October 14

Up with the sun on a beautiful beach and ready for breakfast and our first day of kayaking. I need to explain a little something though before I go any further with the general story. These islands in Baja are part of a national reserve, and as you saw in the last photos the terrain is very much a dessert and therefore slow to decompose. Plus would you really want to camp somewhere near where someone had taken a dump behind a bush and it had spent a day or two baking in the sun. Ewwww!!

So there are potty rules on this trip. First off, liquid release is done into the water. When I needed to go during the day I would refer to it as “going to the little girls ocean”. Guys (or girls who have their own special penis of plastic tube and funnel sold in camping stores just for those times when a girl is camping with only guys and the ocean doesn’t seem as inviting after dark) can stand at the edge of the water and release. However for other needs our guides brought along our friend Paco. Paco is a very small portable toilet that we would hide behind a bush and then take with us to each camp site. I bring up these things because well, I think everyone should know about the little girls ocean and Paco, we ended up talking about Paco enough so you should hear about it, and well he comes up again later in the story so I’m giving you a basis for later.

So we are up, we had a yummy breakfast and then we got our butts into the kayaks and we were off. We had about a 6 mile kayak to do to our next camping spot that day, and it was beautiful. There were lots of bays along the coast, and we would mostly cut across the mouth of them, staying close to the cliffs quite often. We saw many kinds of birds, pelicans, blue herons, turkey vultures, and yes blue footed boobies!

The first day of kayaking you could really feel the burn in your arms. I have noticed there are two kinds burn, there are the ones where you are really into it and using that burn to mentally motivate, and there is the evil burn when its really not happy and you can’t do anything but hate the world. We will get to the evil burn later, this was good the kind of burn. It hurt and it was fun.

About half way to our destination, out on the open sea we made a pit stop, and yes I mean that just as it sounds. It was Paco cleaning time. Kevin and I, were using the double kayak which had the perfect little paco storage cabin right in the middle of it. It became daily routine to pull over and help (only a little bit) the guides remove Paco for his ocean bath; and then wait as they went away with Paco to clean him up. It was an odd and slightly disgusting ritual and something that we won’t forget.

We landed at our second campsite just a little before lunch. This beach was more beautiful than the last. The sands where whiter and brightened the turquoise waters. There was a rock that jutted out and a little cave to the side of the beach that just accentuated the beauty. Beauty can be deceiving and my mild jellyfish sting while having a soak in the bathwater we call ocean should maybe have been a warning for events to come; but we didn’t notice. Oh well.

The afternoon consisted of cribbage and a nice lunch. After a bit more relaxing we prepared to go snorkeling on at the reef on the far side of the bay. Now the first half of snorkeling sucked. I had been having some mask problems the first day. I kept seeping water, and since I was a new snokeler they figured I didn’t have it tight enough so I kept being told to tighten my mask, and not to worry if it hurt a little, it would go away and it was better than getting water in. Well there was a ridge across the nose of my mask and I had tightened it so much the day before that it was now digging into my nose and really hurt. Now the problems begin, It took Kevin and I a little longer to get ready and so our guide had already headed out with Steve and Carl, not normally a problem, but as tight as it was my mask was still taking in water and I would have to stop about every 90 seconds to open it. This made catching up to them nearly impossible. It was not a fun snorkel out. When we did get there, they were all ready to head back in and we had barely snorkeled, so our guide switched masks with me (still not really believing me about the mask I don’t think) and they all headed back (after heading back in using my mask he finally believed me how bad it was).

I felt a bit gypped on my snorkeling experience so Kevin and I decided to stay out as long as we could. We had fun! There were several schools of ever-elusive tuna, which Kevin never saw. I would see them and tap him and point and they would be gone. But we saw lots of lovely fish, the sun began to set and they were harder to see and photograph and then I saw two, which scared me right out of the water. We were slowly heading back at this point, taking our time and enjoying ourselves. I noticed a pretty starfish and then I noticed something very near it move. It was kind of a little twitch. I tapped Kevin and pointed to show him there was something there. As he was just looking for the something I followed with my eyes from the place where the twitch had been to see the rest of it. It was brown and it widened out into something that looked kind of like a rock… a rock with eyes, I noticed…that could only mean A ROCKFISH or scorpion fish… only the most poisonous fish in the Baja waters… before Kevin could even find the thing I was making wild gestures of “Its really time to leave this spot, swim SWIM”.

Away from there and above water I explained what I had saw and Kevin wished he had seen it, though we were both glad to be away. So heading in a little quicker but still trying to enjoy the swim I noticed something else, something long, thin and spotted and it looked an awful lot like a snake to me. That was it… I am really not a fan of snakes or anything snake like them. That was it for me, I wanted out of the water.

Back at camp we told everyone what we saw. Our guide had also seen a rockfish while out and believed that one, but everyone thought my snake thing was a sea cucumber. There is a trend of no one believing me. There is also a trend of my being right, but that won’t be discovered till tomorrow. However I do have to say, sunset in a reef is when you will see the meaner fish. Beware!

We make it back to camp just in time for dinner, which is very yummy! (how do I remember? All the food was very yummy). But now is when the beautiful beach began to bear its ugly fangs. When we got back we were warned that a small bug called “no-see-ems” seemed to coming out. Bug spray and such would be good, but they didn’t seem to be two bad, it was just a little sting and not often. Little did we know how many of these little pests would come out and we all took cover in our tents immediately after dinner. Getting ready for bed we made the mistake of putting something outside and letting a few more of the bugs in the tent. We played some cribbage inside and then as Kevin and I were getting ready to go to bed the bugs began a full-scale attack on us. They are small and fast and you don’t really see them until they are full of your blood and slow and you can smear them on the inside of the tent. It was a losing battle from the start and eventually we gave up and settled down for a bitten restless sleep.

The next part of this story is hard to really convey. To begin with you know its me telling you the story so nothing really bad must have happened since I’m still hear telling the damn thing. I really don’t know how to convey the fear we really felt. I guess I need to ask you to pretend someone else is telling this part of the story. *shrug* I know that won’t work but I have to try.

Just a little before midnight (having only gone to sleep maybe 2 hours ago) Kevin and I both sat straight up in bed at the exact same time. A noise had woken us. The loud noise of a motorboat at full power heading pretty much right for us. We both looked out the front window of our tent but there was nothing! It had been just past a new moon earlier and that had set long ago, so there was no natural light on our deserted island as we seven had slept soundly on the beach, alone.

Peering out the front of the tent we were spooked, we saw nothing, but we totally heard something, and it was still coming straight towards us. Frozen in place staring out there we waited. The boat, nearly on top of us, slowed its engine almost to a stop basically right at the beach just to the left of us. A flashlight turns on, scans the beach and then turns off. At this point we terrified. I mean think about it: alone on a beach in mexico a dark motorboat comes into the beach all stealthy like, and then scans the beach with a flashlight. Imaginations run wild!!

The flashlight off, the motor turns on again and moves just a little bit away from us, at which time the flashlight goes on and off again and then, SPLASH, something or someone goes into the water. At this point we decide we need someone else to wake up. Kevin’s cousin Steve is in the next tent over, so in our softest yell-like stage whisper or something we call out to Steve, he wakes up in a start and proceeds to fall right back into snores. Calling out again, still terrified to be too loud, we manage to wake up Steve and one of our guides in training. The boat as luckily continued to move away, but there was still that splash, and we aren’t sure what to think. Steve and our guide take a look out at the beach and the boat and return to their tents with a “It’s okay” and “I’ve seen them before” respectively, then they are both in their tents and have left us to our imaginations without ever coming over to hear what else happened prior to their wake up.

We aren’t quite ready to throw in the towel on our fear yet, but thinks might be looking better since the boat and flashlight have finally decided to leave, the wind has ominously picked up and the waves from the wake have taken a quite beach to a very loud and angry beach. Kevin suggests we wait a little while for the wake to settle down, so maybe we can hear again if there is still a who or what in the water and then maybe finally give up and try to sleep. So we wait and we wait…and we wait. At this point we figure out that the waves are not the wake from the boat at all, but a ill timed tide and wind change making our lives that much more sleepless. I should point out that during all of this we refuse to go out in night to check the water ourselves, why? That’s easy… TOO MANY BUGS!! Shows how much we value our lives. *grin* In any case exhaustion finally won out and we both gave up on watching for snipers or whatever our imaginations can come put with that might attack us from dark, and we laid down for a restless few hours of sleep.

October 15

The next morning, after our main guide told us to stay in our tent until the sun came up over the cliff and made the evil little “no-see-ems” go away (you could see them crawling all over your tent just waiting for their chance at our blood) our guide also informed up that our midnight visitors were actually fishermen. What were they doing in a motorboat in the dark? Well that’s simple, it’s a nature reserve and netting fish is illegal. Our midnight pirates were poaching fish that splash was the net that then dragged along the reef we had just snorkeled. Yes we are still alive, yes they were never after us, yes they were still sneaky and do illegal things, and yes it was still damn SCARY!!

Sun up we ventured out of our tent for breakfast. A few bugs still not ready to give up had breakfast on us, but eventually the sun was up and they were gone, we were fed and we set off on a hike. We walked out behind Paco and up a cliff to a cave where one of our guides who was also a archeologist told us about the history of the people hear and showed us cave paintings and shells used for eating. Pretty views along with the history and a surprise visit from a Hummy and we were happy campers. Back down on the beach, packed up and into our kayaks we were off for the day!

One more post and photo album will be coming soon!!!
Make sure you don’t miss all the pictures from this set