Baja For Beginners
“Looking after children can be a subtle way of giving up,” the novelist Edward St. Aubyn once wrote. If a vacation is thus a defining microcosm of family life at its presumed artificial best, then it will forever encapsulate your attitude of giving up, or giving in, or putting up a fight, usually at great cost to your nerves and sleeping schedules. It is the family vacations about which your children will brag or complain (or fake-complain) to their friends and future spouses and their own children, as in, “My parents dragged me to Epcot,” or, “My parents made me do the midnight watch on a month-long sailboat trip to Labrador.” In short, this is how you will be remembered.
And so, when we were invited to join two other families on a vacation to Todos Santos on the Baja Peninsula in Mexico, we eagerly hitched along. We’d been to Todos twice before with these same friends, but had since collectively amassed three kids, ages 2 and under. What better place, we reasoned, for preconscious children than a town where the coastline is so dangerous and unswimmable that one stretch is referred to locally as Killer Beach? This would be the perfect spot to spend two weeks pretending to relax as our toddlers charged heedlessly and relentlessly toward the 25-foot surf while we — not giving up, mind you — constantly looked after them.
Todos Santos is on the Tropic of Cancer, one hour north of Cabo San Lucas along a cow-frequented stretch of otherwise desolate coastal road. This is the edge of the continent; the entire weight of the ocean rears vertically upward at this precipice and smacks down on the sand so forcefully that at night, even a quarter mile from the beach, the windowpanes rattle in their casements.
According to my co-vacationing friend, the longtime surfer Chris James, Todos first became known among surfing circles for its legendary waves, which were in fact less legendary than the exertions required to enjoy them. As surfers claim, until the mid-70’s, there were no paved roads south of Tijuana (the stretch from La Paz to Cabo via Todos seemed to have stayed unpaved until the mid-80’s), which made the thousand-mile trip from the border arduously slow and surmountable only by four-wheel drives. Adding to the outlaw thrill was the risk that you’d flip your truck on the bad roads or have a gun pulled on you by a Federale. “Basically,” James admits, “Todos was a mildly scenic town with a great fish-taco stand.”
Pilar’s Fish Tacos is, in the opinion of some locals, the indirect reason for the town’s gradual evolution from a mildly scenic town with a great fish-taco stand into a cultlike destination for an incongruous amalgam of gringos. As local myth would have it, the rancher who owned the land around Pescadero, a nearby village, decided, after the asphalt arrived, to open the San Pedrito RV Park. At about the same time — the late 80’s — the artists showed up, as did the first cafe with the first good cappuccino (still available at Caffé Todos Santos). The increasingly artsy vibe attracted the New Agers and the seekers, and soon after, the healers pulled into town. As Charlie Deal, the structural-integration specialist (i.e., nice Rolfer), said of his reasons for living in Todos, “The opportunities for personal growth here are just too great.” (Counters James, “I come here for the personal regression.”)
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