Drive down a long and sandy dirt road....

... and arrive at paradise. Alas, there are no shitters in paradise.

Paradise as seen from above. Its an interesting spot: when I was here 4 years ago it was a commercial RV campground with 35-foot RVs and Hawaiian shirted gringos as far as the eye could see. But it was built on an arroyo, so a hurricane washed it all away. Now its almost completely wild again with a bunch of surfers camped on the point for the world-class waves.

Interestingly, a huge number of the surfers are from Canada, specifically British Columbia. These guys are wilderness firefighters gone south for the winter. Good idea!

The Wookie, camped smack dab on the point.

The Wookie's frequent visitor, on the roof. I have to keep asking him not to block the solar panel.

Another view of the sandy road to the beach. Note the farm fields: that's basil, and elsewhere are tomatos and eggplant. Word around the beach is they're all organic, and all grown specifically for Trader Joe's. If I only knew how to make eggplant palatable...

The view from the Wookie. Wake up at first light and check the surf right from bed.

The Wookie at night, all lit up by LEDs and a big full moon.

I drove the Wookie to the moon for this picture.

Having fun with the water jugs, putting blue LEDs under them.

I live by the addage that you can never have too many blue LEDs.

Inside the Wookie, all lit up. Ok fine, enough with the damn LEDs.

For the first week or so the surf was tiny. Here's my neighbor Dave trying desperately to drop into a little one.

Gah, couldn't quite make it in. Note the rocks just underneath: make the drop and its like riding a glass bottom boat where you can see all the rocks and urchins waiting if you screw up...

Not only was it small, but it was also crowded. Small surf + big crowd = grumpy surfers.

Luckily there are many other things to do when the surf gets small. These were caught on a line, but lots of people snorkel around the reef and use a Hawaiian sling. Personally I snurf, which is snorkeling off the nose of a surfboard. I own a trademark on that word by the way and get $1 every time someone uses it.

Here's my neighbor Craig pushing his crazy fancy downhill mountain bike up the hill that I just blasted up on my scooter. Note the strange gringo house in the background. There are lots of gringo "dreamhouses" around here in various states of completion. I really like this one, would love to check it out closer, but like most gringo dreamhouses its surrounded by a giant wall and no one is ever home.

Here's Pedro in full profile. He's 90cc's of raw scooter fury and cost US$545 out the door brand new. All the gringos on their giant $10,000 off-road motorcycles laugh at Pedro, but the reality is he gets me wherever I want to go. We explore all the mysterious dirt roads that lead to nowhere, ride to town whenever we want, make nighttime raids on the basil and tomato fields, and plus he has a bell. I have yet to see one of those big gringo offroad motorcycles with a bell...

And he drives me down the road to the crazy tourist beach with $7 margueritas. They're desperately trying to channel spring break energy from Florida, sometimes succeeding but usually its just super loud classic rock from satellite radio and like 5 gringos on laptops taking advantage of the free wifi. That's where I am as I type this by the way. Pardon me a moment, my marguerita just arrived.

Here's a picture from Burning Bush, a one day event on the other side of Baja, in La Ventana, also known as the kite boarding mecca of Baja.

In this really shitty picture you can kind of see them setting up all the things they're going to burn.

The installations were great: very interactive, very fire-centric. That big pole in the center has little 1 foot pieces of PVC that you shoot up the support wires with a slingshot. If it reaches the top of the pole, a giant flame erupts. People kept it flaming all night long.

Another crappy picture. You can sort of see the bay just outside the festival area, covered in whitecaps and kiteboarders.

Our camp in the arroyo. The big rig is Craig & Marguerite's biodiesel and solar powered 4wd behemouth, and the Subaru is John & Lita's ride. The Wookie, incidentally, is broken down at this moment. When I drove in I got a bit stuck in the sand and spun the wheels, which overheated the transmission, and tranny oil starting pouring out the inspection hole. We figured I broke a seal or worse, so I decided I'd deal with it after the festival.

Here's one of the many proverbial bushes not so proverbially burning. I like to say the event was Burning Man culture meets kitesurfing culture meets Mexican teenager culture. Kite surfers raised flaming kites in the air, which dribbled bits of melting plastic near the crowd. People played with the fire installations. Mexican teenagers had little fights on the outskirts. One scene that stuck in my mind: there was a group of Mexican kids, all maybe 17 years old, all dressed like cowboys in big boots, Levis and Stetson hats. There was a big fire nearby and one of them took off his hat and held it front of him like a shield and got really really close to the fire, way closer than I'd have thought possible, showing off a cool little cowboy trick.

Mostly it had a real "family event" feel to it though. We alternated between their fires and our own. Yes, we went all the way to Burning Bush to do exactly what we do at our regular camp: sit around the fire, drink cervesas, and talk about dogs.

Another favorite moment: around midnight, which is super late for Baja, the crowd was entirely made up of Mexican teenagers listening to a Canadian woman sing fantastic songs on her acoustic guitar. She sang a song that went "George Bush sucks dick.... Cheney too." No one understood it, so she paused and yelled out "Me no gusta George Bush!" and everyone cheered.

Against all odds morning eventually came, and turns out someone stole John & Lita's cooler in the night. Bastardos! We hope you enjoyed the rotting vegetables...

I always love Baja gringo vehicle camps. The vehicle tent method works well. You can tell that guy on the roof is constantly futzing with this camp.

Marguerite taking it easy.

Craig burying Mr. Santos. Mr. Santos, incidentally, is a wolf, and is far and away the smartest dog I've ever met. One time Craig said to him "hey, go see what Cam is up to", and Mr. Santos trotted down the beach to say hi to Cam. I need to film a movie of Mr. Santos running, its an incredibly graceful sight.

While Craig buried Mr. Santos, I Pedro'd into town to find a mechanic to possibly do a tranny rebuild on the Wookie. We arranged a towtruck, he said he'd be there in an hour. Five hours passed and still no tow, so at sunset I scootered back to town to see what was up, and they essentially acted like they forgot about me. Not a good sign...

We agreed on a 9am tow the next morning. I wasn't holding my breath so we got up at first light and started pulling the Wookie with a tow chain behind Craig's truck. While I shifted from park to neutral I passed by reverse and the Wookie lunged backward, which didn't feel like a broken transmission... Tried drive, same deal. Turned out the tranny was working just fine. The theory is that when the Wookie's storage place flooded last hurricane season, water got in the tranny oil, which boiled when the tranny got hot. So we drove to town, changed the tranny oil, and were on our way. Here you can see Craig following just in case.

No problema! We made it back to the beach without a hiccup, tranny slip, or spilled aceite de transmission. Here's Craig and Marguerite taking Pedro and a longboard to the crazy tourist beach. Yup, they made it, even though Craig is barefoot for some reason...

This is a really shitty picture of our "activity-based sundial". The idea is it doesn't keep track of time with numbers, but instead with what activity you'll probably be doing at that hour. So there's the coffee/tea cup around sunrise, the wave drawn in the sand for a surf after that, then an eggshell for breakfast, then the lightbulb where you decide what you're going to do today, then the cervesa you might drink, then the flyswatter to symbolize the nap you might take while swatting flies, etc. Anyone can place an item on the dial when they do something, and eventually we'd see patterns. That was the idea anyway. It was taking shape until these guys camped right on it, but such is life at the anarchist campground.

One day while the sundial was casting a shadow over the lightbulb I decided to bury a 5 gallon water jug and make a sort of etch-a-sketch.

Here's what it looked like at night, ready for etching.

Another view.

This is what the first customer drew.

And here's what the next customer drew. Yes, it gets lonely on the beach.

Hallelujia, the swell arrived! People had been talking about it for a week, and as usual it got here 2 days later than expected. My theory is swell prediction in Baja is like a game of telephone, and each person bumps the arrival forward a little bit.

This picture shows a wave that you'd probably call a bit overhead, or OH+. At the peak of the swell the sets were double overhead with literally 50 people in the water, most of them insanely good, which made catching a wave tricky. That's a really odd thing about this spot: its one of the most crowded waves I've ever surfed (and I've surfed in SoCal), which is weird when you're at such a remote place. Oh well, such is the price of warm waves with nearby internet.

Then birds started washing up on the rocks...

We pulled this guy out of the surf and put him on Craig's truck to protect him from the dogs.

We tried feeding him sardines and water and anything else we could think of, but no luck, he died the next day.

Lots and lots of pellicans washed up, probably 5 on our section of the point.

We heard something on satellite radio about pelicans dying, and how no one knows why. One theory is all the fire retardant they dropped on the wildfires drains to sea where it gets in the food chain and makes top predators like this one sick. Dunno. It did cooincide with the swell, so another theory is they got bashed against the rocks. This guy had a damaged left wing, and he flew away after resting for a day. I'm talking about the bird, not Craig, by the way.

We celebrated our successful bird rescue with some margueritas made with fresh strawberries from the farm up the road.

And we watched the whales jumping offshore.

Muchos ballenas.

At night when the swell is small you can hear them splashing around in the distance. The word on the beach is they're herding schools of fish so they can have a feast.

And then yet another stellar sunset. Then the usual routine of campfires and guitars. And maybe fresh fish tacos if someone caught something big on the reef that day.

Yes, life is hard for the Baja gringo. Hasta luego!