Slowly cooking

So when I left Wellington in winter, damp, cold, windy and more cold, I promised never to complain about the heat, and wished it to be hot, hot, hot.

Now is when I break my word, and bring out the old saying, "Be careful what you wish for."

Loreto, about three quarters of the way down the peninsula of Baja California (that´s the big sticky-out bit on the side of Mexico), is currently thirty degrees celsius. It´s 9.15 am. It reaches thirty eight degrees during the day. My traveling companion (who, fortunately, speaks Spanish pretty well) and I have been huddling inside the air conditioned motel room (painted a bright shade of orange) too afraid to go outside. Today we´re catching the bus and going north, hoping to find a beach and cooler air.

It´s beautiful here, though. Distant mountains provide a backdrop for palm trees and low-slung buildings. The mission was built sometime in the 1600s or something. Too bad the most comfortable place is the supermarket. They´re having a fiesta to celebrate the town´s anniversary, which is pretty cool, and they´ve got a few flags up. The music doesn´t start til after 11pm, and oddly enough there doesn´t seem to be any dancing.

Finding my way across the border and to the bus station in Tijuana turned out to be pretty much as hard, and not harder, than I´d thought. On my way out of San Diego in the tram I felt like I had stage-fright. But when you get into those kind of chaotic situations, something innate kicks in and gets you into a bus with a guitar playing mistrel, into a taxi when you get off the bus too early. You kind of go on auto-pilot, and somehow welcome the fact that you don´t have to pretend anymore; I feel like I spend a lot of energy in the US pretending like I´m not a tourist, trying not to make mistakes. But backpacking is fueled on mistakes. You put a certain amount in one end, with a certain amount of money, and see where you get to.

The roads here are a shock after the four-lane freeways in the US. The main road down Baja is two lanes, both seem incredibly narrow, with no shoulder at all. Our driver on the (nineteen hour!) bus ride down here took the bends at quite a speed, and smoked out the window. The sun rose on rolling barren hills filled with scrub land and the most awesome cacti. Wow! The men wear Texas-like cowboy hats and have short legs. The signs on shops are hand-painted. Compared to Egypt, this is easy living; hardly any harrassment from shop-keepers, and if there is any from men I can´t understand it so it´s easy to ignore. I think we´re in a rich part of the country. There are no homeless people, in comparison to San Diego where there are three to a corner. All the children are really cute, I want to steal one, and the beer is cheap.