On the Other Side of the Border

Crossing to the south side of the border was an enigma. While traveling through Canada and the United States, I felt that, in a way, the journey was predictable. I have lived almost half my life in the United States, and I know the codes as well as the language. Although visiting specific places I don’t know excites me tremendously, I knew—and at the same time felt uneasy about—what the journey would be like once we crossed the border into Mexico.

It felt like a huge question mark. I had never traveled through Mexico by land, and on my previous short visits I had only been to Mexico City and Playa del Carmen. The land border intimidated me because all I knew about it was what I had read or seen in movies.

But at the same time, it is a country I have always felt close to. I grew up with Mexican television and movies, listening to and singing rancheras and boleros. I knew perfectly well that people ate huevos rancheros and chilaquiles for breakfast, even though I had never tried them, because they were references in Cantinflas’s movies.

As we packed the Atlas in Southern California and played Tetris with our luggage, we debated until the night before whether we should cross through Tijuana or Mexicali. At midnight, we decided we would go through Tijuana.

As we approached the border, the highway drew us into a spiral where the lines of cars and trucks narrowed in tremendous disorder. No one wanted to let anyone in, and the lanes dissolved into absolute chaos as we were all funneled through the security cameras.

We had our documents ready and were surprised that no one ever asked for them, since immigration officers were randomly choosing whom to search. We had heard that Baja California had a special status because we were Americans citizens. I thought about how difficult it would be to unpack and reorganize all our luggage, so I desperately hoped we wouldn’t be chosen. Luckily, we drove right through, and before we knew it, we were on an extremely high elevated bridge that took us out of the city. As I drove, I could see several meters below the famous wall that separates the two countries and cuts like a wound through what for hundreds of years was a single territory.

We didn’t see Tijuana. The bridge took us far away, and we only stopped at a small restaurant in a parking lot. It was a small wooden, thatched place with a kitchen, and beneath strings of papel picado, a couple of women welcomed us with big smiles. We felt as though we had arrived home. They brought us a large serving of salsa, and although we like spicy food, especially Martín, this salsa won the battle. The tacos and burritos, however, were delicious.

A World so Close, Yet Unknown

We kept driving to the city of Ensenada, where we looked for a hotel for the night. That was where some of the setbacks we hadn’t expected began: the water went out, the power went out, and we were left without air conditioning. Then the water came back, but it was so dark it looked like Coca-Cola so that we couldn’t shower or brush our teeth.

We began our second day with a seafood lunch of epic proportions, and although we did our best, we couldn’t finish it. We continued south to San Quintín, a town founded by a couple of companies that transported sea otter pelts to Russia and the United States. The companies went bankrupt at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but the town prospered by turning to oyster fishing.

We arrived late and looked for a place to stay. We found an apartment on Airbnb, but when we arrived, the place looked as though it was under construction. Martín and Carter had to climb over a gate to open the parking entrance at the back of the house for me. The space was full of rubble and so narrow that we had to fold in the mirrors and trust that we wouldn’t scratch the Atlas’s paint.

Then we climbed a staircase without railings, with a drop beside it. Fortunately, the place itself was clean. It had two connected spaces, one for sleeping and the other a tiny kitchen that we didn’t use. Martín and Carter went out for tacos, which they later described as the best they had ever eaten in their lives. I ate a mango I had been saving and sat down to write the stories and adventures of the previous week and edit the photographs. The place had no air conditioning, and it was terribly hot. We slept with the window open to the highway, where heavy traffic shook the beds, and the noise and fumes became part of an experience the app didn’t include in its description.

I finished writing in the morning. I always wake up early, and while the boys sleep, I work on my tasks. Every week I promise myself I’ll be more efficient, but I haven’t managed it. It takes me several hours to gather the entries from my journal, write, read, edit, and re-edit, first in Spanish and then in English. Many times I have had to stay up almost the entire night working so I can publish every Sunday at the scheduled time, but for me this account is almost as important as the journey itself.

The next morning, the first part of the route took us along a very narrow road with heavy truck traffic. It was extremely stressful because the road had no shoulder and was elevated, so we passed extremely close to vehicles coming in the opposite direction. There was no room for error: on one side was a deep ditch, and on the other were trucks that didn’t stay in their lane, with their tires crossing onto the yellow center line.

We drove slowly. The crosses and roadside memorials, along with pieces of metal and bumpers scattered along the ditches, reminded us to drive carefully and patiently, even though the road was straight and invited us to go over the speed limit.

We stopped a couple of times to look at that astonishing landscape, but amid all that beauty there was far too much trash: cans, rubble, broken glass, plastic, cardboard, and paper that never decomposed because of the lack of rain in the desert. Along the road, the surroundings were a dumping ground, something deliberate and on a massive scale that had accumulated over the years. And it wasn’t only along the roadside. We could walk among the cacti and find trash more than a hundred meters away.

As we continued, the landscape became increasingly rugged and magnificent. The cacti had every imaginable shape, and some were covered with flowers and fruit. Several times we stopped to walk among them. I had never been in a place like this, and I wanted to capture every detail, every spine, and every texture with my camera and with my memory.

I know that in a few days this place will be only a memory. Only by preserving the images and writing about what I see, as well as the emotions I feel while I am here, can I preserve it.

Life Among the Rocks

The road took us through mountains of solid rock, some with gentle slopes and others that looked as though they were made of stones piled up as if someone had thrown them down from above. We saw rippled mountains with jagged peaks or cone-shaped points, as well as others with flat tops.

In that world of stone, we found a sandy road with a sign that said “Cactus Camp,” and we went in to explore. A heavily corrugated sandy track made the Atlas shake as though it were having spasms. We proceeded cautiously, amazed by the place’s beauty. The distant mountain silhouettes looked like ghosts floating in the brilliant late-afternoon light. Some stretches had nothing but cacti, while enormous rounded rocks dominated others in shades of white and pink. We decided to camp there because the place was so far removed from civilization that we knew it would be a spectacular night.

I took my camera and waited among the cardón cacti 🌵 and the rocks beneath the golden light of sunset. Describing the colors and how they changed is hard to put into words, so I felt extremely grateful to have my cameras with me. Once the sun went down, the crescent moon began to shine like a concave line amid the vibrant colors of twilight. A few minutes later, Venus appeared beside it.

There, we also had a surprise encounter with a female coyote.

The sky went from yellow to orange, then purple, and finally deep indigo. The moon began to descend toward the horizon and turned orange. The air was so clear that I could even see its shadowed portion glowing as though it were an eclipse.

As darkness fell, the Milky Way began to shine. I was moved almost to tears, and in the distance, I could hear Carter strumming his guitar and humming. I took some photographs and waited for the sky toward the southwest to grow darker.

I looked for Andromeda, barely visible as a small, bright smudge on the screen of my wide-angle lens, but bright enough to distinguish.

I spent a couple of hours moving around the area and enjoying that fantastic night. Then I went to my tent and turned off the lamp.

The Sunrise

I lay down to look at the sky through the tent’s mesh and fell asleep until the sky began to brighten and bees buzzed around me. I went outside to enjoy those last unique moments, stood on a rock, and waited.

I recorded and photographed the sunrise over that endless field of cardón cacti, the giant cacti of Baja California.

What the Earth Hides

We broke camp and reached an intersection where we found the basics: water, coffee, huevos rancheros, and gasoline. It wasn’t a normal gas station with pumps, but a hand-painted sign that said: Gasolina. They sold a five-gallon container for 675 Mexican pesos. The owner lived in a run-down trailer beside the road and ran his business from there. He transferred the gasoline into our tank with a hose and siphon.

A few hours later, we reached the border between Baja California and Baja California Sur. They are two different states, something I learned when we reached the sanitary inspection checkpoint, where they charged us 30 pesos to fumigate the car. We never found out why they were going to fumigate it. They gave us the receipt and never actually did it. We arrived in Guerrero Negro, a town famous for gray whale watching during the end-of-year season, but in September, we were told, “there was nothing to do.” So we did some research and discovered its best secrets by looking at the map.

We started with the salt flats, which were nothing like what I had imagined based on the ones I already knew. It wasn’t a flat white surface covered in hexagons. This one was pale pink, and near the edges the solid crust was broken, forming pools of water so clear that they reflected the intense blue sky. White salt crystals lined their edges. That combination of colors and textures made the place look like a painting rather than the real world.

We continued along the edge of the salt flats until we reached a metal fence and a guard booth. In the distance, I saw a mountain so white that it looked like an iceberg, although in that heat that was impossible. The guard approached us. He was an older man whose skin had been weathered by the sun and the years.

“You can’t go past here. You can only enter on the tour. You can turn around and come back later,” he said, handing me a card.

I asked permission to go through just far enough to turn around, and I caught sight of white dunes on the other side of the sea. I got out to talk to the man.

He insisted:

“I can’t let you through,” and, reaching into his pants pocket, he pulled out some refrigerator magnets and continued, “Buy these from me.”

He showed me some with photographs of trucks, cranes, and heavy machinery working on the salt flats. The truth is, if he had had one with birds, the salt mountain, or the dunes, I might have bought it, but the machinery didn’t excite me. Instead, I asked his name.

“Martín, and this is ‘Gorda,'” he said, introducing us to his caramel-colored dog of indeterminate breed, who greeted us with a wag of her tail.

We laughed at the coincidence of his name with our Martín’s and asked him about the nests on the utility poles.

“They’re ravens,” he replied without hesitation.

I was surprised. The nest was enormous and made of sticks, nothing like a raven’s nest. I took out my camera and confirmed that the bird resting in one of them was indeed a raven.

“The nest belongs to the osprey,” old Martín continued. “They’re not here right now. When they come, the ravens steal their eggs, and I give them Bimbo bread and tortillas, but Gorda chases them away so she can eat the tortillas.”

I laughed as I imagined the entire scene. A solitary man in a guard booth, a hermit in the middle of an astonishing landscape who knew the cycle of the migratory birds and shared his life with them and with his cheerful “Gorda.”

“I’m going to tell you where you can see some dunes without paying,” he said in a whisper, as though someone might hear him in that vast emptiness.

He gave us directions, we said goodbye, and continued on our way: 4.5 kilometers along a corrugated track that nearly destroyed the poor Atlas. We had to drive so slowly that it took us more than half an hour to cross it. To our left was the sea, and to our right a monumental dump, almost five kilometers of waste scattered across the dry, inhospitable land, despite the huge NO DUMPING sign beside the road. We imagined that eventually all that trash would reach the sea.

We kept trying to find an entrance to the dunes because, although they were close, we couldn’t cross the wetland pools. While I explored with my camera, Martín and Carter found a track through the mud and sand. We decided to take it, knowing that if it didn’t look safe, we would back out, but the temptation to get close to those massive white dunes was a magnet we couldn’t resist.

Once again, I was grateful to be with my boys. This was one of those places I wouldn’t have dared to visit alone. Fortunately, we had no trouble reaching the very heart of the dunes because the sand was firm and dry.

Carter and Martín romped like puppies over the imposing white mountains, running and sliding while I went off to enjoy myself with my camera. The sand was soft and volatile, and the gusts made it fly and shift, giving the dunes a life of their own. The infinite blue sky contrasted with that white, shadowless world.

Once we had had our fill of so much beauty, we continued toward the Sea of Cortez, on the peninsula’s eastern edge.

First Police Checkpoint

Until then, Carter hadn’t driven, and we thought this might be his chance to try his first adventure on roads so different from those he was used to. But above all, we were a little nervous that being a “gringo” might make us more vulnerable with the police, about whom we had received so many warnings.

We had already passed through several military checkpoints without any problems. They hadn’t searched us, and the fact that we were Colombian and spoke like Colombians opened doors for us.

But with Carter behind the wheel, our luck changed. A few minutes after he started driving, they made us get out for a search. Carter, who had never been searched in his twenty-four years, didn’t know what to expect. The officer asked why he was so nervous, and I explained that he didn’t understand what a search was. Meanwhile, Martín accompanied another officer as he searched the car. Suddenly, I saw him holding my wallet and counting the bills. I had a few Canadian and American dollars, Mexican pesos, and even Colombian pesos. It wasn’t a fortune, just the minimum we needed to pay for food and gasoline from a container when necessary.

Despite my fear, the officer put everything back in its place, and they didn’t take anything or ask for a bribe. He did, however, want me to speak to them in “Paisa” to prove that we really came from Colombia. Then they began taking out all our luggage, the cameras, and the instruments. Martín’s viola didn’t make them curious, but the guitar case did, so they immediately asked whether we were carrying weapons.

To make sure the guitar was fine, Carter had to play right there in the middle of the desert. It was a completely surreal scene: our luggage scattered across the sand and Carter playing his guitar, still trembling, under the officers’ gaze.

The Sea of Cortez

We breathed easier and continued toward the El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve. The landscape grew greener until we reached a gigantic oasis dominated by three volcanoes: El Viejo, El Azufre, and La Virgen. The last, the largest of the three, is more than two thousand meters high and is an imposing mountain. That day, a beautiful white cloud sat trapped over its crater.

While the other clouds moved with the wind, this one remained in place. I wanted to stop to photograph it, but as on most of the roads we have traveled, there are no scenic overlooks and not even a shoulder. We passed wetlands and lagoons where I saw herons and large trees mixed among many species of cacti, until we could finally stop for a few minutes. Not where I would have chosen, but the only place possible. There, I saw how fertile this strange land is, finding flowers, bees, and butterflies in the middle of the desert.

On the eastern side of the mountain, the landscape changed, and vast lava fields appeared, with cascades of reddish rocks and no vegetation. The sun began to sink toward the horizon behind the mountain, and the sky filled with color as dark storm clouds gathered, foretelling a storm.

From my window, I watched that beautiful dance of light and shadow, brightness and darkness around the volcanoes rush past, but we couldn’t stop. I left my heart attached to that place, which now belongs to the large collection of photographs I never got to take.

At the end of the afternoon, we arrived in the town of Santa Rosalía on the Sea of Cortez. An industrial area, a port, and a vibrant place full of life that eagerly awaited the storm that broke that night. Its residents happily welcomed the downpour and walked calmly beneath that improvised shower.

We spent the night in an Airbnb where we could shower. It almost sounds as though we were walking around stinking and never touching water, but it depends on what kind of water we’re talking about: seawater? River water? Lake water? Sometimes we have even had to make do with a “cat bath.” Still, we always miss a shower with clean, hot water. We also needed to recharge, both ourselves and our electronics: phones, chargers, batteries, and cameras.

The next morning, we visited a very small town called Mulegé, founded in 1705 by a Jesuit who built one of the first missions in a beautiful oasis. Reaching such a lush, remote place lost in the middle of an inhospitable desert is still astonishing. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for the conquerors who saw it for the first time, or why they decided to occupy the hill and build the mission there.

But as always in these cases, the trash, neglect, and pollution of the river’s waters hurt my heart. Even when I looked for information, I received an absurd answer: “The missionaries managed to improve the appearance of the oasis by introducing date palms and olive trees.” I understand this was the norm in the eighteenth century, but not that it is still described this way in the twenty-first century, because history definitely belongs to whoever writes it.

An Unforgettable Night

After having seafood soup for lunch, we went to El Requesón Beach, where we decided to camp that night, although we weren’t well prepared. Our kitchen, which depended on butane gas, was out of commission because we had to leave the small canisters in California since we weren’t allowed to cross the border with them. We didn’t replace them either because of the danger of keeping them inside a car that spends several hours each day under the blazing desert sun. So we had to go on a forced diet for a day, but the lack of food was compensated for by the pleasure of immersing ourselves in the warm waters of the Sea of Cortez.

The most incredible part of that visit happened after the sun went down. The air was humid and heavy, while the sky threatened rain that never came. Clouds of mosquitoes descended on us, and inside the tent the heat was infernal because there was no breeze. I closed my eyes and tried to remain very still and relaxed, hoping my body would acclimate and I could fall asleep, but the temperature was above thirty degrees Celsius, and the little battery-powered fan wasn’t enough to move the air. Feeling that my method had failed, I decided to use the power of my mind and imagined that I was in a frozen forest in Alaska, hoping the atmosphere of my visualization would help me. That didn’t work either, and I felt as though I were suffocating.

As a desperate measure, I opened the mesh and stuck my head outside, fully aware of the risk involved. It was almost midnight when I felt a gentle breeze, but what completely transformed the experience was looking up. I forgot about the heat and the mosquitoes. That cloudless sky was a spectacle that most people only experience as an optical illusion inside a planetarium. Martín tossed and turned beside me and warned me the mosquitoes were going to attack, but I no longer cared. I even invited him to stick his head out too. He must have thought I had lost my mind because he turned over to the other side.

I couldn’t get over my amazement. During the previous days, I had looked at that starry sky through the excitement of the photographs I could take, but not through quiet, unhurried observation. My field of view was very limited, and I began playing with the idea of leaving the tent and lying outside. That afternoon, I felt the sand was compact and would feel like lying on a rock, while inside the tent my sleeping pad felt wonderful. After debating whether sleeping out in the open was reasonable, I got to work. I took out my sleeping pad, pillow, water bottle, and phone, then lay down on my back. The breeze grew stronger, and little by little the experience became magical. Sleep slipped away into the darkness, and I let the mosquitoes do what they wanted. There weren’t as many by then, and aside from the buzzing in my ears, I tried to ignore their bites.

As I relaxed, I began to see meteors crossing the sky in every direction. Some traced a short, thin white line, while others left a long, thick trail. I stayed there without moving, enjoying that unique and unrepeatable moment. After a while, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an electrical storm beginning to form toward the northeast. At first, I saw quick flashes of light, but eventually they illuminated much of the clouds in that direction. I took my phone, set the shutter speed to ten seconds, and began the hunt. Hundreds of images later, I managed to capture a few bright flashes over the clouds.

Then the light of dawn finally defeated me, until the heat of the rising sun forced me to seek the coolness of the calm sea.

Detained by Immigration Police

After a delightful day traveling through increasingly beautiful landscapes, we were stopped late in the afternoon at another checkpoint. We had already passed several without any problems, including military, prosecutor’s office, and highway police checkpoints, but this one was different. They were immigration officers, and the fact that our passports had no entry stamps put them on alert. We explained that we had never seen an immigration booth and that we planned to complete the immigration process at the office in La Paz.

They held on to our passports, and after a couple of hours in the sun, with clouds of mosquitoes trying to pierce our ears, they explained they would have to take us to the National Institute of Migration offices. Meanwhile, the Atlas would remain in the inspection area parking lot. During the long, hot wait, the boys took out their instruments to ease the stress.

When the shift changed, they put us in the rear compartment of a van, separated from the driver by a metal barrier. We didn’t know where we were going or what would happen to us because, according to the officer, we wouldn’t be allowed to remain in the country.

So many months of traveling, so much preparation—and our journey was going to end like this?