Date: 15/10
City: San Quintin, Baja, Mexico
Miles ridden: 117
Cumulative miles: 13722
Sigrid had a swim in the morning,
Did I mentioned before that the pool was not heated and the nights are not hot in Ensenada, ok, this morning I volunteered to guard the bed, somebody has to do it. So we took it easy, filled up our bikes and set off towards San Quintin. The ride was not very eventful, finding the hotel was a bit more difficult. The night before we looked up a hotel that got good reviews in the trip advisor, but there was no real address, just the name of the town. As it turned out, the town was bigger than I thought and it was not easy to find the hotel. So we started to ask around (with our limited Spanish) and it turned out the all the hotels not on the main road have a sign at the turnoff. So we followed the main road until we found the sign, headed along the corrugated dirt road and arrived at a beautiful place, which had clean rooms and a beautiful garden.
So we booked in and during unpacking we meet a group from California, which came down to celebrate the 106th birthday of a Mexican lady in the next town. They had known her for years.
They did know Baja like the back of their hand, so they helped us to break the trip to La Paz down into sizeable parts and suggested as well hotels in the appropriate towns. That helped us a lot, since looking for hotels in an unknown city is still our weakest point. It started to get dark, so we decided to ride two up to the next restaurant at the beach. To cut the story short, after encountering long patches of beach sand and getting stuck in a pothole filled with sand, we turned around. The pic shows me trying to turn the bike.
Dehydrated food didn’t sound too bad after all. On our way back we meet Uli, he was locking for a hotel. So we ended up in the same hotel and having dinner together (somebody drove us in a car to the restaurantJ. Having said that, our driver took another road J not quite as sandy… It turned out that Uli is from Germany. He took three month off and tries to go as far south as possible before returning to Germany. So we talked about the preparation for the trip, shared our experience on prepping the bike, the border crossing and our experience in the US and Mexico so far. After the pleasant dinner we realised that Uli can make telephone calls in Spanish, bummer that he has to race off, would be handy to have him along! The pictures show Uli making a call to Michael, our driver and Uli, Michael and me)
Date: 16/10
City: San Quintin, Baja, Mexico
Miles ridden: 4
Cumulative miles: 13726
We heard rumour about Tornado Paul, he is supposed to hit Baja in the afternoon, somewhere in the south. Checking out the map we decided to stay until Paul has passed.
Uli tries to meet somebody in La Paz and decided to get to Guerrero Negro this day, which is 450km away.
After checking out the setups bikes and comparing notes Uli had to leave.
After Uli left we thought we get food and booze, just in case that the hurricane would hit San Quintin J, so we went to the city and went on our first shopping spree in Mexico. Well, we ended up in a super market, but at least it was a Mexican oneJ.
It took us really long before we got what we needed, but at the end we succeeded thanks to our phrase book. So we were prepared for Paul J. A spinoff of Hurricane Paul were the clouds which gave us a beautiful sunset.
Date: 17/10
City: San Quintin, Baja, Mexico
Miles ridden: 0
Cumulative miles: 13726
Nothing today, it was just some planning for the rest of the Baja trip up to La Paz. The hurricane moved to the sea again and didn’t come up at all. Nevertheless, we got a power outage. So we started to redraw our map on the bikes and repack some luggage
when we meet Clara from Argentina. She is a biologist doing some research project with her husband in San Quintin. She was supposed to evaluate the samples that her husband brought before, but without power there was not much she could do. So we had a beer and a great conversation instead.
We will leave tomorrow and try to get to Guerrero Negro, 460km from here, so it will be an early start.
