Welcome to The Baja California

It’s a Foggy morning in the mission beach area of San Diego. The Taco Stand hasn’t opened, and sleepy Hostellers pack surfboards into their Mitsubishi. A Jacked Up Ford Expedition with a “Support The Troops” bumper sticker next to one that reads “Second place is the first loser” roars out of the alleyway and onto the street. The Swell, when I check it, is bigger than yesterday but blown out. It Matters not, we’re going to Mexico today. My Coffee is Starbucks- it’s the only place open this time. San Diego is a little dirtier than the other American cities, but the tits are as artificial as anywhere in California.
Last night when we pulled in, Jay and Troy were eager to gag on the Horrible food at Hooter’s in exchange for some PG titillation. Our server was a short Midwestern loudtalker with cannonball tits and crooked eyes. She told us her name was ‘Gina’ and wrote it down on a napkin in jagged italics with a sharpie on a napkin.
“We’re surfer’s” Said Jay “On our way to Mexico.”
“I’m Not a Big fan of Mexico. None of us are around here.” She said.
“We’ll be camping.” Said troy
“Camping, that sounds terrible!”
“We’re all the way from Canada, it was minus forty four when we left Edmonton”
I said.
She looked out the window towards the Ocean, and her crooked glassy eyes lit up. She smiled and pointed at a dark shape floating on the horizon. We all looked out to see “Is that a Cruiser or a Battleship?” She asked.

San diego is California’s southernmost city. A Military town with plenty of students, the Migrant workers that creep northwards are not welcome here, unlike the other cities in California.

Twenty four hours ago we woke up in a desserted state campground on the outskirts of Malibu. Driving through on the 101, the hilltops were lined with modernist mansions. Every gas station in that posh coastal beach community provides gas, oil, smokes, free water and air, and five to ten Mexicans eager to do whatever dirty work the Mercedes driving Mansion owning Malibu Stacy’s won’t do. In Malibu, the white people don’t work. Even in Santa Barbara, Work, as in labour, is something for the freedom earning underclass.

Three days ago, I was skateboarding around at sunrise on Presidents day in the Santa Barbara downtown. The Illegals, like gnomes or Oompaloompas, could be seen everywhere, quietly, and diligently polishing garbage cans, scraping gum off sidewalks, changing lightbulbs and cleaning out gutters. By the time the Jogging girls were running, and the Winos were rolling out from under their rocks hacking up the nightly accumulation of filth, the Oompas had again disappeared, magically receding into their underground chambers.
Santa Cruz, though, is the Ultimate California City. We passed through there briefly on our way south, Taking a couple hours to check out the world class surf spots that pepper the coastline of those parts, and the world class surfers that pepper those spots. There are thousands of surfers in the water at any given time around Santa Cruz, and more when the swell is good.
Steamer lane was by far the most impressive wave I’ve ever seen. Hundreds, if not a few thousand were lined up behind guard rails along the clifftops to watch the surfers. The swell was big that day, and it was ‘going off’. There is literally a lane of swell humps that can be seen rolling in from a mile out, and they slowly grow larger and darker as they form up into these unstable mountains of gurgling jello. The crest starts to form up as the off shore breeze lifts ‘steam’ off the top of the wave, and gunners waiting way on the outside paddle desperately in futile attempts to catch the fast moving mountain of water at it’s break point. There were some epic bails. Those who could paddle fast enough to catch the wave and rode down the point expertly wove their way through a gauntlet of forty or fiftry bobbing surfers all the way down the line up, before dropping off their boards just before the steamer crashes against the sea cliffs that line the coast along those parts.
The Spirit of surfing is king in Santa cruz, the people are all beautiful. If people aren’t in the water they’re riding a long board, meditating, tanning, or doing yoga or pilates. Skate and BMX parks are as common as gas stations. Along the coastal boulevard people in all manner of strange, self propelled, wheeled contraptions. A wide variety of longboards and skateboards in all shapes and sizes, roller skates, inline skates, and inline skateboards. All different kinds of bikes. There was a girl hustling along on some sort of penny farthing style unicycle, and a dude on some sort of weird bike that turns at both the back and front wheel. He was pulling off some bizarre shit. All the women have sun bleached hair, drum tight midriffs, and perfect skin. I’m not kidding. All of them- even the old ones. Happiness, at least the illiusion of happiness, is tantamount. Even the Winos were trim, tan, and Jolly.

Ahead of us Baja awaits, but first we pass through Tijuana. This is making Troy nervous, and in the San Diego Tribune, daily reports of kidnapped Americans, and assassinated police chiefs sprinkle the headlines. A photograph of some Fedrales (Mexican federal Sodliers) patrolling the Tijuana streets in a black armoured pick up truck with a gringo manning a .50 calibre machine is splayed across the front page of the weekly independent. I guess I’ll find out for myself this afternoon what’s really going down.


Welcome to the Baja California:

Crossing The border from Sandiego into the gaping, reeking jaws of Tijuana was like night and Day. What a difference a few hundred Metres Makes. There was no trouble getting through the border- the one border guard sits facing Mexico making sure nobody tries to sneak through to America. They don’t care who enters. Tijuana is organized chaos, and instantly we were in a place where nobody spoke our language. Everything is in a state of deterioration, or partial reconstruction. Taco stands blow smoke through the leaves of dead palms as hungry gringos gather around mounds of smoking meat waiting to eat. “Farmacistos” stand in front of prescription drug stands in shabby white uniforms shilling out cheap drugs and street vendors with sunken faces sell polished human skulls. The Peso is worth one tenth of a dollar, and the vehicles are not much crappier that the ones you see in Edmonton. Traffic lights are rare- There are no rules for crossing the street, you just deal with it. I saw a double parked Volvo get pushed out of the way by an angry Gringo in an f-150. Troy was very nervous, his eyes dodgy and his mannerisms stiff and jerky. He was saying “Gracias” to everybody. Jay and I were excited, you perk up in a dangerous place and it makes you feel alert, and more alive. I saw the federale manning a .50 cal mounted on the back of a pick up truck driving by. Just like in the photo.

After a couple hours running from lineup to lineup and wicket to wicket navigating the Mexican auto insurance bureaucratic nightmare, we got on the Baja Highway 1 headed south out of Tijuana, passing slums and crowds of riot police (doing what, I don’t know, but there was about twenty of them all scrambling off to some emergency with plexiglass sheilds, helmets, and batons.

Out of the city, running down a hundred kilometers of coastline there was garbage everywhere. The corridor between the highway and the ocean was filled with real estate developments- walled communities- either in a state of construction or disrepair. Also “Campos”, basically scummy trailer parks. Little towns blended from one into another the whole way down, and none of the town names correlated with the ones ones on the map. We Checked out K38- a famous Baja Surf spot, but the swell was bad. Half naked kids and flea ridden, crippled dogs running around everywhere. Abandoned diapers swarming with flies.

It took us about two hours to find a campsite. Signs for them are everywhere, but they were all just gravel patches with a barrel to put your garbage in. The thing was, they all wanted between sixteen and twenty dollars per person per night. It was tough to figure out, because we slept in a beautiful Cali state park campground near Malibu a few nights previous and didn’t pay a dime.
Just before sunset we found a place- Playa Salamando- where the ratio between first world rates and third world accommodations didn’t seem so severe. We rolled down a steep and crickety dirt road into a magical little world of white outhouses, white tables and a labyrinth of lanes and campsites lined with thousands of white painted boulders, all of it nestled into the steep, rocky hillside between the ocean and Baja highway 1. We pulled into a perfect oceanview spot, and the waves were looking great. It was looking like we’d be able to surf there in the morning. I set up Gordy’s old tent, and picked my way down a pile of grey red and black boulders to the rocky beach below to get a closer look at the break.

There were bits of plastic from all over the pacific washed upon the beach, up and down the shoreline. Shoes, rope, pepper shakers, Barbie shoes, spatulas, and a multinational myriad of plastic beverage containers.
I looked out at the waves. They were breaking beautifully, with a long peeling right on a perfect six foot wave, and a short, mushy left that looked good for Troy and myself. But an hour or so later the tide receded to reveal jagged, toothy razor sharp boulders- seven or eight, but spread out evenly through the surfable waves. It looked like we wouldn’t be going out there in the morning. I looked down at my feet, and the rocks were teeming with cockroaches. Fortune Cookie. There were thousands of them, swarming all over the beach. They scattered when you came close, but they were everywhere, crawling over every rock and in every plastic bottle, hording over washed up tangles of sea weed.
It was getting dark, but I found some wood lying around and gathered it up for a fire. Jay and Troy picked up a couple bundles more at five dollars a piece, and we made a fire. The wood was treated with some sort of preservative, and it belched plumes of toxic black smoke out over the pacific. 2 beers then bed. When I got up, it was raining and blowing, and the ground had turned to a watery grey-brown porge. After adding some more pegs to Gordy’s old tent, I walked up the lane towards the outhouse (Banyo) and my shoes clumped up with mud. As I approached the steeper part of the road it became slippery, and I was sliding around. There was a little river of mud running down the center of the road. A Snarling dog was straining his leash trying to get at me. It occurred to me that we wouldn’t be driving out of this place until thing dried up a bit.
Our last bit of coffee blew away and I watched as the filter and a puff of black granules drifted off with the wind towards the cruise ship at the horizon. Jay set up the table in his van and we played poker for about fourteen hours or so. I cleaned out the table six games in a row, and it made Jay’s face turn red and he began to swear more as the veins in his forehead became pronounced.
Next day the sun came out and things began to dry up around mid afternoon. The Gringo running the place sauntered over from his trailer and informed us in sign language that the road was dry enough for us to leave. So we packed up our shit and drove to the steep section. On one side, sheer dirt cliff rising up, and on the other, sheer dirt cliff going down. Jay took a run at it, and we got about two thirds of the way up before the tires spun, and with the brakes locked we slid back down to the start. After two tries we finally got up the hill, the Van’s tires spraying mud over Mexico. It took the full effort of myself and two Mexicans to pry jay’s fingers from the steering wheel.

Ten minutes later we rolled into Ensenada, and got a decent hotel room for little more than it cost us to be stranded on a cockroach infested unsurfable mudpit beach with pretty white painted rocks lining the treacherous crumbling roads

Ensenada is a tourist town, as megalithic cruise ships dock in the port so an unsexy conglomerate of Canadians can meander through the Mexican Klondike days style arrangement that the city has prepared for these pasty tourism aficionado’s to gawk at. Every restauraunt, bar, and strip club has a dude that yells things in Spanish in a fruitless effort to convince you to attend the establishment he represents. Mayan street vendors hawk Mexican wrestling masks and ‘your name on a grain of rice!’
A crowd of young male Canadian Lebs (The Same rancorous loudmouths I endured through highschool) swarmed us at a taco stand so I pulled out my Chuchillo and stuck the ugliest one in the kidney and flashed the shining red blade at the others. One of the Lebs, a fat one with hot horrible breath snuck up and grabbed hold of my knife hand hooking his other arm around my neck. The others were ready to pounce but Jay managed to get between them and let loose a furious windmill on the skinnier Leb with the furry upper lip and gold chain. Troy capitalized on the distraction by driving his foot up the ass of the slower one, and the bastard’s face went red and bugeyed as he keeled to the ground and recoiled into himself like a salted snail. I stomped the foot of the fat one who had me subdued- he squealed like a pig, and it gave me the time I needed to wrench my knife hand free. I broke loose of his grab and spun around, slicing open his gut, hari kari style, and the sweaty lummox came to his knees and died with his guts spilling out over the sidewalk. “Sorry about the mess” I said, and motioned for Jay to tip the Taco vendor handsomely as we went looking for beer. A mariachi band followed us up the street parade style and small brown children with missing teeth sprinkled flower pedals before our feet. It was free beer and hookers for the rest of that night, and I doubt there will be another one like it soon.
The next morning we woke up nursing hangover’s and after a couple hours lazing around the hotel room we sauntered down for a continental breakfast of tang and Due (Mexican cocoa puffs). We climbed into the Van’s and wove our way through a tangle of razor wire junkyards and shanty towns down ragged dirt roads to the ocean where we put on our damp, sandy wetsuits and paddled about half a kilometer across a small bay to a clean fifty foot point break that goes to the left and to the right. We shared it with a trio of boogeyboarding locals.
Bobbing up and down watching seals and grey whales in the clear green blue waters I thought about when we left fourteen days ago. The day we said goodbye to Poof and Fred and everybody. Troy’s hands and feet turned into icy clubs as we froze our asses off on the yellowhead in Alberta hustling west in a drafty 92 chevy astro with “I was washing my Hair” blasting on the radio.
I caught wave after wave until I was too weak to stand up on my board. I’m finally starting to feel as though I have Arrived.