It was going to be a long driving day, over 800 km from
Ensenada to Santa Rosalia, so we might have a small chance to catch the
Thursday night ferry from La Paz to the mainland. We packed up camp early, leaving behind the
salt water from the campground taps. The
small dusty Baja towns and huge industrial enclosed vegetable growing
operations gradually gave way to uninhabited desert as the day went on.
The variety of cacti was breathtaking, some up to perhaps 60
feet tall, and living in virtual forests of cacti.
And the bizarre cirios trees, which are found nowhere but
here. They have tiny branches, tiny
leaves, and a fat trunk:
Instead of bridges, there are reinforced sections of road
where water is designed to flow over the road.
I’m sure we would have been pulling water into the air intake had it not
been for our snorkel (never mind that plenty of other cars got through, without
a snorkel in sight)... We were held up for around 2 hours at one of these
flow-overs, with police kind of directing traffic and speaking on loudspeakers and flashing
their lights, and a couple of diggers playing around with dumping dirt in the
middle of the flow.
This foiled our plan to get to Santa Rosalia, since we are
avoiding driving at night. In fact, we
were stopped at a military checkpoint at Guerrero Negro because of another
washout down the road. We’re now in a
hotel. Crazily, while having pizza, the
building next door caught on fire, provoking people running in the street and
pickup trucks full of cops to converge briefly.
And apparently the internet is out in all of Baja due to the storm, so it
will be a few days before we can post this.
See you then!
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