Traveling solo generally means either talking to strangers, or not talking at all. Both can be fun, especially if you can hold — and overhear — conversations in multiple languages.
What follows are some vignettes from the peninsula: scenes, conversations. Some touching, some irritating, plus a few funny ones thrown in for good measure.
I’m tucked into my window seat on a Southwest flight from Denver to Los Cabos. An elderly lady sits in the aisle seat. She’s pale but plump, dressed in pastels from head to toe. She looked like meat kept in ice water too long. We say hello, I go back to my book. As boarding finishes, no one takes the center seat.
“This is nice,” she says. I agree, extending my left leg into the spacious gap under the middle seat. “I hate it when smelly people sit next to me,” she says. Like people with too much perfume? “Oh no, I mean like Indians. They always smell like, oh I don’t know, curry or something.” Yikes. I don’t answer and return to my book.
We manage to avoid conversation until the last 20 minutes of the flight, when she starts to tell me about her upcoming week. She’s 73, a native of Wisconsin, and about to turn 74 on the trip, which will be at an all-inclusive resort in Cabo San Lucas.
I ask her if she likes all-inclusives, guessing the answer but not the reason. “Oh yes, it’s because I never have to tip! Those Mexicans, they’re always trying to cheat us.” Have you been to Mexico before? “Lots of times. One thing I love at the resort is to ask for all sorts of weird cocktails, take one sip, then send them away! It’s so fun, and nobody cares. It’s all free!”
She asked me why I was in Baja. I told her I’d be driving around, looking for really good food, and to talk with the people who make it. “I never used to eat anything but hamburgers here in Cabo,” she said. “And they were horrible. So I finally started eating enchiladas and the other dirty Mexican food.” Did you say dirty? “It’s all so dirty, you know: where they cook, nothing is clean here.”
Hoo boy. I wished her well as we all stood up to leave, feeling sorry for her bartender.
Smoke. Just a wisp, rising into the crystal blue sky from around a curve on Transpeninsular Highway No. 19, the road from the airport to La Paz, about 2 1/2 hours away. I round the corner and see a small Japanese-made box truck, overturned. Crumpled into the side of the sandy mountains that hem in this part of the highway.
As I slowed, I saw that the truck had burst into flame, and the smoke was what was left of the inferno. Brightly colored children’s toys, most still in boxes and plastic, scattered around the wreck like flowers after a desert rain.
The windshield had been smashed through. From the inside.
Burnt out flares. Two piñatas. A skid mark on the asphalt. One sneaker.
Soon to be another of the hundreds of homemade shrines to the dead on this highway.
I know enough that the sight of a South Dakota license plate in Baja doesn’t mean the car is actually from SoDak. That’s just a state with no income tax which makes it incredibly easy to maintain residency, so it has become most nomads’ preferred “home.”
But throughout Los Cabos, La Paz and Loreto, especially Loreto, Gringo plates were almost as common as those from Baja Sur: California yes, but many from Oregon, Nevada, Arizona and Washington, and a great many from Beautiful British Columbia!
Texas, Idaho, even a Chevy Silverado from Minnesota. I scribbled, “Hi dere from Saint Paul!” on a sheet from my reporter’s notebook and slipped it under the windshield wiper.
But I really wanted to find the owner of the Toyota corolla from New Hampshire, 3,500 miles away. Now that would be a road trip tale to tell if there ever was one.
Morning coffee at DoceCuarenta in La Paz, a great spot for great coffee, good pastries (try the picadillo empanadas), and fascinating overhead conversations. Coffee shops are gold for this anywhere.
Sipping a latte and wrestling with the New York Times Spelling Bee after crushing Wordle in two tries (insert nerd emoji here), I hear some English. An elderly gent, fit and well dressed without being fancy, strikes up a conversation with an equally elderly, although less trim and less well dressed couple at the next table. They are all drinking drip coffee. Black.
Snowbirds, they chat about wintering in Mexico, the ups and downs, places to stay. The gent lives in La Paz half the year, owns a house and everything. The couple had just arrived in the city, and were prospecting; they’d spent winters on Bahia Kino in Sonora before, but no longer liked the drive.
Calm, chatty, elderly conversation. Turned out the gent was from Beautiful British Columbia! (I saw that on so many plates I started singing it in my head), the couple from Iowa. ( I thought I’d heard that Midwest sing-song!) They spoke only rudimentary Spanish, but were taking classes.
The gent left before I did, but when I walked out, there he was, chatting up in fluent Spanish an old Mexican man in a wheelchair who’d lost his legs below the knees. They were talking about Club Atletico, the local soccer team.
This was the way to winter in Mexico, I thought: with grace, and a light footprint.
Chef Hector Palacios sits down with me at his restaurant Casamarte, a venerable location on the Malecon in La Paz where, roughly ten years before, I first ate the Peruvian dish anticuchos de corazon when the place was called Carlos and Charlies. Hector is bald, with intense eyes and the top-heavy build of a chef who lifts sheet pans and pots all day.
He speaks no English, so my synapses are roiling as I work to keep up with him. My Spanish is good, but I am not yet truly bilingual, and long, deep conversations are still work for me. But Hector is patient and we talk many things about Baja cuisine.
One in particular I had to know about was a dish he’d brought out earlier: Wide, perfectly made pappardelle pasta sauced with not tomato sauce, but a smooth, mild chile colorado salsa that was redder than the finest Italian tomatoes, and, underneath, a hidden bed of soft, local goat cheese. When you mixed the two it created this rich, unforgettable sauce that lingers with me even now.
“It’s an old ranch dish,” Hector said. “There were many Italians who came here long ago.” I’d later see more evidence of this up in Loreto, which caused me to dive more into the MexItalian influence in the region.
This pasta dish will appear in my book, with full credit to Hector Palacios.
I’m sitting on a bench outside the cathedral Nuestra Señora de La Paz, lit up beautifully for the cool evening. I’d just gorged myself at a place called Bismarkcito — no one could tell me if there’s any connection with Bismarck, North Dakota, but if there were one it would be amazing. I’d demolished a plate of raw clams and a curious soup called caguamanta, a New York-style clam chowder sort of thing that used to be made with sea turtles, now illegal, and made now with skates and rays or other sorts of sea life.
A young Mexican couple have just come from their date. He’s dressed nattily in a guayabera shirt and pressed chinos and shiny shoes. She is a vision in a sundress, her black hair aglow under the cathedral’s lights.
I can’t hear what they’re chattering about, but I picked up enough to know that they’d just come from dinner. He suddenly motions her inside the cathedral. Catholics, I think. Way to end a perfect date by staring at a bleeding, crucified Jesus. As usual, I was dumb and wrong, because ten minutes later they emerged, smiling again, hand in hand.
Under the lights, he dropped to one knee. She gasped loud enough for me to hear it, and he presented her a ring. It was right out of a movie, and I felt the world grow a little less cynical and hard that night.
The middle-aged guys at the table next to me seemed weirdly out of place. We were all sitting at the beachfront patio of The Oasis in Loreto at sundown. I was nursing a series of Tecate rojas and they were pounding margaritas like nails.
That certainly wasn’t out of place; assault drinking margaritas seems to be the official pastime of the Baja tourist. What arrested me was their speech: A perfect pocho blend of Spanish and English that I normally only hear on the border. And they weren’t tourists. They were locals. I couldn’t stop listening.
One, wearing a baby blue shirt with more buttons undone than I find comfortable, was born in Loreto, the other, wearing plaid in earth tones with the arms rolled up, was from Los Barriles, just south of La Paz. They were talking about “regular guy” stuff: making money, girls (chicas, not mujeres), fishing. The local had a spot perfect for grouper, but they were both worried it was within the boundaries of the national marine park, where fishing is forbidden. They spent a margarita’s worth of time looking at their cellphones, scanning maps.
“I think we’re OK!”
“Orale! Vamos!” Clink glasses.
It wasn’t the conversation that was fascinating, it was that here, 600 miles from the California border, were two local guys whose speech patterns were exactly what you’d hear in Calexico or Los Angeles. And they were the only two Mexicans not from borderlands that I have heard talk like that in many trips to that country. Has to be a story there.
Rain pattered down on my windshield as I snaked through narrow canyons up out of Loreto and onto the high desert plains that led to Ciudad Constitución, and ultimately to San Jose del Cabo, my destination nearly seven hours away.
This was going to be a long day, my longest day driving in Mexico. Normally a trip like this wouldn’t bother me — it’s like driving from St Paul to Kansas City — but Mexico is not the United States.
To be sure, the Transpeninsular Highway is a decent road, comparable to U.S. highways like 50 or 2 or 83. But this highway rarely sported shoulders, and in some places not even guardrails.
Baja is an open range state, too, so random cows can wander all over the road at any time, but most often at night. Vacas, not banditos, are the reason people don’t drive at night here.
My fellow drivers ranged from less than 30 miles per hour all the way to Warp 7; the posted limit was, mostly, a laughable 80 kilometers, or 49 miles per hour. This, I’ve been told, is entirely designed to allow cops to pull you over at will, and, if they feel like it, ask for a mordida, a “little bite,” to pay your ticket roadside and thereby supplement their meager incomes.
I was hyper watchful for all of this as I drove on and on. I was followed, or at least I thought I was being followed, by a police pickup loaded with policía wearing bulletproof vests and carrying assault rifles, all the way through the endless series of (mostly) optional stop signs in Ciudad Constitución. False alarm. Thank God.
By then the rain had given way to gray, and the landscape shifted from stark and stony to agricultural and homey; it felt like Tulare or Chowchilla in California’s San Joaquin Valley, 1,100 miles due north.
I was hungry enough to eat a stashed Kind bar I’d brought from the U.S. because I didn’t want to stop until I reached La Garita, “the checkpoint,” a restaurant just north of Todos Santos, still more than three hours away. They advertised chilorio from the roadside, and I’d heard nothing but great things about their food.
Finally I reached the restaurant and got my plate of chilorio, served with a complementary plate of grilled panela cheese, which was amazing. I paid the bill and tipped well. The waiter stopped, and we talked a bit about the place. He said it was mostly Mexicans who ate there, and that he and his fellow servers didn’t love the gringos who showed up for one reason — they rarely tipped. The fact that I had, he said, was nice.
In fact, he told me that 30 minutes before he’d served two old American ladies who didn’t leave him a peso. I asked if they were from Wisconsin.
Arturo, the bartender at Casa Natalia in San Jose del Cabo, was happy to speak to a guest in Spanish. Almost none of the guests in this tourist city spoke any. Mostly trim except for growing paunch, he and I shared a birth year, although he’s older by a couple months.
I was exhausted from my drive and just wanted something light and maybe a beer or two after it and my big lunch at La Garita. The bar is tiny, fewer than a dozen seats, and I was the only person sitting except for an antediluvian English couple who, of course, ordered gin. My only other guess would have been Harvey’s Bristol Cream, which, astonishingly, the bar carried, along with J&B whiskey, another spirit of a forgotten age.
Born and raised in La Paz, Arturo misses it. La Paz es una ciudad mas mexicano, no? He grinned and nodded his head, “Siiii…” That opened the floodgates.
I didn’t have my notebook, but we started talking about the food — I’d told him I was a cook in the United States — and he started rattling off places and dishes, including La Garita. He said their machaca, the dried, shredded meat of northern Mexico, was often venison from deer they farmed in a corral behind the place.
His favorite fish taco spot in La Paz was a puesto, a cart, that I’d coincidentally stumbled on there, too. It’s right near the cathedral where the young couple got engaged, but neither of us could remember the name.
Arturo waxed poetic about the days when caguamanta soup had no manta, but was made with caguamas, the sea turtles. I told him I knew what he was talking about, not because I’d eaten a sea turtle, but because I’ve eaten snapping turtles and they’re likely similar; turtle meat is as varied as pork, so gives you differing textures and flavors when melded into a soup or stew.
After a couple hours, a dozen oysters and a plate of grilled octopus, finished by a nip of 400 Conejos, the middling mexcal that seems to own a monopoly in Baja Sur, I wished him goodnight, feeling better about this touristy city I was in.
At the bar at Lupita’s, a trendy San Jose del Cabo restaurant recommended to me by a chef friend, the only customers speaking Spanish were me and a couple Mexican woman in the corner; for what it’s worth, I try to only speak Spanish in Mexico because a) I want to improve my languange skills, and b) it’s the native tongue of most people there and seems polite.
The music was bumpin’ and the food was good, a little surprising because Lupita’s is the sort of place fancy Americans hang out in. And as if on cue, a trio sat next to me at the bar: An American couple plus an Englishman, who seemed to be their new friend.
The couple were unassuming, he in a t-shirt and jeans, she in a nice blouse with a light sweater in the cool evening. The Englishman, a man well over six feet with a porn star moustache and wavy hair, wore a linen buttondown (unbuttoned) over an a-shirt.
All worked in Hollywood, as everyone in the place could tell from the first seconds of their conversation: It was all talk of drugs taken and names dropped and parties staggered out of, and films made. But it was the Briton making the most noise.
Lupita’s was the couple’s favorite restaurant. They ordered miso clams, the Englishman lentil soup. (I was eating a shockingly good nopales salad.) Right out of the gun, Captain Britain started talking about how many awards he’d won at Cannes, and about a time when he was partying with “Quentin,” who would be director Quentin Tarantino, and they were all given mushrooms. Tarantino wisely decided to wait until he returned home to take them, and this nugget of wisdom was chewed on by all.
It was a high-volume, mesmerizing show of poor taste, and, as an American I am happy to say the vast majority of the most awful, sterotypically Hollywood banalities emanated from not the American couple, but the Englishman. At one point the waiter asked me in Spanish how everything was. I told him the food was great but the weather here was, well, windy. “No mames!” he laughed, looking right at His Majesty.
I think the Americans caught the vibe and cut the dinner short. I didn’t see how well they tipped, but I hoped it was worth it. After they left, the couple on my right, witness to it all, started talking — or, rather, they’d been talking the whole time, but even sitting next to them I couldn’t hear. They were from Austin, Texas.
They’d heard it all, too. What the hell was that, I asked.
“Dinner and a show, I reckon.” Well played, sir. Beer bottles clinked.
More long form please. Stretch! 😊
What lovely vignettes of a country. Next month I make my first trip to Mexico, to visit friends in Sayulita. I’m trying to learn some basic Spanish with Duolingo but I know it won’t be enough for more than trying to say hello, please and thank you.
I’ll be trying to find the little local places to eat and try the local specials. I can’t wait to explore their food. Your recent articles have truly whetted my appetite for them.