Cabo San Lucas is a crazy town, and seems to prove a point in the cities of Baja: it’s easier to drive into the heart of these cities than it is to get back out of them.
There’s plenty of party and activity to be had in Cabo, most of which you can read about elsewhere. For my part, The Lady flew down to join me in Cabo and brought her helmet, as she’d be riding pillion on the way back. She also packed all of her belongings into a nifty River Road tank bag which turns into a backpack, allowing us to zip the entirety of her stuff onto the bike in a matter of seconds. Completely worth it for anybody serious about a tank bag, if it fits your bike.
Now the real test would begin—I’d be retracing all the fuel-starved miles I’d run on the first round, but this time with an extra 140lbs. of weight from my passenger and her belongings on a bike already poor at fuel mileage.
It didn’t start well. Getting out of Cabo San Lucas back to Mexico-19 requires knowing the entirely unmarked route out of the city (which I didn’t) lest you find yourself on one of the many unpaved and rocky dirt roads the towns in Baja are riddled with (which I did). Took us a full 45 minutes just to find the damn highway, and 25 miles of crazy Mexican roads with potholes. Had we known the proper way, it’d have been 2 miles and 5 minutes.
To the bike’s credit, it was more than able to handle the crazy dirt roads fully loaded with passenger, and didn’t even squirm around its rear tire in the dirt. Not something that could be said of so many big V-Twins today with their fat tires and fork angles.
The same can’t be said for ground clearance, however, and Mexico has speedbumps the size of Godzilla. I left some nice new notches in a few of these, wincing as I did.
Day 1 of the ride back ended in Loreto, and cemented in my mind that some of the least interesting places to motorcycle on the Baja peninnsula are the parts south of Loreto and La Paz. While the highways are mostly good here, they’re also flat, hot, straight, and fairly dull compared to the other wonderful scenery to be found on the peninnsula.
Day 2 saw a large chunk of time spent at the beaches of Bahia de Concepcion, which are among some of the best I’ve yet experienced in the world. The Sea of Cortez is bathtub-water warm, and because it’s so protected from the tides of The Pacific, there are virtually no large waves; only the littlest ripplings against white- and black-sand beaches. This made it easy to get the bike down the steep dirt slopes to the hard-packed beach and park it beneath a cabana while we lounged in the luxurious aquamarine water. All the rich and ridiculous people on their yachts with their little fluffy dogs would take small watercraft to the beaches for food and beer at the restaurant shacks setup along them, harassing the locals the drunker they got. They can eat their hearts out—nothing says “screw you” to Fat Americanism like parking a motorcycle on a beach for a day in the Sea of Cortez.
When we’d had our fill of beaches, we hopped back on the bike and burned it hard toward Gurrero Negro. There’s some ongoing road construction on Mexico-1 just Northwest of Santa Rosalía, and while I’ve handled this exact stretch of road already on this trip (and several others like it), this time we were stuck behind the unskillful driver of a large, newer pickup truck, kicking up huge plumes of dust along the dirt track we were traversing as we went. Slowing down didn’t seem to cut us any slack, as the dust clouds wouldn’t blow away appreciably, and in this mess I finally experienced a fall on the trip: caught by a large pothole filled with soft dust and dirt, the bike slid over on its right side, dumping myself and my passenger in the dust. Fortunately we were going under 10mph, and the crash bars I’d installed saved the bike from any damage (as did the soft dust). We recovered quickly, cursed the irresponsible driver of the pickup, and went on our way.
Given that we’d spent the bulk of the day on the beach the sunlight was waning fast, and we still had roughly two hours to go. This last stretch was straight and fairly cool in temperature, so no worries there, but we’d be heading directly into the setting sun. The Lady, concerned about this, asked if I thought I’d be alright with riding like that.
My response: “You mean I literally get to ride into the sunset across the desert on my faithful steed with my lady on the back? Hell yes!”
Watching the sun turn molten gold as it sank into the mists of The Pacific was a beautiful sight indeed. It was dusk when we rolled into Gurrero Negro, but still light enough to avoid the dogs crossing the road in front of us, ignorant or uncaring of their own wellbeing.
The capstone for the day? We got a nice little room for the night with a good hot shower at The Cowboy Hotel. How apropos.