The area that has long been known as Junkyard of the Pacific becomes
an interesting side trip for an Insider reader and his grandson
by Vince Landis
(Click on images in this article to expand)
 The National Geographic recently added
to the lore about Malarrimo Beach, the junkyard of the Pacific. It is
on a stretch of shoreline which reaches about sixty miles west from
Guerrero Negro, past Scammon’s Lagoon and Malarrimo Beach out to Point
Eugenia north of Turtle Bay. Just west of the grey whale breeding lagoon,
this beach is noted for catching vast quantities of objects drifting
in from the Pacific Ocean. Grandson, Joe, and I decided to go explore
it.
He came to Lakeside Monday evening, June
21, 2004, and we left in the Toyota Tacoma at 0700 on Tuesday morning.
We took the new 125 and 54 freeways to Chula Vista, and I-805 south
to Tijuana. The new overpass in Tijuana took us directly to the border
road leading to Playas de Tijuana and Rosarito. It was a beautiful morning.
 Two sailing ships are still on the movie set where the Titanic once
“sailed”. South of Rosarito, just north of Cantamar, we stopped to take
a picture of the concrete nude sitting in a back yard in a residential
zone. We don’t know her history, but assume that the statue was contracted
for and the deal fell through, so there she sits with a detached hand
on top of a garage. We arrived in Ensenada at ten o’clock and went
directly to the Migration
office to get our tourist visas. We told the friendly officer that
we wished to enter legally this time, and he was happy to oblige.
One must make a trip to the bank to pay the required $20.00 each
fee. On the way to the bank, we were approached by, what we believe
to be a panhandler, who gave us a wild running story of being an
American seaman from Seattle who was sent by his captain to deliver
some abalone, but his car was impounded and his papers held
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 by the police and I don’t
remember what all else. All he wanted was ten dollars for bus fare and
a ride to the bus station. His story was so good that we did so. On
the way back we passed a good bakery and Joe bought a dozen bolillos
while I pretended to try to park the car in a space which was much too
small. With Joe and the bolillos on board, we went to the bank and returned
to the visa office.
We left Ensenada at eleven. There was
heavy truck traffic on the highway because of the intensive vegetable
farming south of Ensenada. We stopped for gas at San Vicente’ (my town).
The attendant was a particularly nice fellow who spoke excellent English.
In San Quintin we found El Jardin restaurant which Bob Griffith had
mentioned as excellent. It is located in a beautiful park-like garden
with trees, lawns, shrubs, and flowers. There was a wonderful flowering
artichoke with large purple blooms. Peacocks stroll the grounds. We
had a great lunch while Beau slept on the lawn. Joe ordered garlic fish
and I ordered fish in mango sauce. Both were done to perfection and
accompanied by potato salad, seasoned rice, and lightly steamed broccoli,
cauliflower, and carrot chunks.
Just beyond El Rosario the Cerio (Boojum
) trees and elephant trees started dominating the sparse vegetation.
Before long, the large granite boulders characteristic of Cataviña appeared.
We stopped just below town and turned into an all year stream bed for
some shade and rest. Here we saw the first of several wells pumped by
power from a solar panel. Soon a police black and white turned in with
ball gum machine flashing. The officers said that we had blown through
town at 81 Kph. We wished that we had parked behind the bushes. They
were courteous and gave me a 30% senior discount on the ticket. So we
parted friends.
 Shortly, we went through Villa Jesus
Maria and saw the huge (ugly) steel eagle which marks the border between
the State of Baja California and the State of Baja California Sur. This
is where we needed to show the tourist visas. We also had to pay a fee
for the man who squirts a bit of insecticide on each tire. A less effective
method to prevent the spread of insects would be hard to imagine, but
it is an excellent fund raiser. They checked us for chicken and beef,
but we had grilled lamb and pork on this trip, so we were OK. We would
have lied anyhow, of course. This is also the point at which one is
supposed to set the clock forward one hour. Although one thinks the
west coast goes south, Guerrero Negro, on the Pacific side of the peninsula
is on the 114th longitude which is east of Yuma, all of Nevada, and
Missoula. Joe and I decided to remain an hour behind the natives so
that we would not suffer jet lag. Heck, I get jet lag flying to Seattle.
The book Baja Legends, by Greg Niemann, recommends the Malarrimo Motel-restaurant-bar-RV
park, in Guerrero Negro as interesting, excellent and economical. Since
we were headed for Malarrimo beach, what could be more appropriate?
Guerrero Negro is the home of the largest salt recovery facility in
the world. Sea salt has been harvested from Scammon’s Lagoon in harmony
with the nearby breeding ground of the California Gray Whales for many
years. We were only fifty miles east of our objective, as the crow flies,
but it is about one hundred and fifty by road. While waiting for dinner,
Joseph and I toured the bar. It has a nice collection of flotsam recovered
from Malarrimo Beach. There were sand blasted bottles, fishing floats,
wooden oars, round army containers about three feet long and eight inches
in diameter, lots of construction helmets and a wooden ships wheel.
The walls had pictures of flotsam and of the nearby grey whales. Joe
ordered crab for dinner and got a large crab body shell stuffed with
delicious crab meet. To be different, I ordered the octopus plate. It
turned out to be tender octopus chunks in about an equal amount of tasty
small brown mushrooms. Rooms at the Malarrimo Motel were only twenty
dollars and had all night lights, hot showers, drinking water in the
room, coffee in the room, soap & shampoo, and a charming decor featuring
whale and nautical scenes. This makes it a five star hotel in my book.
The next morning an old Baja hand (www.Bajainsider.com)
said, “And no loud music coming from the car wash next door!”
In the morning, I walked Beau and chatted with a friendly
couple who had spent the night in their bus conversion in the RV portion
of the Malarrimo complex The bus advertised surf boards on the side,
so I assume they are following their dream in a tax deductible manner.
More power to them. We left at about eight o’clock, nine local, briefly
toured the town of Guerrero Negro and turned south-east to the farming
town of Vizcaino. This small town and the surrounding Vizcaino Desert
are the sole heritage of the navigator who renamed most points of interest
in the Californias in 1600. These include La Paz and San Diego and many
other landmarks. We topped off the gas, and turned northwest toward
our goal. The first forty five miles of blacktop was in good condition.
Then started the really bone jarring washboard of an overused gravel
road. There were very shallow extensions of Scammon’s Lagoon which reached
clear down to the highway and even south of it.
One
causeway over a bay featured gobs of sea foam, like soap suds, blowing
up the bank and across the road. Another had well formed cakes of pure
salt on the shore and men were picking them up, presumably to take them
to the salt plant to sell. There was a pipeline beside the highway and
we saw a coyote resting in the shade of a large valve. The road had
an abundance of fog warning signs like “Fog Area”, “Dim lights in fog”,
and “Drive Slowly When Foggy”. These are interspersed with signs to
protect the rare species of antelope unique to that area.
It was twenty six miles from the end of the pavement
to the turn off to Malarrimo Beach. The road out to the beach is a “virgin
road” which has never seen a bull dozer or a road grader. My kind of
road! We turned off at eleven and were at the beach at twelve forty
two.
Along the road were quite a number of elephant trees
with small bright red flowers on the brushy branches off of the fat
grey trunks. A particularly enjoyable section of road went along a high
ridge where one could see a very large canyon below and the ocean in
the distance. Then the road
went down a narrow crooked wash into the sandy bottom of the canyon,
called Caribe Wash, and followed it to the coast. There was a lot of
flotsam tossed onto the sand at the mouth of the wash. The flotsam was
mostly plastic bottles and containers, lots of thongs from every beach
on the west coast, glass bottles with caps or corks, and Styrofoam floats.
Unlike the Oregon coast, the driftwood was mostly huge timbers and pilings.
We walked about a half mile down the beach and found nothing unusual.
The “prizes” were collected at rock piles or washouts
in the bank. Otherwise, the beach was clear clean sand. We returned
to the pickup and dined on burgers made of a large barbequed Portobello
mushroom on a bun. Joe gave them a gallant try, but decided to stick
with carnivore burgers. Then a nap. The wind made even that a little
tricky because it blew sand in your face if given an opportunity. We
let the air in the tires down to twenty pounds and drove two miles east
on the beach to a point where a small lagoon intruded.
There was more of the same materials, some of which
was tossed high on the bank by winter waves. We also saw a dead seal
and a dead dolphin. They were interesting and desiccated so that they
didn’t stink. Then we drove three miles south to a rocky point and returned.
I only collected a small foam fishing float and a wheel from a Tonka
Truck. Was it a flop? Souvenir wise, yes. But it was interesting and
worth another visit after the winter storms and before a huge number
of whale watchers have combed the beach.
The return trip to the main road was faster. On the way we saw a very
interesting wild cat. It was about a twenty pound cat with a long tale
and a fairly dark brown coat. It was too large with too long a tail
to be a feral cat. It had no spots or other markings. The best match
on the Internet was the Jaguarundi. It left at a leisurely lope, like
a coyote, but did not stop on the ridge to look us over as a coyote
would have. I drove most of the washboard main road fairly slowly with
the right wheels in the reasonably smooth ditch. This required being
alert for rocks in the ditch, and even worse, washouts to the arroyo
below.
Finally my patience ran our and I joined the other vehicles
in going fifty miles per hour. We were running low on gas, but, rather
than get out the spare gas, we made it into Vizcaino on fumes. We went
across the street to the restaurant with the most trucks out front and
had excellent tortas. I liked the floor tiles which were ceramic squares
about one foot wide. The pattern looked like a wood floor with inlaid
wood diamonds. Next door was a twenty eight dollar motel which couldn’t
hold a candle to our twenty dollar on the night before. But we were
not up to driving another forty miles to Guerrero Negro.
The beds were half inch plywood resting on concrete
piers. There were good enough mattresses but no box springs. The towels
had an abrasive quality. Our commode was baby blue with a white tank
cover and a purple Walmart seat cover and floor mat. However, the motel
was a quadrangle where we could back up right to the door of our room,
and there was no objection to Beau - or us. Actually, it wasn’t bad
at all until the workmen started hammering next door at 0700 local time.
I made boiled coffee on the tailgate and we had bolillos for breakfast.
We went back to the Pemex station and inflated the tires to highway
pressure. Then we crossed the street to get ice and Tecate beer. We
went the forty miles to Guerrero Negro and another twenty to Villa Jesus
Maria where we planned to top off the gas tank. Typically, planning
efficiently does not work in Mexico and the gas pump at Jesus Maria
was out of order. Undaunted, we went another twelve miles up the highway
and took the dirt road to the coast. It was an area of sparse vegetation
and beautiful sand beaches separated by rocky headlands.
Typically the northwest winds blew sand from the beaches
onto the headlands which then looked like they had a light coat of snow.
We saw no vehicles until we entered the town of Santa Rosalillita. This
town was to be the Pacific port for the ill conceived Escalera Nautica
Del Mar De Cortes, a proposal to haul yachts from the Pacific Ocean,
across the peninsula to the Sea of Cortez. The result is two large signs
proclaiming the project, a deserted breakwater, and a large flat parking
lot. A more useful project would have been a fuel dock because yachts
typically have barrels of diesel on deck for the long trip from Cabo
San Lucas to San Diego.
We followed the main dirt road north and shortly discovered the quarry
which had been the source of the basalt boulders for the breakwater.
There we turned west and followed an ever diminishing trail along the
coast.
This was virgin road with more deserted beaches with
sand frosted southern headlands. The road finally disappeared completely,
so we retraced our path to the quarry and took the main road inland.
Several times, we used the GPS to determine our position and to identify
intersections. This was the first time I used the GPS this way. It was
fun and very reassuring The road went around a mountain and returned
to the coast. The inland portion included some real dust basins where
vehicles had tried multiple routes, all deep with dust.
I made the mistake of stopping once and heavy dust came
in the window and covered everything. Near the dust holes, we met a
truck with a box bed pulling a panga accompanied by a van. In one hundred
and seventy five miles of dirt roads, these were the only vehicles we
met. Inland from Punta Lobos, we saw a Cerio blooming, it was too late
to see blooms in most of the area we had covered. Near Punta Vibora
(viper or rattlesnake), we saw another Jaguarundi. This one was the
same size and shape, but was a much lighter tan color. Soon it was getting
dark and we decided to camp on an inland ridge. The coast was too windy
and chilly to be fun camping. We found a relatively smooth spot and
laid out our bedding.
The campsite was surrounded with Cerios, Joshua Tree
like yuccas called datilillo, elephant trees, ocotillos, and chollas.
Some of the yuccas had yellow blossoms. I dined on barbequed pork on
Ciabatta rolls with hot sweet mustard but Joe didn’t feel hungry. Beau
stood guard as we slept under the stars. Breakfast was re-hydrated soup
and coffee We looked under the truck for loose bolts or other problems,
and finding none, we put our ten gallons of spare gasoline into the
tank and went on north.
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