The Almost Tropical Waters of La Paz

First post from Mexico, and it turns out that crossing the border isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be. The border crossing between San Diego & Tijuana is one of the busiest in the world. With 25 lanes of car traffic and 15 lanes of pedestrian traffic. But we took a special bridge straight to Tijuana airport. So all we had to do was walk straight through the US immigration section (no one was there) and then to get into Mexico we pushed a button. That was it.

Our first stop in Mexico was La Paz (not the same La Paz in Bolivia). This one sits at the end of the Baja Peninsula and is famous for its whale sharks and rugged landscapes.

Balandra Beach

The landscape in the Baja Peninsula is very dry. In the area around La Paz it was pretty much a rocky desert. It was so dry that even the desert plants were drying out.

The area has a harsh kind of beauty to it. You have all these rugged mountains and cliffs that meet the sparkling turquoise sea with white sand beaches in between. But at this time of year the water isn’t very warm so the looks are deceiving (just like Croatia).

We were around in low season it meant that the beach wasn’t very crowded. Since the water was too cold for Pedr (i.e. not warm enough for a bath) he decided to stay on the sand while I went for a swim. I walked and walked and walked through the water, but it never seemed to get any deeper than my thighs.

I got halfway across the bay, and figured that I had come this far so I might as well keep going and see if I could get to the other side. When I looked back I could see a whole bunch of people following me trying to do the same thing. Now it was a race to get there first. The deepest point in the crossing was only up to my chest, and no current so it was pretty easy and I made it all on my own. I made the crossing closer to high tide, but what we didn’t know was just how much the bay changes when the tide goes out.

Low Tide

If I’d waited a few more hours I probably could’ve done it with only my ankles getting wet. But once the tide went out we could explore the rocky headlands where the sea has been slowly eroding and undercutting the cliffs. And it has left behind some impressive formations.

Espiritu Santo

It’s a bumpy 2 hour boat ride in a little speedboat to a sea lion colony at the tip of the island. But you pass more amazing scenery along the coastline as you go.

Rock Formations

On Espiritu Santo you get smooth-sculpted dusty pink cliffs, rusty-red craggy cliffs, lumpy black cliffs and even delicate thin sheets of rock hanging from other rocks. It’s a very strange landscape.

Sea Lions

When we finally arrived at the sea lion colony a few of them came right up to the boat to check us out. As I was leaning over to look at one of them, it popped out of the water and came right up to my face. I almost fell backwards into the boat from shock. There are 5000 sea lions in this colony and they cover pretty much every spare rock that sits above the water line. There were a lot of very young sea lions all enjoying a snooze in the sun. In some spots they were neatly lined up in a row, but in another spot they would be all piled on top of each other and using each other as pillows.

Once we got into the water a few sea lions came over and swam around our group. They would swim around in circles, darting this way or that way. Sometimes coming in to blow bubbles at your face then turning to dart off in another direction. I spun around so many times trying to see what they were doing that I ended up making myself seasick. There was one huge 500kg male sitting on the rocks keeping a lookout at everything going on. We made sure not to go too close to his rock. There was another big male in the water that swam right below the fins of another group. But they were all too busy looking at the baby sea lions on the rocks that no one saw him. Luckily for them he didn’t seem to care about people at all.

Eventually we had to leave the sea lions because we were freezing from the cold water. It must’ve been 16°C at the sea lion colony, significantly colder than at Balandra. But Pedr was willing to freeze for sea lions. To top off the day we stopped for lunch on a beach where we could warm up in the sun with La Paz style ceviche. (The water was still too cold for swimming.)

Whale Sharks

For our final day in La Paz we were finally going to see the whale sharks. We were getting a bit worried because the weather was very cloudy. We weren’t going to have another chance if we didn’t see any. (Pro tip: don’t book the thing you want to see most on the last day!) Luckily there were whale sharks everywhere in the shallow bay off La Paz. This area is where young sharks hang around until they get big enough to head off to the open ocean. So the sharks we saw were between 3.5 – 6m long, but full grown ones can be as long as 15m.

Gentle Giants

Because it was cloudy and the water was a bit murky, we couldn’t really see more than 4m underwater. So a couple of times we would be swimming alongside one shark only to have another one appear right in front of us without warning. But there’s nothing to be scared of. When you’re swimming alongside them you really understand their nickname of “gentle giant”. They’re big but swim so peacefully and effortlessly, and hardly seeming to move their tails at all.

The reason there are so many whale sharks in the area is because there’s a lot of plankton (their food). So when the sharks feed they open their huge mouths and basically vacuum up all the plankton as they swim along. They’ll follow schools of sardines (who also like plankton) and swim straight through the middle of the school and steal their food. Once we had three sharks right next to each other all swimming at the surface sucking up plankton. We never thought we would see so many sharks so close together in such a short amount of time.

Protection for Whale Sharks

The authorities are trying to look after the whale sharks, and have rules on how many tourists can enter the marine reserve, how fast the boats can go (so that the sharks aren’t injured in collisions) as well as banning shark feeding. It didn’t seem like the sharks were too worried about people, but it did feel like there were a few too many groups following the sharks around. (As soon as one group got out of the water another group would be waiting to jump in.) The research company that took us on our trip were the ones that have been working with the authorities and boatmen to have rules to protect the sharks. So it’s good to see that they have been successful in stopping the shark trips from being a free for all.

Leaving La Paz

Having ticked off one of our big bucket list items, it was time for us to leave La Paz on a ferry to the mainland. We thought we’d enjoying a nice drink on the terrace bar as we watched the land disappear while the ferry headed out to sea. But found this instead.

So we sat in the cold wind instead until we couldn’t handle it anymore before heading back to our cabin.

Experienced Travellers Can Still be Idiots

And to prove that even experienced travellers like us still make dumb mistakes: we were woken up from our siesta by an announcement saying that we needed to bring our cabin keys back to the reception area. When I asked why this was, it was because the overnight ferry was actually just a 6hr trip.

I had misread the time on the website, paid extra money for a cabin we didn’t need, and missed out on free lunch because we thought we would save our meal voucher for dinner. So we ended up in a strange port late at night with no hotel reservation. We went to our hotel anyway and spent 45min trying to get them to change the date of our booking. Then went to bed for a 4hr sleep (that didn’t happen because a car alarm kept going off ALL night long), because we needed to be at the train station extra early to buy tickets.

We made the train in the end, and that’s coming up in the next post.