Baja California

10. Okt.

7 Min. Lesezeit

Two Weeks Alone Through the Desert

Mexicali

I was more nervous about Mexico than I had been about the United States. Not because I had personally had any bad experiences, but because before going there, you almost automatically hear the same stories: border towns, cartels, corrupt police, robberies. Mexicali rarely comes up as a place where you are supposed to feel particularly relaxed.

The final day in the U.S., meanwhile, was remarkably uneventful. Around 150 kilometres with almost no elevation gain, lots of headwind, farmland, industry, bad roads, and 42-degree heat. Freight trains kept passing beside me, so long and loud that they seemed to accompany me for most of the day.

Then came the border, and within minutes the change was obvious. More people, more dogs, more improvised houses, more traffic, more noise. At the same time, I immediately realised how little Spanish I spoke. More precisely, almost none.

Entering the country itself was incredibly relaxed. I did not even have to show my passport. That would later become a major problem, but more on that another time.

For the first night, I had booked a room for 15 Swiss francs at a place with two reviews on Booking.com. On the map, everything looked normal. In reality, the house was inside a gated residential community. The owner could not be reached, the security guard let me in anyway, and then nobody answered the door at the house either.

Eventually, I heard a television upstairs in the neighbouring house and knocked. The man who opened the door initially seemed ready to close it again, but then realised I was not a scammer, just a fairly lost tourist with a bicycle. His name was Antonio. He invited me into his apartment, and for half an hour we had a conversation using Google Translate, gestures, and whatever else worked.

Later, Luis, the actual host, finally appeared and was fairly upset because his dog had gone missing. He was convinced I had left the courtyard gate open and spent half an hour searching through the security footage for proof. The recording showed that the gate had already been open when I arrived. After that, I got my room.

I went out to get something to eat, and suddenly Mexico already felt considerably less intimidating.

What Was Actually Different

The next morning, I wanted to leave at five to escape the heat and woke up at eight. I probably just needed the sleep.

Half an hour later, a car pulled up beside me. Ali had seen me on Instagram, knew I was heading towards Argentina, and gave me his number because his family lived in La Paz and I should get in touch if I ever needed anything.

That became fairly typical over the next few days. The farther Mexicali disappeared behind me, the less my worries beforehand matched what was actually happening. Some of the roads were better than many I had ridden in the U.S., the shoulders were wide, and the traffic was relaxed or almost nonexistent. Truck drivers switched on their hazard lights behind me and gave me a huge amount of space when overtaking. People honked, waved, or asked where I was heading when I stopped for food.

That evening, I was sitting alone in a restaurant just before San Felipe and asked after dinner whether there was anywhere nearby where I could camp. The owners simply pointed behind the building and told me I could sleep there. I could use the shower too.

After that, I kept doing the same thing. Eat, ask, pitch the tent behind the restaurant. Once, a woman sent me to the police station, and the two officers thought it was perfectly normal for me to sleep directly outside, as long as I disappeared early the next morning.

It all worked surprisingly smoothly.

What I Actually Started to Worry About

The street dogs were less straightforward. In Mulegé, two shot out of a backyard and chased me downhill. I was already moving pretty fast, so I just kept pedalling until they eventually gave up. Apart from that encounter, though, the dogs here in Mexico have been much more relaxed than the ones I knew from Eastern Europe.

The heat became a different issue as well. Along the Gulf coast, the air was far more humid, and even though the temperatures were similar to those in the U.S. desert, it felt much more draining. I was basically sweating all the time.

After several days without a proper shower, a restaurant with showers appeared out of nowhere shortly before sunset. For around two francs, I was allowed to wash, and I threw my clothes in as well. The air was so humid that I started sweating again while drying myself, but afterwards I at least felt somewhat presentable again.

Food, on the other hand, was never a problem. I would order random things from the menu, and because my Spanish was almost nonexistent, it was always a surprise what actually arrived at the table. Usually tacos, burritos, quesadillas, or fajitas, with chocolate milk or Coke. Almost every time, it took only a few minutes before someone wanted to know what I was doing with the fully loaded bike, and shortly afterwards half the room knew.

Two Litres for 120 Kilometres

In the end, my biggest problem on Baja was not safety, but water.

At Bahía Concepción, I spent far too long in the evening trying to decide where to sleep and eventually ended up on a small hill above the bay. I walked up in flip-flops, moved a few rocks out of the way, and then somehow still spent the whole night lying directly on top of them. It was hot, humid, everything itched, and dinner consisted of my emergency chocolate biscuits, which I had been carrying around since Vancouver. All the restaurants and shops were either closed or simply did not exist.

The next morning, I had around two litres of water left. Loreto was 120 kilometres away. I somehow assumed that something would appear along the way — a restaurant, a shop, anything. Nothing did.

The area was much emptier than I had expected. At some point, I started flagging down cars and stood by the roadside holding out my bottle. Twice, people gave me water without much discussion. Even so, there were moments when I came pretty close to simply sticking out my thumb. Three or four hours of suffering on the bike versus half an hour in a car would have been a very good deal that day. Of course, I kept riding.

In Loreto, I went straight into the first shop, drank a cold Coke and a Gatorade, and then treated myself to shrimp tacos with guacamole.

After that, everything was fine again.

When the Desert Suddenly Has Too Much Water

Baja is dry. Except, apparently, exactly when you do not want it to be. September is one of the few months when it can actually rain properly. When I reached Ciudad Insurgentes, it started pouring so heavily within minutes that I escaped straight into a café and drank a chocolate frappé while lightning and thunder rolled outside for almost an hour.

Afterwards, the town was flooded. Not just a bit of water on the road, but brown, foul-smelling rivers, knee-deep in places and much higher in others. I carried the bike through the deepest sections because I did not want to completely submerge the electronic shifting, and it took me quite a while just to get out of town again.

Later that evening, I made another mistake, a much more ordinary one: I had not bought enough food because Google Maps claimed there was a restaurant and two open shops in the next town.

Google Maps was wrong.

Everything was closed.

The River

It was long after dark when a truck came towards me. The driver honked, flashed his headlights, and shouted something out of the window. I did not understand a word, so I replied with the fairly universal: “Sí, sí, gracias!”

Two minutes later, I understood what he had meant. A river was flowing straight across the road.

Not just some water on the asphalt, but a proper brown current. I stepped in and slowly felt my way forward. First up to my knees, then to my thighs. The water was pushing hard against my legs, and at some point it became obvious that falling here would be fairly unpleasant.

The cars turned around. I had very little desire to go back. So I lifted my bike over my head and kept going. That was the moment on Baja when I was genuinely scared. Not of cartels, not of some border town, and not of any of the things you constantly read about before travelling to Mexico, but of being swept off the road by a brown river in the middle of the night.

I made it to the other side.

Baja Was Different

Later, as I continued towards La Paz, I kept thinking about how different my worries before Mexico had been from the problems I actually faced.

I had prepared myself for unpleasant border towns, crime, and situations where I would feel unsafe. Instead, I slept behind restaurants, outside police stations, and near people who gave me water the moment I asked for it.

The harder things were much more ordinary: heat, running out of water, dogs, closed shops, thunderstorms, and my own tendency to assume a little too optimistically that something would eventually appear along the way. I reached La Paz after just under two weeks.

By then, my bike badly needed a service. So did my clothes. And my socks were probably beyond saving. Baja had prepared me, at least a little, for the coming months in Mexico and Central America. And it had corrected some of the stories I had carried with me before arriving.

I had also learned that, on this journey, water in the desert can somehow become a problem in both directions.