A Travelogue: Part 1

Loy and I went to the southern tip of Baja California on Dec. 13 and got back Dec. 25. We flew into Cabo San Lucas and stayed in a hotel in San Jose del Cabo a few days and at a rented cottage in La Paz for a few days.

I've split my photos up into a number of categories, so I'll post some pix and some comments in a series of posts aligned with the categories.

A few days into the trip we left San Jose and bussed to La Paz. There, after a few days, we bussed for the day to a beach called Balandra and spent about six hours on a beautiful lagoon. Later we went to a nearby beach, Tecolote, with a view of the island Espiritu Santu (Holy Spirit).

This is the Gulf of California, the Sea of Cortez. John Steinbeck hung out in these parts. Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea about an incident he witnessed here.


The formation below is the defining feature of Balandra Beach. The beach is bounded on three sides by volcanic cliffs.










The lagoon at Balandra is really sweet. The water doesn't get more than knee-deep for several hundred feet out from the beach. You can see starfish and shrimp as you walk on its nice sandy floor.



At Balandra Beach there was vendor selling pop and fish tacos (pretty good, too). The shots below are from Tecolote, about half a mile away, and with a view of Espiritu Santu. Immeditely below is the facilities, a small hotel, a restaurant and a bar.


Espiritu Santu across the bar.


Espiritu Santu at sunset. We planned to take a snorkeling charter the next day out to Espiritu Santu, where we were guaranteed opportunities to engage with sea lions and whale sharks, with a high possibility of a close encounter with a gray or humpback. The next day was too windy for the charter. We had no other opportunity to do the charter.