cracked all the way through and the bumper was trying to fall off the truck. Trusty ratchet strap to the rescue! This would have to be a good enough fix until we saw our Metal Wizard again in a few days.
We made it all the way back north to Santa Rosalía for a night indoors. In the morning we started off with a super yummy breakfast, and a trip to their famous bakery. All fueled up, we started our trek to Cueva de Ratón, a famous cave paintings site. Compared to other cave painting sites we have been to, this one was probably towards the bottom of the list. This one involved fences, and fees, and you couldn’t get really close like other sites in Baja. To be clear, it was pretty cool, it’s just that there is a lot of cave painting competition on the peninsula. The road up to the cave more than made up for paintings, giving us grand vistas, and deep canyons.
Back down on the valley floor, we headed to secret beach. It was crazy windy, and the tide looked to be coming all the way up the beach, so we did a little exploring to try and find a more protected spot. We ended up on top of a cliff, but cozied into some rocks, with a killer view.
Our second to last stop on this trip back to San Felipe was Cataviña. KoKo was hoping to find a road we had driven a few years ago, full of giant Cardõns and cool rocks. Our first try was not successful, so we took a chips and salsa break at the hotel to regroup. Our second attempt was less successful. Both attempts also ended with some sort of damage. During the first attempt, KoKo got too close to a tree and gave the camera on the roof a good whack and bent it’s stick. On the second attempt, we stopped for a quick break and discovered both our tent latches were broken. Thank goodness for our trusty ratchet straps! We ratcheted the top closed and looked for a spot to sleep for the night.
Our biggest adventure happened later that night around 8pm. KoKo got out of the camper to something weird in the sky. We had no idea what has happening so obviously thought aliens or war, and started taking lots of photo and video. It turns out SpaceX launches things from California, and we lucked into catching a launch. This helped us somewhat forget about our broken gear for the evening, so everyone got some good sleep.
