Baja Day 5: Cabo San Lucas

This is the events of our fourth full day of the expedition. All photos from this day can be found here. The daily expedition report is also available.

After a long night of trying to sleep in pitching seas, we awoke to seals barking at sunrise at Land’s End right at the edge of the Cabo San Lucas harbor. To be fair, I was the only one that couldn’t sleep. Christine slept like a log.

The rocks at Land’s End are spectacular. Huge rocky monoliths sticking hundreds of feet vertically from the sea. There is even an arch.

There were a few clouds in the sky, making for an even more impressive sunrise.

We moored in Cabo San Lucas for refueling and resupplying.

Cabo’s economy is entirely tourist driven and it is booming. This is clearly a playground for rich americans. One look at the numerous multi-million dollar, US based, private yachts in the harbor confirmed that! As such, there are a multitude of mega-construction projects.

Beyond the simple beauty of the town and emphasis on Tequila, it felt like every other seaside party town. Lots of cheese-ball gimmicky bars and restaurants. Even so, there were about a dozen little hole in the wall eateries I would have loved to have visited. A couple of places offered “you catch it, we clean/cook it” policies. And the place is cheap. Certainly, a place we will have to revisit some time. Just have to figure out how to avoid the TGI-McFunsters crap.

While the ship restocked, we opted to head to San Jose — about 15 minutes bus ride — to walk through an estuary and visit the smaller, and only slightly less touristy, shopping district there. San Jose certainly felt like a more welcoming town and had significantly less of the party-cheese-ball taint about it.

The estuary was loaded with birds. But there were a lot of dead fish (indicating water pollution) and a couple of dogs terrorizing the birds. While a great start, there is clearly some work to be done before the estuary can truly be called a bird sanctuary. There were also a handful of native trees in bloom.

The village had an awesome liquor store that specialized in Tequilas. Dozens and dozens of varieties, many not available in the states. They even had a bottle of 3-4-5! Many of the more popular brands of high end tequilas were more expensive than one might find stateside. $140US for a bottle of Don Julio 1942. That can be had stateside for about $120US. However, if you knew what to look for, there were some true bargains. I ended up with four tequilas; three of which were both considerably cheaper and nearly impossible to find stateside. The fourth was simply damned tasty and decently priced.

On the way back to the ship, we ran into a bit of tourist trap. Some local dude with a couple of iguanas that wore cute hats. $2 for a picture opportunity. OK. I’m in.

This afternoon and evening, we are traversing the southern tip of the Baja peninsula to turn north towards La Paz. The seas are somewhat rough, with the ship occasionally tossing water high into the air. There are humpback whales blowing and diving all around us, but none terribly close to the boat. The landscape off to our north is spectacular, though the air is a bit hazy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 1:24 am and is filed under Life, Nature, Photography, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.