Guided tour at the La Paz, Museum
During our Mexican travels, it was often said to us by veteran travelers to Mexico that one travels to the Baja for the "beaches" and that one goes to mainland Mexico for the "culture". That may be jus...
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Walking the walk, talking the talk - a dream in Baja
On a surf-pounded beach in Baja Sur, I sat with my family of five, in a circle of campers around a crackling bonfire. The flickering flames cast each storyteller’s face in turn with a ruddy glow. The...
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Mexico beach Christmas
The trailer was packed, the three kids and the dog were loaded into the van as final preparations were made for the "journey to the end of the earth". For us, Baja truly seemed land's end. Nobody we kn...
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Manana at the lighthouse
Mañana is a Mexican word that I struggle to understand. I continue to learn more about this word every time that I travel in Mexico. One of my earliest lessons was learned at the lighthouse that prote...
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Baja communities play a key role in conservation
Those moments when you can spontaneously interact with a wild animal, one on one, in their environment - whether it's under the ocean, on a mountain, in the middle of the desert - are pretty special, life changing even.
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Life goes on in Todos Santos despite the changes
Down narrow, winding, desert Highway 19, an hour past the last golf course in Cabo San Lucas, lies quiet Todos Santos, a Mexican hamlet with just over 3,400 residents, on the Pacific side of southern B...
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Sonora - Mexico's wild west
During the heyday of westerns, films showed cowboys riding through the Great Sonoran Desert from Arizona to what is now the State of Sonora in Mexico. The desert is still there and so are the cowboys.
...
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Tijuana, a taste of Mexico
Tijuana boasts a bullfight ring, racetracks for both dogs and horses, a jai alai fronton, golf courses, museums and cultural centers, a beautiful beach nearby, and other attractions not found in other ...
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Tijuana hotels and dining
Photos by Robert Mohr © Robert Mohr 2006
People in Latin countries are usually out visiting in the evenings, having fun and listening to street musicians and eating at any of the well-lit taco ...
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Tijuana, a taste of Mexico
Tijuana boasts a bullfight ring, racetracks for both dogs and horses, a jai alai fronton, golf courses, museums and cultural centers, a beautiful beach nearby, and other attractions not found in other ...
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Tijuana: a taste of Mexico - part 3
Tijuana: A Taste of Mexico
Part III
Serious Shopping for the Serious Shopper
By David Roland © David Roland 2006
Photos by Robert Mohr © Robert Mohr 2006
...
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The Baja - links on Mexico Connect
THE BAJA
The wild and beautiful peninsula of Baja California is as close as your computer read more
The wild and beautiful peninsula of Baja California is as close as your computer read more
Beach-bumming it in Mazatlan
Crooked under one arm, he lovingly hugs a water-beaten body board as if it were his best friend. A mass of dirty blonde dreadlocks crowns his scalp and from under sun-faded Hawaiian shorts, his bronzed...
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Mazatlan - not just another resort
Angela Peralta is a big name in Mazatlán (mah-saht-LAHN). And practically everyone, especially the locals, are happy to tell you "the real story" about this legendary, Mexican diva. Only every story y...
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Old Mazatlan has its charms
At first glance, Mazatlán looks like a typical Mexican beach resort with boxy high-rise hotels and loud nightclubs crowding its shoreline, but there is more to this old port city than meets the eye. T...
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The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck
Back in 1940, just before Pearl Harbour, John Steinbeck and his marine biologist friend, Ed Rickets, chartered a fishing boat, the Western Flyer, in Monterey, California, and sailed down the coast around the Baja into the Sea of Cortez. Their six-week mission was to collect specimens of marine life in the area. They jointly wrote a book about the voyage, largely about marine biology, which was published in 1941. A decade later, Steinbeck himself wrote this more personal book. The result is a mixture of travel writing, journalism, diary-keeping, philosophy, meditation and, yes, there's a lot of stuff about the marine life of the area. After all, the author was something of an authority in that field.
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The Devil's Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea
This is the story of a group of men who have become known as the Yuma 14. They are the fourteen illegal immigrants who died attempting to cross the Arizona border in May, 2001. And what a terrible and upsetting story it is. Unknown numbers of these illegal immigrants die every year making the dangerous crossing on foot over one of the most inhospitable stretches of terrain in the world. But the Yuma 14 constituted the largest known number of such immigrants to die at one time.
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The Guaymas Chronicles: La Mandadera by David E. Stuart
Although it's about Mexico, this one starts off in Ecuador in the 1960s where the author was doing doctoral fieldwork for a dissertation on haciendas in that country. His work took him to a remote research station on the side of a mountain seventy miles from electricity, running water, telephones, etc. One day while riding his horse along the side of a gorge, with the bottom of a canyon almost a thousand feet below him, the horse stumbled and fell. On its way over the edge it rolled over Stuart and disappeared, leaving him badly crippled. He was rescued and eventually found his way to Guaymas, on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, in Mexico, where his fiancé, Iliana, lived. Thus begins the story of his recuperation and, at the same time, the exploration of Mexican society and customs which is described here.
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Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the U.S. - Mexico Border by Sebastian Rotella Norton
The action never stops at the border. There is no other place like it on the globe. The international boundary stretches for almost two thousand miles, from the Pacific Ocean through the mountains, the deserts, the valleys of the Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. The region is a vast world unto itself. And the westernmost, fourteen-mile strip between San Diego and Tijuana, the border's biggest and richest cities, is the most intense microcosm of that world. The U.S. Border Patrol records half a million yearly arrests of illegal immigrants here, accounting for almost half of all its arrests.
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In the Shadow of the Volcano: One Family's Baja Adventure by Michael Humfreville
This was not to be your usual sight-seeing trip, moving from one convenient accommodation to another. Their desire was to be isolated from civilization and to live as simply as possible. An element of self discovery was also a definite part of the program. Thus it was that they found themselves a week or two later on an empty beach on the remote west coast of the Baja constructing a tiny hut that was to be their home for an indefinite period. Pacific breakers pounded the beach a few steps away. The specific area where they set up camp was between El Rosario and Guerrero Negro where a number of tiny fishing villages were located.
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Miraculous Air: A Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico by C. M. Mayo
Most of us think of the Baja Peninsula as a vast, sprawling, empty, underpopulated space on the Pacific Coast with hundreds of miles of desolate beaches. To a great extent, that's what it is. What Ms. Mayo gives us in Miraculous Air is a beautifully researched account of the history, geography, ecology, oceanography, the folklore, the wildlife and the incredible fishing in this vast area. We read of cave paintings of people who lived in the area some 10,800 years ago. And along the way, we meet a few quite interesting and memorable people.
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