Baja’s Secret Shores : Uncovering Some Surprises in a Search for the Perfect Baja Beach Town Along the Sea of Cortez : A Search for ‘Daydream of a Town’ on Sea of Cortez

LA PAZ, Mexico — I was unreasonable. I was impatient. I was, in short, a tourist from Southern California, sampling Baja California’s southern gulf coast for the first time. I wanted to discover virginal beaches, fresh fish in cheap restaurants, interesting architecture and friendly residents, all united within one unassuming, underexposed, tiny, highway-convenient town.

This hypothetical place would lie along the aquamarine shores of the Sea of Cortez, dawdling through life with sea-soaked languor, the way tourist-crazed Los Cabos at land’s end must have been a generation ago. This town would have an old Catholic church, shady side streets, and something on its mind other than luring more tourists. (Unlike thousands of American visitors to Baja, I wasn’t chasing marlin or roosterfish.) Surely, I reasoned, somewhere along the hundreds of miles that the Baja Highway spends snaking along the sheltered seashore from Santa Rosalia to this capital city, such a town would remain.

The good news for the Mexicans is that I didn’t find that daydream of a town--though it may well exist--and so I cannot send norteno hordes south to exploit and ruin it.

The good news for the rest of us is how much I enjoyed not finding it. Wandering through the coastal cities of Santa Rosalia, Mulege, Loreto and La Paz, I found my vision in bits and pieces--here the beaches, there the personalities, over there the unself-consciousness--but never all in the same place. By the trip’s end, the landscape had reshaped my expectations, and I had a new favorite Baja city.

No, I’m not telling yet. Be patient. Be reasonable. Remember, first, the words of Howard Estep and John Steinbeck.

Howard Estep is a guy I found one afternoon on a lonely beach between Santa Rosalia and Mulege. He sat in a beach chair near his wife of 40 years, Jeanine, sipping screwdrivers while their three dogs romped around them. Their 27-foot RV stood a few feet away, satellite mounted on the roof, barbecue by the door, and the warm gulf waters lapped more or less at their feet. For this spot they were paying $120 a month. “We gringos are ruining this place. But right now, it’s still beautiful,” said Estep. “I would choose Baja over Hawaii any time.”

Steinbeck’s words you may have already heard.

“Trying to remember the gulf is like trying to recreate a dream,” the author declared 52 years ago in “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.”

“But the gulf does draw one. . . . If it were lush and rich, one could understandthe pull, but it is fierce and hostile and sullen. The mountains pile up to the sky and there is little fresh water. But we know we must go back if we live, and we don’t know why.”

Trace your way down the Baja peninsula along the Gulf of California (better known to Steinbeck and a few million others as the Sea of Cortez), and you find Santa Rosalia at the midpoint.

Last October, a Times photographer and I arrived here by car on a trip down the Baja highway. Though tourism officials say the highway is again open after the storms and washouts of January, the drive would no doubt be a chancier mission now. In any event, most travelers to southern Baja travel by plane to the airports of Los Cabos, La Paz or Loreto.

From Santa Rosalia, Tijuana lies to the north, beyond 577 miles of highway. Cabo San Lucas lies 482 miles to the south. Across the gulf, at the other end of a regular eight-hour ferry route, lies Guaymas.

Downtown Santa Rosalia lies about four blocks wide and a mile deep, in a dusty declivity between two hills. The streets are narrow and tree-shaded, here and there bougainvillea creeping on a tin roof, but unlike every other town in Baja California, they are dominated by wooden buildings. The French, who started a copper mining operation here in the 1870s, insisted on importing lumber to largely treeless Baja.

The prefabricated iron church, another French import (designed by A.G. Eiffel), adds further strangeness of texture, mingling with the more predictable rusty hues of the old fishing boats on the waterfront. Between the clapboard of downtown and the waterfront jut the metallic shells of the old mine buildings, immense and mostly idle. The population of the town is about 11,000.

I made my first aquaintance, a taciturn young pistachio peddler, on the roadside. He wouldn’t bargain, perhaps because he knew he had quality goods, or perhaps because he saw our shiny rental car and figured we’d pay whatever he asked. Smart boy.

On foot, we passed a bookstore, a beaming naked boy being bathed by his father in a soapy plastic tub on the sidewalk, a sweet shop, and a pool room alive with sounds of smacking and rolling. At the closed-down old Hotel Central, two dozen aged mattresses lay stacked in the bare lobby. A handful of shops did seem aimed at tourists from the north, but on the day and night of a major local festival--the anniversary of the city’s incorporation in 1885--I saw only a handful of Americans.

Up Avenida Obregon at No. 30, the El Boleo bakery had three or four customers backed up at the service window. Across the street at No. 15, the Tokio Cafe offered four tables and a Mexican menu of beef, chicken and fish, all entrees under $5. But there was no hint of Japanese food in the Tokio Cafe--another mystery of formerly French Mexico.

Unless you’re the owner of one of those two dozen fancy boats in the harbor, that’s about all a person does in Santa Rosalia: stroll, stop for a bite, maybe snap some pictures. The beaches are outside town. There is nothing resembling a luxury hotel, though there are half a dozen modest places in town. Ocean-view rooms at the tidy, stone-walled El Morro, just a few miles down the highway, can be had for less than $30 a night.

If this were the U.S., or perhaps even mainland Mexico, a theme mall might be rooted inside those wonderful old mining structures, and the town’s quaintness would by now be a well-packaged and marketed tourism product. Instead, the old sheds loom emptily and Santa Rosalia goes about its business, housing commercial fishermen and serving as seat of government for nearby towns, while 19th-Century mists hang in the air.

Santa Rosalia is small. But Mulege, 38 miles south, is smaller still, with about 5,000 residents huddled in low, earthen buildings beneath several thousand palms. It feels like an oasis, and it may be the shade capital of southern Baja. The town is set about two miles from the coastline with a river running through it. Its streets are narrow enough to strike fear in the hearts of most RVers.

The locals can claim two well-known buildings: a mission founded in 1705 (also the year the town was founded) and the old territorial prison, now retired, which stands on a hill overlooking most of Mulege.

The commercial center of town amounts to no more than half a dozen streets, but the rising number of tourists is evident. There’s a dive shop where the saleswoman estimated 90% of the customers are American (and where I got a used snorkel and mask for $15). There’s a laundromat, a sportfishing shop called “El Gringo” and three trailer parks within two miles of town. One morning, after a huevos rancheros -and-bacon breakfast in the patio of Las Casitas hotel, we watched a dune buggy with Idaho plates rumble up the street, then bumped into a father and two sons on holiday from Los Angeles and San Diego.

We stayed at the Serenidad Hotel, a popular place across the river from town. The Serenidad counts many Americans among its regular customers, some of whom come and go via the neighboring airstrip. The hotel layout is ranch-style, and every room seems to be different. This is not all to the good: One room had an air conditioner that didn’t work, another had a burned-out light, and so on. Also, some of those regular American customers--particularly those who rent by the month--seem to spend a awful lot of time perched at the patio bar.

“They’re gonna blacktop the streets in Mulege, and I think that’s bull----,” one expatriate from Long Beach pronounced from his stool late on the night of my arrival. His poodle, Bobo, strolled up and down the countertop. A few stools farther down, two edgy American Easterners, who said they came for the fishing, were arguing about whose therapist was better. There was no clear winner.

Yet amid all that, the place had rough charm. Service was prompt and courteous. Fishing trips can be chartered. The Saturday night pig roasts are a longstanding, widely known tradition. And 13 miles south, there is Concepcion Bay.

Tranquil is the word. Veteran Baja traveler Jack Williams notes that Concepcion Bay is the largest protected body of water on the Gulf of California, which is itself a protected body of water. For 25 miles, the highway skirts the placid bay, yielding vistas known to excite even circumspect AAA guidebook writers. “Breathtaking panoramas,” they have written of the bay. “Sparkling blue-green waters . . . volcanic islands . . . inviting campsites.”

All true. The most popular of the bay’s several beaches, Santispac, is said to be often crowded in the peak winter season, and even on the October day we spent there, most of the palapas --beach shacks usually made of poles with palm-frond roofs--were occupied by campers and RVers. But by Southern California beach-going standards, Santispac was a treasure. Pelicans skimming the shores. Kayaks in rainbow colors. Jet-ski-free silence.

And it didn’t hurt that I had Roy Mahoff and Becky Aparicio to help me explore the place. Together, they run 4-year-old Baja Tropicales Island Kayak Adventures out of a waterfront headquarters known as La Palapa Kayaka , and offer a seductive $30 package deal: At 8 a.m., they lead a group of novice kayakers out to a tiny island a quarter-mile from the beach, identifying birds on the way, offering beginner’s lessons in snorkeling and clamming. On the paddle back in, the groups pause to relax in natural hot springs among rocks at water’s edge. And upon return to La Palapa Kayaka , there’s a lunch of fresh clams and beer or pop. The expedition breaks up around 3:30 p.m.

Arriving late, I got only a partial version of that, but I can attest to the tastiness of the clams, the exhilaration of the paddling, and the pleasure of sharing a moment’s rest in the shade and calm of an island’s leeward side with a pelican on a rock.

Loreto, 84 miles south of Mulege and 220 miles north of La Paz, is the town we were supposed to like best--the place marked by government tourism officials as the next great tourism destination on the gulf. It’s a flat, sunbaked grid with a waterfront walk and a population of around 9,000.

It’s also an old place. The first of the West Coast missions was founded there in 1697, Padre Junipero Serra began his California missionary expeditions there in 1769, and through the early 19th Century, Loreto remained capital of the Spanish-held West Coast.

I strolled up to the old mission building on Oct. 25, heard a great racket inside, and looked up at the doorway to find a chiseled coincidence: “25 Oct. 1697,” said the stonework. The standing-room-only crowd inside was celebrating the 295th anniversary of the West Coast’s first mission.

While they rattled the wooden beams and the whitewashed walls with chants, songs and prayers, I walked through the mission museum next door, inspected the cactus in the empty courtyard and the wreaths at the bust of the mission’s founder, Padre Juan Maria de Salvatierra. When the services ended, scores of children in their Sunday best scrambled to the door--the town’s 21st-Century faithful, spilling through the 17th-Century doorway into the dusty street.

Loreto has modern infrastructure, too: An airport outside town receives nonstop flights from California, and a massive Stouffer Presidente hotel stands on the coast about five miles south of town, fronted by a network of broad, palm-lined streets and open spaces. This area, Nopolo, is envisioned as a resort community that will capitalize on the area’s prime fishing and mild climate. Further attractions are planned at Puerto Escondido, 15 miles to the south.

But so far, the 12-year-old hotel and a golf course remain Nopolo’s principal attractions. And the hotel, for all its manicured grounds, tennis courts and seaside setting, was a comedown for us. Given no guidance by the desk clerk, we searched 10 minutes or more through the mazelike halls of the 250-unit complex before we found our rooms.

The better of the place’s two restaurants, we found, was closed. The hotel couldn’t have been more than 25% occupied, yet service was indifferent. One more element to the strangeness of it all: A lone deer was caged and displayed by the patio dining area, for reasons none of the waiters could articulate. Given another chance at Loreto, I’d probably stay in town at the deerless, lawnless Hotel Mision de Loreto on the waterfront, and spend $30 or $40 a night less.

Loreto has challenges to face. Baja traveler and author Jack Williams notes that even with its historical status in Baja, Loreto “has probably never been among its most charming” cities. And in these uncertain economic times, the timetable for touristic development is a wide-open question. The Moorings, an international yacht charter firm that for six years anchored the new development at Puerto Escondido, in December got tired of waiting for other developments to get done and relocated to La Paz.

Not a bad idea, relocating to La Paz. La Paz is the next major coastal attraction for anyone driving south on the Baja highway, and it was our next stop.

Lying more than 220 miles south of Loreto and more than 130 miles north of Los Cabos, the city conforms to none of the standard tourist expectations of a waterfront Baja destination.

It’s not small, not sleepy, not ripe for transformation. Instead, it’s a self-sufficient capital with a population around 170,000, its airport offering regular flights to and from the United States, its wharf offering ferries to Topolobampo, near Las Mochis, on the Mexican mainland.

We stayed at La Concha Beach Resort, a 107-room complex on the water with pool, palms, restaurant and a location a few miles beyond the tumult and traffic of town.

But there are many reasons to spend time in town: a cathedral, a central plaza, an anthropological museum, a theater for performing arts. Italian and Chinese restaurants. Day trips for fishing and diving take advantage of Espiritu Santo island, about five miles offshore.

On a Sunday night, the residents promenaded on the waterfront walkways by the hundreds. Sound systems pounded and a greenish spotlight mysteriously shone upon an empty blue fishing skiff, bobbing in the shallows like a ghost vessel. The streets teemed with activity.

Yet on beaches within 15 minutes of town, a visitor can find himself in communion with his snorkel, several thousand colorful fish and not another soul. I did that very thing on a Monday morning at Ballandra, a rock-lined inlet about 15 miles outside town, and found myself counting the virtues of La Paz.

La Paz has history: Hernan Cortes, conqueror of Mexico, arrived in 1535, followed by several centuries of pearl harvests, great fishing and intermittent hostilities among Spanish soldiers, the indigenous population, Jesuit missionaries and American troops. La Paz doesn’t have any bars owned by members of the rock band Van Halen (as Cabo San Lucas does), but it does have urban culture--that is, a variety of places to eat and a little nightlife. On its fringes, it has those empty beaches and the warm, fish-rich sea.

“It is a proud thing to have been born in La Paz, and a cloud of delight hangs over the distant city from the time when it was the great pearl center of the world,” that fellow Steinbeck wrote in 1941. “There’s a magic-carpet sound to the name, anyway. And it is an old city, as cities in the West are old, and very venerable in the eyes of Indians of the Gulf. Guaymas is busier, they say, and Mazatlan gayer, but La Paz is antigua .”

I wasn’t in town long, but there in the shallow water in Ballandra, seawater slowly leaking into my mask, I made a judgment: If I could see only one city on my next Baja trip, it would be La Paz.

GUIDEBOOK

Cities on Baja’s Sea of Cortez

Getting there: Aeromexico flies nonstop from LAX to La Paz, and Aero California has direct flights on the same route. There are various inter-line connections on carriers including Alaska Airlines and Air L.A. Advance-purchase round-trip fares begin at $204.

Aero California offers one nonstop flight to Loreto daily. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $220. Alaska, United, Mexicana and Aero California airlines fly nonstop to San Jose del Cabo airport, which lies near the Baja peninsula’s tip, about 140 miles south of La Paz. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $150.

Recent travelers say the 1,059-mile-long Baja Highway is again passable after damage from January’s storms. Santa Rosalia and La Paz are connected to mainland Mexico by car ferry service, but to be sure they travel with necessary paperwork Americans should consult with Mexican tourism officials

Getting around: Several car rental agencies have offices in La Paz, but prices vary widely. Hertz (800-654-3001) will rent a mid-size car in March for about $825 a week, plus 37 cents for every kilometer beyond 2,000. Avis (800- 331-1084), meanwhile, quotes a rate of $414, mileage unlimited, for essentially the same thing. The best-known U.S. companies don’t have offices in Loreto, and Aero California representatives (who fly to Loreto daily) say it is possible to rent a car at the airport once you’re there, but impossible to reserve one in advance from the U.S.

Where to stay: I stayed in, or looked through, the lodgings below. Most major hotels have agreements with, or information about, fishing charter services.

Santa Rosalia: Hotel El Morro, Apartado Postal 76, Santa Rosalia, BajaCalifornia Sur, Mexico; 29 rooms, restaurant. Double rooms from $28 nightly. Telephone 011-52-685-2-0414.

Mulege: Hotel Serenidad, Apartado Postal 9, Mulege, Baja California Sur 23900; 2 1/2 miles south of town off the highway, 50 units, neighboring airstrip, restaurant, pool. Double rooms about $50. 011-52-685-3-0111.

Loreto: Hotel Mision de Loreto, Apartado Postal 49, Loreto, Baja California Sur 23880; 36 units, restaurant, pool. Double rooms $40. 011-52-683-3-0048. Or, for those who want golf and tennis at hand, the Stouffer Presidente Loreto, Apartado Postal 35, Loreto, Baja California Sur 23880; rates for doubles start at $80 in winter, rise to $90 in summer; discount rates April 20-Dec. 19 begin at $75. 800-468-3571 or 011-52-683-3-0700.

La Paz: La Concha Beach Resort, Apartado Postal 607, La Paz, Baja California Sur 23010 (or c/o Baja California Mexico Tourism, 7860 Mission Center Court, Suite 202, San Diego 92108); 107 rooms, restaurant, pool, on the beach. Double rooms $85, falling to $70 in August and September. (800) 999-2252.

Where to eat: The restaurants listed here are the most notable of those I had a chance to try.

In Santa Rosalia, the location of Pepe’s Marisco Stand varies daily, but the proprietor has been in business four years, preparing seafood caught that morning. Scallops, shrimp and a beer for American tourists: $7. (Tourists are often advised to avoid salad, unpeeled fruit and tap water in Baja; the cooked seafood is said to be safer, and is often delicious.)

In Mulege, Las Casitas hotel and restaurant (Francisco Madero 50) has been an institution for 31 years, with pleasant patio. Dinner entrees $8-$14; the local telephone number is 685-3-0019. Also, the Hotel Serenidad (see above) restaurant offers dinner entrees from $11-$15.

In Loreto, Cafe Ole (Francisco Madero 14) is a casual, thatched-roof patio near central square, open for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Main dishes $4-$7; 683-3-0496.

In La Paz, Bismarck II (corner of Altamirano and Degollado) has seafood and a wall mural of a sinking German warship; TV in corner. Entrees $8-$33; 682-2-4854.

Where to paddle: Baja Tropicales Island Kayak Adventures (Apartado Postal 60, Mulege, Baja California Sur 23900) offers rentals and tours at Santispac Beach, Concepcion Bay; 011-52-685-3-0019.

For more information: Contact the Mexican Government Tourism Office, 10100 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 224, Los Angeles 90067, (800) 262-8900 or (310) 203-8191; Baja California Mexico Tourism, 7860 Mission Center Court, Suite 202, San Diego 92108, (800) 522-1516 or (619) 298-4105. For latest Baja highway conditions, Instant Mexico Auto Insurance in San Ysidro, (800) 345-4701.