Ruins

A repeated experience in Baja California is encountering blasted, destroyed, failed, shabby, deteriorating or ill-conceived and blighted human creations. Cinder block and rebar and sometimes land is cheap, but the infrastructure isn't there to support projects, or the money runs out, or the weather, the ferocious, fickle, fucked up weather, jumps all over whatever dreams puny humans have. One very sad and infuriating thing is that the Mexican idea of preparing land for sale or development includes completely removing all native vegetation, flattening the land out and making it completely bare, like a big mud flat tabula rasa. This is the vision of making the wildness habitable by humans, and it must make land more appealing to the Mexican sensibility or to the ex-pats who move there. It's a jaw dropping level of utter disregard for the environment and it often seems to invite ferocious pushback from the very gods. 

 The only structure at a "campground" outside Santa Rosalillita, a tiny little fishing town on the Pacific coast, which was selected for an ambitious and utterly absurd boondoggle called "La Escelera Nautica," more about which below.

 Another attempt at bathroom facilities, this time in Bahía de Los Angeles on the Sea of Cortez. There used to be a cinderblock and lumber palapa here, where the Poetess and I camped a couple of winters, but a hurricane dumped so much rain that flash floods raged through here and utterly destroyed it, and created a whole new 300 yards of beach in one night.

 The dunes about ten miles north of Todos Santos, where an extensive development was planned. In typical Mexican fashion, the signs used to be everywhere, there are little roads all plotted out, lots had been cleared of vegetation, etc. The thing is it's wild out here and the beach itself is absolutely not for swimming. It's a ferocious Pacific coast prone to hurricanes, riptides, etc.

 The wisest construction is sometimes these well put together palapas, this one at Playa la Perla in Bahia Concepcion. Local materials, easily replaced after they are utterly destroyed by a storm. .

 Mexican roadwork is eternal. And the usual style for the two lane highway construction is to just close the entire road, routing cars to the side on dirt and rock paths.

 In Bahía de Los Angeles, there is a long stretch of vacation homes to the north, on the way to the end of the bay, all of which were completely blown out by the last hurricane. Bahía de Los Angeles was also slated to be one of the stops on "La Escalera Nautica."

 An example of preparing a lot for sale along the Pacific coast. Every sign of life removed.

 A noble and extensive drainage and erosion control project along the treacherous hills through which the four lane toll highway runs from Tijuana to Ensenada, and which was closed for nearly two years by a huge landslide that completely destroyed about half a mile of the highway.

 One of the odd marketing things is people using American names for their business, like Patty's Panaderia, or Bety's Esthetica. Sometimes the phonetics get a little weird, and "Pete's", for example, becomes Pits.

 All that is left of the 18th Century Jesuit mission in El Rosario de Abaja. Missions still exist along the peninsula, but most are in ruins and in very remote locales.

 When you are a trucker, and you die on the Transpeninsular Highway, sometimes you get a fairly elaborate memorial that is well maintained by your friends and family. Usually the memorial includes hunks of your destroyed truck. The big one for Hector is famous along the road.

 A sign trying to indicate some rules of the beach, Bahía de Los Angeles. A perfect illustration of how rules usually fare.

 A decapitated sea turtle.

 Another memorial to a fallen trucker.

The little potted Ferocactus is touching. 

 The toughest and most well-adapted people on the peninsula who have turned a pretty good living from ranching, fishing or tourism, really know how to keep their places up and take care of their surroundings. Many house colors are vibrant and awesome. Water is via that huge black tank, that gets filled a few times a year. Entertainment courtesy Dish Network. Satellite internet.

 There are private property signs everywhere, but they are usually shabby, fading, and no one cares.

 In the background, from the "campground" in Santa Rosalillita, the huge facilities for "La Escalera Nautica" project. The idea was to build big ports along the Pacific and Gulf coasts, and connect those ports with wide roads. That way, pleasure craft could, for example, set sail from San Diego, arrive in Santa Rosalillita, get hauled out of the water and driven over to the Sea of Cortez, and then travel around on that side, and then get hauled out, and transported over to the Pacific. The idea was grand, ambitious, an interesting way to try to increase tourist money. Problems: No one wants to bring their six million dollar yacht within several miles of Baja's treacherous coasts; the bathymetry of the dredged ports was not well studied and, for example, six months after Santa Rosalillita had been fully dredged it filled in again and became impassable; people want ease and comfort in their yacht and sailboat travels, while only pretending to be into adventure. Baja is never about ease and comfort except maybe in Ensenada, La Paz and Los Cabos. People with enough money to boat around on the scale to which the Escalera Nautica project was conceived can just boat around. They don't need the incredibly complex headache of being extracted, driven, and re-launched. Anyway, the huge facilities in Santa Rosalillita now are empty, covered with graffiti, falling apart, rusting and morose.

 Misión San Francisco Borja, in the middle of the peninsula. I toured there once with the Poetess, led by a part Cochimi Indian guy named Gennaro. The place is amazing. What labor it must have been to get all of this incredibly heavy stone into this locale. The most sobering moment was when Gennaro pointed out the huge cemetery behind the mission. "That's where all of my people are buried, who died building this." A perfect moment for Baja, somehow.

 Most blank surfaces in Baja get inscriptions, or obscenities.

 An earth moving, vegetation destroying monster, broken down and with a flat tire, rusting out, in the middle of trying to kill that very nice old tree, some pieces of which had already been amputated. An effort to "improve" some beachfront property in Bahía de Los Angeles. Often,m not only is there no money to fix machinery, there isn't even money to retrieve it. 

 This and the next couple of pics, as far as the beachfront development has gotten. Cinder block and rebar. One of the other things that developers in Baja do is build these sort of grand entrances, archways, etc. Behind which? Nada.

 Another ruined vacation home. There is so little money and no responsibility for property at all, to the point that rebuilding just doesn't happen, let alone demolition or restoration of the land.

In the midst of all of this blasted turmoil, there are often attempts at decoration or improvement, usually kind of weird and whimsical.

The wilds are truly wild, but wherever people are, the wilds are also wild, and so the people are repeatedly defeated in any grand scheme. The most solid human presence is always in grudging cooperation with the furious land and the indifferent spirits. All human attempts to exert some kind of will, or to overcome the weather and wildness, always meet with catastrophe, and, even in the big cities like La Paz, everything is always falling apart and on the edge of ruin. It's both disheartening and inspiring, humbling and a powerful reminder. 

Once, after three weeks in Baja that included 11 nights of primitive camping, the Poetess and I arrived back in the United States, and, in the small Californian town of Portrero, just north of the border fence, we saw a guy using a leaf blower to clean up a parking lot. We both burst into manic laughter.