MotoFoto.cc

Motorcycle Photography

Home    Motors    Travel Photos     Publications    Links    Contact Us

Baja 2008

I like riding in Baja and going to see the whales a lot.  I try to get down there about once a year, sometimes more often.  I started in 1992 and I still find the place fascinating.  Baja has what I think are some of the best motorcycling roads in the world, the scenery is great, the food is outstanding, and it is where the California gray whales migrate each winter. 

This year was no exception.  My friend Joseph and I spent five days during the last week in March on our Triumph motorcycles.   Everything was just like it was supposed to be.  The desert was unusually green, we had a safe ride, we covered about 1700 miles, the whales were great, the food was great, and we made some new friends.

Baja is changing fast, and it is becoming more developed.  I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.  If you want to see it, the best times are from January through April, because that's when the whales are in town.

A staged shot if ever there was one.  I bought a small tripod with me and set my Nikon D200 on the timed setting for this shot.  That's Joseph's Sprint ST on the left, and my Triumph Tiger on the right.  This is the sign that marks the dirt road to Laguna de Ojo Liebre, or Scammon's Lagoon, which is one of the places the whales hang out.  The sign shows a mother and her calf, which is what we saw when we went out to visit the whales.  The mature gray whales are about 45 or 50 feet long, and their babies are about a third that size.  The whales get there in January and they stay until April.

My friend Joseph and his Sprint ST.   The Triumphs are great bikes for a ride like this.  Triumph triples get between 40 and 50 mpg, which gave us the range we needed, and their three-cylinder engines are smooth and powerful.  They also run pretty well on regular gas, which is a good thing (that's all you can get in many parts of Baja).

We entered Mexico through Tijuana and blitzed south for about 200 miles to get to El Rosario, which is the first place I broke out the camera.

This photo is at Mama Espinosa's in El Rosario.  

El Rosario, in my opinion, is where Baja really begins.  

Up to El Rosario, Mexico's Transpeninsular Highway (Highway 1) follows the Pacific coastline.  At El Rosario, the road turns sharply to the left, and heads into the largely undeveloped Baja peninsula.

I used to like lobster, but I have to worry about cholesterol now.

The stretch from El Rosario to the next Pemex station is a long one...it's 200 miles.  My Tiger and its 6 gallon gas tank can make that easily.  Most motorcycles can't.

The gas in Mexico was considerably less expensive than we have in California.  Gas in California is approaching (and in some places, exceeding) $4 per gallon.  In Mexico, it was 6.77 pesos per liter, which works out to something around $2.44 a gallon.

When you do this ride, the first 100 miles is through the tourist zone (from Tijuana to Ensenada), which is necessary and at times scenic, but mostly useless as far as I am concerned.  

The next 100 miles or so takes you through the agricultural regions.  Much of this, especially through the wine country, is beautiful and the roads are twisting mountain lanes (in other words, perfect motorcycling country).  There are a lot of little agricultural towns in this stretch with killer speed bumps, though, so you have to keep your speed down.

After you get through San Quintin and Los Pinos at the southern end of the agricultural strip, the road runs through open coastal plains along the Pacific, and then it climbs through some hills into El Rosario.  After that, it's out in the boonies for the next 220 miles to Guerrero Negro.  Guerrero Negro means Black Warrior.  It's the name of a ship that sank off the coast of this town in the 1800s.

I wanted to stay in Malarrimo's but they were sold out.  We got a room next door at the Hotel Los Carracoles, which was clean, nice, and $40 a night for both of us.  The room had cable TV, and the hotel had computers with internet access in the office.  Like I said, Baja is changing fast.

Before we left to see the whales, we chatted with Alex, a rider on a fully-farkled 650 V-Strom Suzuki.  Alex had experienced a clutch failure out in the desert, but he found a guy to fix it in Guerrero Negro and he was headed home.  Alex also mentioned that he had linked up with a guy on a GS 1200 BMW (another adventure style bike) and he had ridden with him for a portion of his trip.

Guerrero Negro is a company town.  The company is Mitsubishi, and the town's business is salt mining.  Salt is mined by flooding shallow sea plains, allowing the sea water to evaporate, and then bulldozing up the salt.  It is the second largest salt production facility in the world.

Joseph and his coat of many colors on the way to see the whales.

The baby coming in for a closer look.  

These calves are like big puppies.  They are very playful.

By this point, my lens was shooting through a dripping wet polarizer, which is why this photo is a bit fuzzy.  The whales sprayed us pretty well with their spouting.

This is an old steam engine from the Boleo Mining Company.

Santa Rosalia used to be a copper mining town, and Boleo was the French company that ran it.

When we walked by in the early evening, there was a wedding underway.  

I grabbed this shot with my 24-120 lens and the camera on ISO 1250.

I have shots of the interior and exterior of this church on some of my other Baja pages.

This shot shows a typical Santa Rosalia structure.

Another wooden Santa Rosalia building.

This is a shot at dawn, looking north along the Sea of Cortez coastline.  

The Frances Hotel balcony, early the next morning.

This is a fabulous hotel. No phones, no e-mail, no air conditioning, and no phoniness. It is tucked away up on Frances Mesa at the south end of town.  You would never find this place accidentally.

They had two parrots in the courtyard that became quite animated if you stopped to talk to them.

At some points the bugs were so thick we were stopping every half hour or so to clean our faceshields.

Lots of bugs.

I was sure glad I was wearing a full face helmet.

Sebastian Vizcaino was one of Baja's early Spanish explorers.

The tall cacti are Cardon cactus plants, one of Baja's unique species.

A Baja cactus.  I think this is a Cholla cactus. 

There are many cactus species in Baja. 

 Some exist on this peninsula and nowhere else in the world. 

A young Cardon cactus, one of Baja's unique species.

The Cardon is the world's largest cactus.  These plants can grow up to 70 feet tall and they can live for up to 300 years.

Mulege is a very cool little town.  It's one of my favorites.

Baja can be a harsh place.

Joseph surmised that this was a burro.  

We saw several wild burro herds on this ride. 

When the burros wander on to the road, they sometimes get hit.

Vultures were everywhere.  In fact, when we descended through the Cuesta Del Infierno region going into Santa Rosalia (not a place to be if you have any fear of heights), a vulture flew along at eye level about 10 feet away looking right at me.  He was probably thinking about dinner.  It was eerie.

Later on this trip, I almost hit a vulture that tried to stay an extra second or two on a coyote carcass as I went by at 70 mph.  I think the next time I go down there I will try to get some good vulture photos.  They really are an interesting species.

That's an HJC carbon fiber helmet I bought at Brown Motor Works.  It's great.  It's a bit lighter than a standard helmet, and that makes it a lot more comfortable on a trip like this.

We stopped for a cup of coffee at Las Casitas, a great little hotel and restaurant in Mulege.

A decoration on a Mulege home.

When I first visited this town in 1994, the river had warning signs for cholera.

The trees are date palms.  The Jesuits and Father Junipero Serra, who explored and settled this region hundreds of years ago, introduced date farming to the area.

The mission at Mulege.

Another shot of the Mulege mission, looking south.

I think this is the prettiest part of Baja. The mountains rolling right into the sea (with bright aquamarine water colors on one side and cactus growing out of the desert on the other) made this a memorable part of the trip.

The colors in this region are surreal.   I used a circular polarizer on nearly all of the shots on this page, and the 12-24 Tokina and 24-120 Nikon lenses did a good job of capturing the scenes as I remember seeing them.

Loreto is about 80% of the way down the peninsula, and it was our destination on this trip.  We planned to be in Baja for 5 days, so it was a good place to turn around and start back north.

We stayed in San Ignacio the next night at the La Pinta hotel, a hotel chain in the Baja peninsula.  They've now renamed themselves the Desert Hotel.  They are nice, but they are a bit pricey for Baja (they are still inexpensive by US standards, though).

 I have a lot of photographs of the San Ignacio mission and surrounding areas (many posted in other trip reports on this website), so I put the camera away that night.

This is a Cirio plant, another one of Baja's unique species.  Many of these were still in full bloom (this particular one, however, was not).

Baja had a lot of rain this winter, and people said seeing the peninsula as green as it was on this trip only occurs about every 30 years.

Shortly after taking this photo, a fellow rider stopped by on a GS 1200 BMW.  It was Luke.  He was the same guy Alex had spoken of in Guerrero Negro.

Luke was traveling from Canada through Baja.  He rode with us for the rest of the trip.

I was just south of Catavina when I took this shot.

Another cactus species.

This is a hedgehog cactus.

Luke and his GS 1200, south of El Rosario.

When we got to El Rosario, I wanted to try to find the abandoned mission west of town.  We got directions from a nice lady, but the road was too muddy and beat up to make it to the mission.  Luke and I turned around and rejoined Joseph to fill up at the El Rosario Pemex before heading to the Old Mill hotel in San Quintin.

Unlike what I experienced on the trip I took last year, the 4-mile dirt road to the Old Mill hotel was dry.  I saw the hole (now dry) where one of the guys on last year's ride dropped his bike, and I was amazed we had not all gone down.  It was deep.

The road being dry was not such a good thing, though.  About the last half had a lot of deep, soft sand, and I nearly dropped the Tiger half a dozen times.  I run my tires at 38 psi in the front and 43 psi in the rear because I like the way the bike handles on pavement at those pressures. In the soft sand it was awful and it scared the hell out of me.  I had the Tiger loaded pretty heavily with all of the junk I was carrying, and the front end just wanted to dig in and lay down.  I remembered that the answer to nearly all motorcycle handling problems is more gas, so every time the Tiger's front end started sashaying around, I just cranked on the throttle.  That got the bike straightened out, but it just meant that I hit the next patch of soft stuff going even faster.  The Tiger's dual sport adventure styling notwithstanding, that thing was a handful in soft sand. 

Miraculously, I got in and out of there without dropping the bike.  Luke and Joseph did okay, too.  It sure scared me, though.

We had another great ride through the mountains and on into Ensenada.  

We stopped to pick up some cheap drugs at one of the pharmacies in Ensenada.

It was obviously a little overcast in Ensenada, but we had no rain at all during this trip.

Right next to where we stopped, there was this cool pickling operation.  

Joseph commented that it would make a good photo and I think he was right.

The border in Tijuana, as is usually the case, was a mess.  The Tijuana cops closed off the exit to the normal crossing point because traffic had backed up too much into Tijuana, and they were diverting everyone to the Otay Mesa crossing.  At that point, we lost Luke somewhere in the traffic mess.  He planned to head up the 5 Freeway to get north of Los Angeles that night anyway, so the only thing is we didn't get to do was offer a proper goodbye (goodbye and safe travels, Luke).   After finding our way over to the Otay Mesa crossing, Joseph and I then managed to get separated, so we last saw each other going in different directions somewhere south of Otay Mesa in that traffic mess.   I split lanes among the parked cars and beeped a gazillion street vendors out of my way, and it still took an hour to get across.  I am guessing the cars had a 4 or 5 hour wait that afternoon.  Joseph and I spoke by phone later that night, and I was glad to learn we both had made it home safely.

This was another fun trip to Mexico and a great ride.

If you enjoyed the photos on this page and would like to see additional photos from prior Baja trips, please click on the links below.

• Baja 2007...a similar road trip on a Triumph in 2007.  This page has some great whale photos!
• San Felipe, a 2006 weekend trip on the KLR 650 Kawasaki through northern Baja.
• Bahia de Los Angeles, a 2006 ride on the Tiger to visit my friend John's home on the Sea of Cortez. 
• San Felipe's 80th Anniversary, a fun weekend in February 2005.  This was another Harley ride, one of the last before the Harley gave up the ghost for good.
• San Felipe on a couple of red hot sports bikes.
• Baja 2004, a quick 1550-mile motorcycle trip to Mulege and back on the Suzuki TL1000S.
• Baja 2003, another whale watching trip with my daughter and three of her friends on spring break.
• Baja 2000, a trip to see the whales with the girls and a couple of friends.
• The Mexico Motorcycle Trip from Los Angeles to Cabo San Lucas, across the Sea of Cortez, down to Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara, and back to the USA through mainland Mexico.  I did this ride on an old Harley Softail.

Check out our published work below.  Click on the pictures to learn more about each book...