I know of 2 places named La Paz – one of them is in Bolivia, and the other is in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur – that’s the BCS in the title of this piece. It took me until 1996 to get to the one in Bolivia with climbing partner Brian Rundle, but the one in Mexico was reached way back in 1972, and that’s the one I want to tell you about. I was traveling with 2 women – one of them I would marry a year later, and the other was her sister. We had been in the country for 6 weeks already by the time we made our way from Guadalajara down to Mazatlán by overnight bus. Mexico is hot and humid, mostly, in late July, and we were traveling on the cheap, using public transport everywhere we went.
When we arrived in Mazatlán, we realized that we were back on Pacific time, so had to wait an extra hour for things to open. American Express travelers checks are what we used, and when a bank finally opened we exchanged some for Mexican cash – never much at a time, as 20 USD went pretty far at the time. The exchange rate was 12 1/2 pesos to the dollar. We had quite a few hours to kill before the next leg of our trip, so headed off to the big market. Meanwhile, the idiot to whom I was engaged stormed off in a huff over some minor disagreement and disappeared. We spent hours looking before we finally located her. She spoke not a word of Spanish and caused us a lot of angst in the meantime – this type of behavior happened several times on the trip, and should have been a red flag, yet later on I married her anyway, much to my ultimate regret.
Much later in the day, we made our way to the ferry terminal. It was a hot wait of over an hour before we could board, even though we had bought tickets back in town. We had paid the cheapest fare, only 65 pesos each – this allowed us to sit in seats in a common area with a lot of other passengers. The ship was quite large, with 5 classes of ticket, ours being the lowest. Even so, there was some air-conditioning in that area.
From the deck, we had this view to the southeast as we were leaving Mazatlán.
We splurged on an overpriced meal, then settled in for what we hoped would be a few hours of sleep in our seats which actually did recline.
Another weird night in Mexico. They dimmed the lights in our cheap-seats section later on, and amid many various snores we painfully drifted off to sleep. Our ferry ride lasted 13 hours, dawn arrived, and we approached the Baja Peninsula.
Baja at dawn
We docked at 9:00 AM, then bummed a ride with some Americans for the 17 KM trip into La Paz. It already felt hot, but it was to be expected, I guess, as this was a desert. I learned that the city only gets just over 6 inches of rain a year and the average daily high temperature was 98° F in July with 60 to 70% humidity. After much phoning around, I found a small place, the Hotel Mansion Guadalajara, with a vacancy. For 60 pesos a night, we got a room with 3 beds and a ceiling fan instead of air conditioning. The shared bathroom was down the hall. We had to wait until 1:30 to occupy the room. If we hadn’t been traveling on such a tight budget, we would have sprung for a place with air conditioning.
While we waited for the room to become available, we walked around on the unimpressive beach by the town and drank numerous bottles of soda pop to help cool us off. Once in the room, we took much-needed showers, then headed over to a market and bought sandwich fixings. The prices seemed high for what we got. At 7:00, we headed over to the beach to swim, saw a nice sunset and bought a couple of rounds of Tehuacán beer. After that, we walked around the town, buying cold drinks every time we found them, and made it to bed by 10:30.
The next morning was Saturday, July 29th. The girls had slept poorly because of the heat, but, surprisingly, it didn’t bother me as much. After a breakfast of oranges we visited the tourist bureau. Then, armed with information, we hitched a ride over to the office of the other ferry company, the one that operated the ferry that went from La Paz to Los Mochis. That trip would put us 400 KM farther north than Mazatlán where our ferry travels had started. We purchased 55-peso cheap seats for that trip. Our thinking was that the 20 pesos we saved instead of buying the 75-peso next tier of seats, we would put towards an air-conditioned hotel room in Los Mochis.
Tickets in hand, we hitched a ride across town and out to Coromuel Beach with 3 Californian fellows in a 4-wheel-drive pick-up. They had just driven the entire length of the Baja Peninsula, a thousand miles – what an adventure! We visited with them for a while, they left, and we swam.
Coromuel Beach
The beach itself was nice enough, but there were little stinging organisms in the water which made swimming unpleasant. Some folks bought us a free round of Tehuacán, which we really appreciated. It was just plain hot, all the time, so anything cold felt good. Normally, the girls would never drink beer, but here it was part of our survival technique. Finally, we bummed a ride back into town and returned to our hotel room. Normally, we would complain about the lack of hot water in the shower (at many cheap hotels, hot water was only available for brief periods each day), but here it was a relief to take a cool shower to help cool off.
We didn’t often eat in restaurants, preferring instead to buy simple sandwich fixings and eat in our room. That’s what we did next, walking all the way out to the Centro Comercial, a large shopping center, where we bought some nice things for supper. After eating in our room, we walked over to a nearby beach for another Tehuacán. It was hot outside, and hot back in our room. The ceiling fan made it bearable, just!
The next morning, we slept in late. It was so hot in our room, 87°F (I had a small thermometer), one of my strongest memories is of staring up at the ceiling fan and wishing we could just be some place cool. The whole morning was spent in our room, packing up and taking another shower. I went to the front desk and paid our bill, then we left our luggage at the desk for safe-keeping while we went out for the day.
La Paz Bay
Outside, it was hot! We walked over to a movie theater – it wasn’t air-conditioned, but like fools we paid 5 pesos to sit through a double-feature. “Battle in Outer Space” and “Flight of the Doves”. My God, it was hot in there! Stunned by the heat, we stumbled out on to the street 3 hours later. Needing to kill more time, we wandered around, bought postcards, wrote and mailed them. After buying a few simple supper fixings, we headed back to the beach for a refresco. Finally, back to the hotel – we got our bags, hailed a cab and went to the Salvatierra ferry terminal. We had quite a wait before we could board. A customs agent started to search our stuff, but soon gave up when he saw the massive amount of souvenirs we had accumulated.
Finally, we boarded. This ferry was smaller and seemed quite nice, much cleaner with better seats. This trip across the Sea of Cortez was much shorter than the one from Mazatlán 3 days earlier, but still took 11 hours. It was fairly slow, but we weren’t in any hurry. I actually managed 4 or 5 hours of sleep on the trip, and the next morning we could see the mainland as we approached.
Topolobampo
It was 7:00 AM by the time we docked at the terminal at Topolobampo, which sits at the end of a peninsula about 15 miles south of the city of Los Mochis. Customs agents were there at the terminal, but they didn’t even bother with us and all our stuff. I begged a ride into the city with a California couple and their 2 young boys, where we enjoyed a nice breakfast in an air-conditioned restaurant, then settled in to an air-conditioned room at the Hotel America.
Our time spend in Baja had been pretty miserable because of the heat. We had brought it on ourselves, I guess, by being too stingy to splurge on an air-conditioned hotel room. Thinking back on our days there, the main impression I am left with is the heat-induced stupor. At that time, we had no experience with the desert, and La Paz was most definitely in the desert. It wasn’t much different than Tucson, where I now live. It was almost as hot, but with higher humidity than Tucson. If I could go back in time and re-live those days, it would be in air-conditioned comfort.
As an aside, the world-famous resort town of Cabo San Lucas, a hundred miles south of La Paz at the tip of the Baja Peninsula, didn’t really start to be developed until 1974, a few years after we visited La Paz. So, at the time of our visit, La Paz was pretty much the end of the line when it came to claiming you had driven the length of Baja. Nowadays, Cabo has completely overshadowed La Paz as a tourist destination.