A Rough Ride to Bahia Tortugas

Bahia Tortugas February 21st, 2007

Bahia Tortugas Google Earth Shot

We were here some nineteen years ago just after I stopped believing in Santa Claus.

The back story here is important: we were living in San Diego at a yacht club on Center Island and it was the custom of this club to have Santa come in by boat, step off and greet the hordes of kids wanting there last chance to ask for a shiny new bike! Well that is exactly what I was asking for and what I saw step off the boat was no Santa Claus but my dad with his ridiculous beard that he had kept since Oregon (big bushy and very white), a red hat, little round gold glasses and a Santa suit with something stuffed in where the jolly belly needed to be.

When he sat in the chair and all the kids lined up to sit on his lap I did not get in line. I was six and Ian was four and that was the end of Santa for both of us. But the poor kids of Bahia Tortugas were about to be duped just like we were. Dad looks like John McCain, replete with the baldness, and the problem with that bald spot is that when you are in the sun (i.e. on a sailboat) it tends to burn quite badly. So dad always wore a baseball cap to keep it well protected. Right before we made it to Bahia Tortugas his cap blew off into the Pacific Ocean and all he had left for a hat was his stupid Santa hat from San Diego. We only made it halfway up the beach before all the village kids came running down yelling “Santi Clase” “Santi Clase.” Dad asked mom to run to the store and buy him some candy to give out, she did and dad passed out a big bag of candy to his hearts content. Well Ian and I ran as far from this faux Santa as we could and all I can remember of the town is some dusty streets and an amphibious vehicle called a Duck that was rusted out and sitting next to the fish warehouse were we had to lug 60 pound blocks of ice from back to the boat after dad was finished playing Santi Clase.
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Josh and his Duck

At second glance the town is much the same; a dust bowl of dirt streets and an old duck! The road in was an arduous one, some 60 miles of the worst washboard dirt, deep sand, cliffs with no railings or shoulder, potholes the size of Volkswagens, and of course the road construction (destruction). There was one point were I was sure Ian and his 700 pound bike with bald tires was going to meet his doom. We were coming through a mountain pass following a dump truck when suddenly he turned off to the left in what looked like a small bike trail... When we came through his dust and could see again we know why he choose this bike path, there was a valley between two small mountains that they had been filling so that the road did not go down in to the valley, well it was completely unpacked like standing on the edge of an eroding dune, in all fairness a steamroller had made one pass this however seemed to make it worse. So basically it was a lot like riding your bike across a frozen pond surrounded by a 400ft drop.

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The Rowan Brothers on the Road between seas of salt flats.

salt flats

When we reached the town we were excited as well as fearful of the thought that we would have to drive back out so we decided not to talk about it. We ate lunch at a small restaurant on the hill. One of the waitress/cooks kids was hanging around between delivering food and started asking questions about the motorcycles. It turned out his name was Daniel and he liked the green one more than the silver but really wanted us to buy him one. He was a bit of a special kid and would just randomly turn around while talking to you or jump off the neighboring wall and hide while we engaged him with questions about school, friends, and his parents. Of course Ian made him cry when he asked him about his apparently absent father that was living in Guerrero Negro. Then I tried to fix things by offering him some American money; a nickel and a dime which Daniel rightly said was worthless continued his bawling into his now muddy hands. I told him they were special ones that would bring him luck. He snorted and put his head in is teeny dirty hands and continued to cry. Then all of a sudden he perked up and asked us for pesos, something he explained that actually had value. His mother’s cooking was excellent, more delicious fish tacos! Another waitress asked for a ride- I told her I would give her one if she showed us a pace to camp and along the way she somewhat desperately explained that Bahia Tortugas was a very, very quiet town…

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We ended up staying at a hotel in town because neither Ian nor I could be bothered to set up camp (30 min of opening and closing side bags). We walked around town in the dark looking for something reminiscent of our time here as children and happened to almost bump into the aforementioned Duck in the dark. We ate some cold corn on the cob and walked out on the pier that overlooked the bay and its fishing boats (one with all its lights apparently cleaning fish by the amount of seagulls teeming around it) and the four sailboats lazily swaying on their anchors in the night. The next morning I went for a run on the beach just as a squall was hitting the town; it seemed to stay just one hundred yards behind me for about five miles and when I turned around it was gone. The beach had an incredibly low slope and circled around to a point giving a perfect view of the village for the run back, later that day Ian and I raced our bikes down it and captured it with the helmet cam.

-Joshua Rowan