We walked around the town with our budding siesta buzzes, and had a heavy gringo moment when we tested the theory that in Mexico you can get prescription drugs over-the-counter.  We went into the pharmacy asking for valium, and the pharmacist all but kicked us out.

About six hours after the snap of the power line we were free to go.  The damage estimate was $200 to the town, $90 to the house, and a $40 "infraction fee".  Rina went ballistic at the mention of this last one (pot cookies notwithstanding), and managed to get the fine reduced to $20.  I wish I'd seen it, but I'm told she had the Mexican police visibly cowering.  So we paid our $310, which theoretically will be reimbursed by our Mexican auto insurance, and were on our merry way the hell out of town.   We stopped at the first inviting beach. 

 For some reason the lines kept running through my head:  "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul, the tip of the tongue taking a trip down the palette to tap at three on the teeth, Lo-li-ta." 

The colors of the bay were fantastic.

As were the strange formations in the hills.  We found a fabulous place to camp right under this hill.

Beautiful of course, and completely abandoned except for the little fisherman's shack a few hundred yards up the coast.  There's lots of places to camp for free here.  It's a humungous coast, with only the least bit of development.  The only amenities the RV parks provide that these lack are warm showers and noisy gringo neighbors.

The snorkeling is great too.  The only problem is that the water teems with stingrays, which want to leave you alone but will whip their venomous tail deep into your flesh if you have the misfortune of stepping on one.   I'm told the pain is almost too much to bear.  They're everywhere gliding over the bottom, which is fine in the deeps, but in the shallows, when they're gliding 2 feet from your very vulnerable chest, it can really get the adrenaline going.   In the sandy shallows you drag your feet over the bottom in a move called the "stingray shuffle" to shoo them away, but in the kelp forests, which at low tide reach the surface, it's another story:  you're completely blinded and tangled in the kelp, and every so often a spiky tailed stingray jets from the foliage waving his tail in warning.  But once you get past the shallows it's a blast, and the water here on the gulf is warm enough to swim in for an hour.

I cooked my trademark guerilla gourmet goo for dinner, and woe to the person on cleaning duty.

Later on we had an unbelievably good jam.   We started around the fire in blackest night (the waxing moon still sets an hour after the sun does), then moved over to this rusted old car.  We banged it with this and that, stomped on it of course, then Rina screamed long and nasty, and the music got so dark I felt like we were crossing over in some way.  It felt like the scene in the Lord of the Flies where Piggy gets killed: no recovery now, the commitment has been made.  The music was all very open and expansive, not fast and furious as usual.  We were letting the desert into the music and into us.  The perfect ending came when Sam, who was trying to sleep atop the Manor House, said with more than a touch of irritation in his voice, "Hey, maybe you should cut it out, you're going to give our neighbor a fucking heart attack".

Mabelita later said she was actually frightened.  Damn, I wish we'd gotten it on tape.  We were recording, but as usual the best jam got away when the recorder mysteriously stopped working right at the start of the jam. 

Better and better it gets, from deep in Baja.