Big Trip Day 316: Bootless in Baja
Hey friends! Dory here, with our first missive from a familiar time zone.
You last saw us on the eve of our return to America, emerging shell-shocked and underdressed into Salt Lake’s November weather. We spent a week in SLC visiting with friends and staying with my parents, and I took a brief detour to Dallas for work (shoutout to Rent the Runway for clothing me for that event; none of my same five t-shirts were going to cut it.) Utah-based adventures concluded, we loaded our things into Justin’s 2012 Subaru Impreza and hit the road for an unexpected and long-awaited Big Trip era: Mexico!!!
Many of you already know this about us, but Justin and I freaking love Mexico. It’s such a diverse country, home to a million delicious things to eat, countless regions with distinct cultural identities and wild, centuries-deep history, and people who are kind and who take you at face value. It’s also an incredible destination for the outdoor sports we love — separately and together, we’ve traveled to Northern Baja, Guerrero, and Monterrey for surfing and rock climbing, plus Mexico City for museums and music and food... we just love this country.
So when we found out I’d need to be back in the States for work, we figured it was as good a reason as any to get one of our favorite places on earth into the Big Trip itinerary. The original plan was: get a car in Salt Lake City, get surfboards in San Diego, drive to Mexico, surf, eat fish tacos, surf, repeat. But Boot Life (a.k.a, full time travel when one of us was significantly albeit temporarily disabled,) meant that we needed to make some changes, since Justin was in no state to be shredding the gnar for at least a few more weeks. We realized we needed to come up with an alternate plan that involved a lot more dry land and a lot less extreme physical activity in the ocean.
So: enter Oaxaca! We’ve both always wanted to go, and had talked about maybe making our way over there during our Mexico era, but the boot meant the time was now.
We drove the Subaru as far as San Diego, where Justin’s mom Nancy generously took custody of our rig and then drove us to the Mexico border (not a minor errand from San Diego!) There, we bought our tickets for the Cross-Border Express bridge, a peculiar privately-owned border crossing that’s unique to this one spot on the US-Mexico border. You buy a ticket for $20, and you can clear immigration and walk straight from California into the Tijuana airport! Pretty neat, and well worth the effort since it meant we could fly nonstop domestic to Oaxaca City, saving us a ton of money by avoiding an international flight from San Diego.
Everyone we know who’s been to Oaxaca loves it, and we were no exception. It’s a lovely city. Walkable, friendly, full of historic buildings, an incredible art scene... and food worth writing poems about. Here were some of our favorites:
Tacos de chile relleno. These were in a still-warm blue corn tortilla; the chile relleno wasn’t a fresh poblano chile like we’re used to in the States, but a dried pasilla that had been rehydrated, with a super rich and smoky flavor. Filled with ground beef and onions and more chile, dipped in egg batter and fried, and then rolled up in that super tender blue corn tortilla with a little swipe of refried beans and more salsa. Outrageous! Delicious! No notes. (Tacos de Cazuela del Carmen Alto)
All the pastries from a bakery called Pan con Madre (a reference to their sourdough baking; in Spanish, sourdough is masa madre, or mother dough) but especially their concha, which was the best I’d ever had. Mexican bakeries in America often crank out conchas that taste like sweet dust wrapped around a stale hot dog bun, but this was something else entirely. Imagine a huge fluffy brioche bun that melts in your mouth, and now imagine it topped with a thin, crisp layer of super delicious chocolate sugar cookie. I could eat a hundred of them. (Pan con Madre)
After going to see lucha libre one night, we discovered a truly incredible spot for tortas al pastor. Tortas, basically just Mexican sandwiches, are a hugely underrated element of Mexican cuisine. There’s just something about them -- they’re SO much greater than the sum of their parts. A fresh roll, mayonnaise, crisp lettuce, sliced tomato, pickled jalapeño slices, avocado, a creamy tomatillo salsa, and outrageously fresh carne al pastor, sliced directly off the spinning vertical spit where meat roasts at the center of the restaurant. We came back to eat this torta three different times — it was just that good. (Tacos Chemita)
Tamal de mole negro. Oaxaca is a big tamal destination — in fact, they have their own namesake format, el tamal oaxqueño, which as far as I can tell is just a regular tamal but wrapped in banana leaf instead of corn husk. At the recommendation of our friend Sadie, we hit up a market near our house for smoothies from a spot called Super Jugos Angelita (they were indeed super,) and just behind there was a woman selling tamales from an enormous metal pot. She was out of everything except mole negro, but holy shit was it amazing. Thick corn masa that was almost melt-in-your-mouth tender, filled with a generous portion of chicken stewed in spicy, savory, sweet mole negro. (Mercado Sanchez Pascuas, first vendor inside on the right)
Oaxaca was the first place since Vietnam where each day was a race to see how many delicious things we could eat before we were no longer hungry and had to wait until the next day to go again. After all our time in Indonesia, and after the food in Europe (which didn’t really speak to us, honestly,) it was kind of emotional to be back in a part of the world where the food just rules. It was hard to set a foot wrong, and out of everywhere we’ve traveled, it’s the city with the highest number of places we saved to our Big Trip Google List! If you’re heading to Oaxaca, we’ve got you fully covered.
It was also great to be back in a place where we could chat up the locals. Maybe it’s just that we both speak Latin American Spanish (a real point of contrast and occasional confusion during our time in Spain!) but in our experience, Mexico is a place where it’s possible to really get to know people, and to talk to locals about real things almost immediately. One morning, while eating quesadillas, we had a long conversation with a business owner about American-Mexican immigration dynamics and the impacts of the dollar’s spending power on housing prices. In general, it’s been super refreshing to feel like we can really talk to people.
Our last day in Oaxaca marked Justin’s six week point from his injury back in Albania, so we found yet another radiologist for his final set of x-rays. Our friend Anna provided her final amazing text message telehealth consult, and confirmed that he was good to go on losing the walking boot! At last! That day, we went to the historic site of Monte Alban, so Justin decided to offer up his now-useless walking boot (from Spain, no less! Appropriate!) as a sacrifice to the Zapotec gods. He was a little gimpy with the boot off, but knowing the bone was healed was a huge relief, and meant he was able to fully participate in his next activity — a bachelor party for our friend Brian back in Northern Baja!
The next part of the trip is kind of logistically complicated, so here’s the barebones rundown:
Justin left Oaxaca first, flew back to Tijuana, and got picked up (again!) by Nancy
The next morning he got into our car, which we had left at Nancy’s house, and met up with Brian and fellow bachelor party celebrant Brett to caravan across the border
The three of them drove south through Baja to Punta Cabras (four hours south of Tijuana) for a weekend of surfing, drinking, and relatively mild debauchery
A few days later, I left Oaxaca and spent the night in Tijuana. The next morning, I took a bus from Tijuana to Ensenada to get a little closer to Justin — Justin, meanwhile, drove two hours north to pick me up
We were reunited in Ensenada: surfboards on the roof, and Justin’s foot officially boot-free. Our Baja era had begun!
I hope you were paying attention when Justin explained TrustedHousesitters in our last email, because you’re about to hear a lot about TrustedHousesitters. After struggling to get any messages back at all in Asia, we essentially scored every single housesit listed in Baja California between December and January -- as of now, it’ll end up being four different housesits for a total of 29 days of free housing in Mexico. At this point in our travels, we were expediting the drive down Baja so we could arrive in La Paz in time for our first sit, for the week of Thanksgiving.
I’ll be the first to admit that I really didn’t understand how big Baja California was until we started driving down it. Baja’s big. From the U.S. border to the southern tip it’s over 1,000 miles, and most of it is on wildly remote roads of wildly variable quality. There’s lots going on close to the Tijuana-San Diego border, and more cities and towns in the southern cape, but in between Baja is mostly just long stretches of desert, filled with looming cactus and death-defying potholes and the occasional military checkpoint. You never leave a town without a full tank of gas, and you never drive at night -- less for security concerns from possible roadside bandidos, and more for fear of hitting a sneaky pothole or a surprise burro and perishing on the spot.
In the interest of time (since we only had four days to get to La Paz, but we still wanted to be able to appreciate the drive) we took the Sea of Cortez route instead of driving down the Pacific side. That meant no surfing for us, but it also meant we got to see some of the calmest, most stunning coastline we’ve laid eyes on since Greece. The desert drops straight into the sea along the coast, and the highway hugged long stretches of cobble beaches, with bright blue water lapping at the shore. The ocean was glassy-flat nearly every day; to break up the drive, we’d stop to take a quick dip at least once, even though it was a lot colder than I expected.
Our drive south also included a surprising amount of skateboarding! Back in Indonesia, we both tried surfskating for the first time at a cafe/skatepark in Kuta Lombok. Imagine a regular skateboard, but with trucks that pivot -- it lets you carve and build speed on flat ground, and is a pretty close mimic to the motion of carving on a surfboard. Since we’re in our mid- to late-30s now, skateboarding is in general considered a one-way ticket to the hospital, but surfskating is a lot more mellow and doesn’t involve any of the tricks or as much of the speed as the traditional version. Plus it’s a great way to get some movement in when there are no waves, and it turns out the malecones of Mexican coastal towns are the perfect place to practice! We bought a surfskate used off Facebook Marketplace back in San Diego, and skated pretty much every day during our road trip/La Paz era. Neither of us has been seriously injured as of this newsletter.
After a few nights on the road and another several hundred miles of expert driving by Justin, we arrived to our housesit in La Paz. We were staying in El Centenario, a little suburb about 20 minutes outside town, in a simple house with three very sweet but poorly trained dogs: Cali, Ash, and Hillary. Their owners were gone for just over a week, and were super gracious, offering us use of their car, their kayaks, and even their dirtbike (we did not partake!) Unfortunately, the dogs barked more or less relentlessly. It was worth it for a free place to stay, but we learned that three dogs is too many, and that we should probably ask a few more questions about dog training the next time we agreed to a housesit.
The highlight of our time in La Paz was, as it so often is, the ocean. La Paz is known for incredible marine biodiversity, and especially for the seasonal opportunity to swim with whale sharks! Whale sharks are the biggest fish in the world, and despite the sharkiness of their name, are not carnivores. They’re filter feeders, living off of plankton and other teeny-tiny water organisms, and somehow also manage to grow up to 60 feet in length. Swimming with whale sharks was a bucket list item for both of us; we could have done it in Indonesia, but we heard that the ethics of the whale shark operations there left a lot to be desired — feeding the fish on purpose, using bright lights, not regulating the number of people in the water... and after leaving our elephant experience in Thailand with some major ethical hesitations, I didn’t have it in me to have another morally gray experience with megafauna.
But lucky us, the Mexican government has in recent years developed a really thoughtful management plan for whale shark tourism! Locals are still getting a solid slice of tourism dollars, and they’re regulating the number of boats allowed out each day, the number of clients in the water, and the maximum time each boat can spend near whale sharks. We arrived in La Paz shortly after the start of the whale shark tourism season (they can’t start sending tourist boats out until at least a dozen whale sharks have been spotted in the marine reserve) and set out one morning with only two other tourists, a French-Canadian couple, on our boat.
Our guide showed us the key parts of a whale shark using an extremely cute stuffed animal version, and before we knew it, it was time to jump in. We were lucky enough to swim with two juveniles, each around 15 feet in length — which is small for a whale shark, big for a marine animal, and quite truly the largest thing either of us had ever seen up-close underwater. The visibility was low, so while swimming alongside one shark, I nearly swam directly into the broadside of another. I’m not embarrassed to admit I may have screamed into my snorkel when I turned around and saw what I was heading towards. It’s just alarming to have such massive animals moving around you. They seemed intensely unbothered by us; you’re not supposed to touch the whale sharks, at at times it was actually a challenge to get out of their way fast enough to prevent ourselves from touching them by accident.
We spent 30 minutes total in the water with these enormous fish, swimming in circles alongside them as they filter-fed in the murky water. It was super special to be so up-close with such a singular animal, and I’m really grateful we waited to have this experience until we could do it in a way that didn’t cause the whale sharks too much undue stress.
We also did some off-the-beach snorkeling in the afternoons, flexing the freediving skills we trained back on Gili Trawangan all those months ago. The water is cold, which shortened our water time a bit — I had a shorty wetsuit, but Justin was toughing it out in a 1.5mm jacket and boardies — but we were able to spot some really cool stuff. Moray eels, scorpionfish lurking inside old tires sunken in the sand, and even an adorably named conejo del mar nudibranch (that’s “sea bunny,” for those taking notes.) Nudibranch, or as Justin lovingly calls them, “disco slugs,” are colorful, poofy, extremely festive slugs that are usually spotted only while scuba diving, so this was a special thing to find.
When not in the water, we ate birria for breakfast, honed our hibiscus mezcal margarita mixing skills, drank a million iced coffees at our housesit, and learned to appreciate the over-enthusiastic charms of Hillary, Ash, and Cali. Soon enough, it was time to tidy up the house, leave the pups in the front yard to await their owners’ return, and head south to launch into our long-awaited Mexico surf era!
Our first stop was San José del Cabo, where we tracked down an excellent deal for credit card points housing (under 15,000 points for four nights at the Hyatt Place, woo!) and where we hoped to find some cute waves before heading to the Pacific coast, where we anticipated bigger swell (and boy, did we find it.) But I’ll let Justin pick up where I’ve left off — a couple more of these, and we might actually catch up with ourselves in the present!
We love and miss all of you tons. Thanks for continuing to follow along with Big Trip, which is now officially past its one year mark!
Love,
Dory & Justin