Central Baja and the Search for Cave Paintings

Monday March 28. We spent the morning in La Paz. While I hung out at the laundromat, Mike walked down to the marina to find Sea Otter Jimmy, the La Paz master of small engine repair and the owner of a mint condition Jim Brown design trimaran. Jim invited Mike to crew for him next

Thursday for the race, but we will be long gone. Jim has lived in La Paz for more than 30 years, has a Mexican wife, and in addition to small engine repair runs a charter business.

Mike and I visited the tourist information office, walked up to the church and zocalo, visited a bookstore looking for maps, and ate huevos rancheros at a tiny restaurant in a courtyard. La Paz is a pleasant small city with a really protected, shallow harbor, wider streets than the colonial era towns, and easy parking. On our way out of town we stopped at the seafood restaurant where we ate at three nights ago and talked the owner into selling us some of the local salsa that we liked but hadn’t been able to find in the stores.  We look forward to sharing this new taste delight with you!

Drove four hours to Loreto. A half day of driving is about as much as we tolerate these days. Coming down from the central spine of high desert to the coast was gorgeous! The sedimentary mountains

The road to Loreto

erode into fabulous relief, with many tiers silhouetted in the afternoon light. And the bays and headlands and the islands floating in the blue, blue sea, are gorgeous.

We found our RV park with ease and headed to the waterfront, looking for places Mike faintly remembers from 25 years ago and looking for ceviche. The waterfront malecon, harbor and tourism businesses were all new. The third restaurant we tried had ceviche. The texture was perfect: chunky. Once again it did not have enough chile and lime: we had to ask for lime and salsa. The sauce tasted like it had a little ketchup in it: a tad too sweet. The innovation I liked was that it was served in the kind of roasted mild pepper

The small boat harbor at Loreto

used for chili rellenos. The place was run by an American and full of American tourists; I suspect the recipe is geared to American tastes.

Tuesday March 29. Spent the morning cooking and cleaning and blogging (but not posting—the internet was too slow) while Mike chatted up the fellow RVers. One guy had been a Zen monk for 40 years, and had given up on enlightenment, but was eager to share his passion and perspective. Since Zen monks don’t get a pension, I wonder how he supports himself now?

   We went to the zocalo to check out the church and look for tourist information about the prehistoric cave paintings. The guy told us about three places: the major tourist site that is fully guided, San Francisco de la Sierra, and two smaller sites where (he thought) we could walk in unguided. We chose the next one up the highway, Volcán de las Virgenes. We stopped in Santa Rosalia to get more local information. We didn’t find a tourist office, but the guy at the hotel recommended it highly and said there is signage from the highway. We ran into two families from Seattle traveling in two VW vans—one couple with two kids and one single guy with three little boys—and Mike spent 45 minutes chatting them up about how they had fixed up their vans. I was also surprised to learn that Santa Rosalia got its start as a copper mining town, and they shipped the ore to Tacoma, WN for, smelting!

   We didn’t find the signage promised; we did find a good paved road that led up through gorgeous, flowering desert toward equally gorgeous mountains, one of which was a classic cinder cone volcano. There was a gate that was closed but unlocked, so we went through. There were two major wells, apparently a public utility water source. We saw in the distance three steam plumes we thought were industrial facilities; we later learned that they are geothermal electric plants. A side road led to an ecotour enterprise for the conservation area, but the people there knew nothing about the local cave paintings, and said we needed a guide anyway; they tried to send us to San Francisco de la Sierra. We debated what to do next, and ended up with no resolution, just pulling off the road to camp for the night. We had just finished our supper when a vigilancia guy in a truck stopped to check on us, and offered to guide us up to the cave paintings in the morning. We said we were interested.

Wednesday March 30. We returned to the ecotour place at 8am to rendezvous with Marciel. He said he had other commitments for the day, but if we would wait 45 minutes he would fetch another guide for us. How much will it cost? 300 pesos. Okay. 300 pesos each. No: 500 pesos for two of us. Okay.

   We made sandwiches and packed up. Our guide turned out to be an 18-year-old named Manuel. He drove us in the truck up the road past the second well, through two open gates, into the

Fossils in Canyon Azufre

mountains, alongside a canyon, and stopped just past a sign in Spanish and English describing the features of Canyon Azufre. We followed a rough trail down to the bottom of the canyon and proceeded down the canyon a few kilometers. The canyon was beautiful, mostly crumbling sedimentary walls in various colors and shapes and stratigraphy, and on the bottom sand, boulders, trees with gnarled roots, and an impressive variety of rocks: red, white, black, yellow and green (copper oxide). Along the way we stopped to examine massive beds of fossil shells, and a hot spring. The rock paintings were up the left wall on the underside of a massive boulder. 

Rock paintings in the canyon

While the areas exposed to the weather had washed away, the most protected surfaces were visible animals and human figures painted in red and white. All in all, it was a dramatic and lovely hike.

 We returned the way we came and were back to the ecotour lodge by 1:30. We paid Marciel the MX$500; he said no, it is 300 each. I said no, we agreed on 500 for two. He said he had committed costs. I said we agreed on 500; if it had been 600 we would not have gone. (This was true: Mike and I agreed beforehand that 500 was our max.) What about a tip? Did you pay the guide a tip? Mike forked over another 40 pesos. It had been a lovely outing, but Marciel’s attempt to milk us for more cash left me with a sour feeling about it. We had hoped to walk in for free or a lot less, but it is true we wouldn’t have found it without a guide.

   The paintings we saw were quite modest in extent and condition. Mike wanted to see more. So we decided to check out San Francisco de la Sierra. We stopped in San Ignacio for more information and to secure a permit from the INAH office. We were directed to a small, unsigned door in the wall of the San Ignacio monastery. The permits for one day cost MX$175; only the Cueva Raton was accessible in one day; the other two were more remote would have required three days.  

   The road to San Francisco de la Sierra was quite an adventure.  The first 15 km were good road,

The road to San Francisco de la Sierra

rising up through magnificent bluffs and mesas and ridges overlooking precipitous canyons, while the last 5km--even more magnificent--were the worst we have driven yet! The perfect pavement ended abruptly, dropping off to a single lane dirt road that was badly eroded into rocks, lumps and channels, on the edge of those precipitous canyons. Mellow Mike did not flinch or complain, he drove it like a champ. When we got to Cueva Raton there was a wide spot for parking, which we were relieved to do, and walked the rest of the way to San Francisco de la Sierra to check in. We were escorted by Senor Francisco who happened to be at Cueva Raton to reconnoiter with the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Historia (INAH) rep and was just on his way back to the puebla. He was a well-spoken middle aged man of healthy stature and visage. I imagine he was one of the more educated people in the puebla. The mainstays of the village are raising goats and making cheese, and guiding tours of the cave paintings. The three-day tour of the cave paintings involves trekking and camping with burros as pack animals. The goats and burros by day wander and graze freely in the canyon, and are brought back at night to the pens at each house. There are pumas in the area, and they like to feed on goat when they can catch one. Francisco asked if we liked mutton, and we said we don’t eat meat at all. He approved of that, commenting that meat is bad for your health; he blamed Mexican obesity on eating too much meat.

   The village head who is responsible for checking INAH permits and assigning guides is Senor  On the lower side of the village is a very basic lodge for visitors, consisting of a couple of rather attractive stone buildings with thatched roofs and wifi.

Goats hanging out at the new coop building

Enrique. He is much older and lives in a small, rundown house with his wife. In addition to the desk with the log book, they sell a few drink and snack items from their front veranda. Mike wanted to buy some goat cheese, so Francisco escorted us to the new coop building where three villagers with white coats, gloves and face masks were making the cheese. A guy unlocked the refrigerator and sold us a vacuum packed, 1kg wheel of cheese. The puebla is all dirt with trash strewn about. The human children play quietly while the goat kids bleat loudly and continuously. We passed a new school building under construction on our way to see the church, which was very basic, drafty and in poor repair.

   It was quite chilly in the mountains and we were glad to have our down jackets as we walked back to the van for the night.

Thursday March 30. Our guide—whose name I didn’t catch— showed up at our van at 8:20 in the morning. He was an older man who spoke with such a thick, rural accent that I understood very little

Painting in Cueva del Raton

of what he said. There was some awkward misunderstanding as we were packed up for a half day hike, but the cave turned out to be only a five-minute walk and a 15-minute visit. The guide’s role was primarily to unlock and relock the gate. The paintings on the ceiling of an overhang were more extensive and more elaborate than the ones at Tres Virgenes, and in three colors: red, white and black. They included elegantly stylized human and animal figures and some geometric lines. There were also a couple rocks with shallow bowls were the pigments were ground to make the paint. After the visit we didn’t have the right change to pay him the 80 peso (~US$5) per person guide fee, so we walked together back to the lodge at the puebla where we were able to get change.

Then we took off on our own to explore the canyon. We hoped to be able to find the trail to the other caves, but never did. We spent a couple hours scrambling down one dry canyon and up another,

The canyon we explored

following goat paths. It was fun scrambling over the water scoured rocks, challenging to pick our way through the desert cacti and mesquite, refreshing to stop under a few oasis palms, and interesting to see lizards, bones, and stare at a fox. We followed a trail back to the puebla--easily recognizable by the human trash—to buy a second wheel of cheese.

   The drive down the mountain was just as dramatic, but less nerve-wracking, than the previous drive up.

   We drove north from Guerro Negro along the coast. It is a pretty desolate stretch of road. Though anxious for a shower, I could find no leads on hotels or RV parks. We chose to head for a fishing village on the coast, hoping that it would at least have a place to buy ceviche and beer. The 7km gravel road west through a flat, sandy, barren desert was bleak and windy. The village turned out to be even more bleak, sandy, barren and windy, and sections of the road by the water were nearly impassable. We returned to the road in the desert and found a place to pull off and camp. I had to settle for a light sponge bath. In lieu of ceviche and beer we had tortilla soup from a mix and red wine. At least there was no light pollution: the sky was a blizzard of stars.