Baja the Hard Way
By Paulette Perhach
My poop shovel arrived in the mail alongside dresses I’d ordered, unrelated. I swept both packages over to my best friend’s house, where, happy in a velvety gown with medieval sleeves, I screwed together the handle of the shovel, admiring the tools hidden within the tube of each section, attached just above the angled threads: a whistle, a screwdriver, and a hacksaw that, when unscrewed and on its own, formed into what we called a murder stick.
“What is this you’re doing again?” my friend asked. “Some kind of dirt rally?”
It had been four years since I stopped on a sidewalk in the middle of Seattle to take in a parked beige 1980s Volvo wagon, covered in gear and stickers. All my life, every time I’d walked by a vehicle strapped with a flat gas can, traction boards, and a rooftop tent, fitted with a winch and a pipe coming up and out alongside the windshield (and what could that even be for?), I felt compelled to leave a note under their wiper: “Who are you? What do you do on the weekends? How can I become one of you?”
Standing by one of these parked rigs, set to survive out there, made me evermore aware I was, with my two-wheel drive, in here.
Unlike the others, this one had a hint, an invitation, something to Google. A huge sticker on the door displayed a number with a logo above it with a Day of the Dead skull, two wrenches set like crossbones, a cactus and a howling coyote. “Baja XL,” it said. “The 4,000 km desert rally & challenge.”
On my phone as I walked, I discovered the Baja XL is a 10-day off-roading adventure from San Diego to near Cabo and back, the distance from Seattle to Florida. It was the goofball version of more serious races, like the Baja 1000. About 60 teams, ranging from Vespas to Land Rovers, drive a mix of off-road and on highway, camping and clamoring their way down the coast. Perhaps now, I could see what I was missing.
The organizer, Andrew Szabo, said he would let me come as a reporter, but I had to make my own way, hitching rides from vehicle to vehicle.
Was this too crazy? Flying down to Mexico to ride with strangers, hoping to not get stranded?
I almost didn’t go. I told the guy I was dating at the time about it, and he asked for more details. “Look at your face when you talk about it,” he said. “You light up. You have to go.”
I freaked out and almost backed out again when I realized the starting point was a clothing-optional campground 90 minutes from the San Diego airport, in the middle of nowhere, as clothing-optional resorts tend to be. The panic of throwing myself out there nearly consumed me, balanced only by my contradictory and ever-present need to get out there.
Then, of course, a Facebook post and a few DMs later, I found a ride.
Unsupervised, I bought a new pack at REI. Monitoring the Facebook group in the days before leaving, I saw someone already there mention just how cold it was, so at the last minute I snagged a sleeping bag rated for 20 degrees. And then I got on a plane to southern California, with just my first few days of rides planned, hoping it would all work out.
To not be a burden
I was determined not to be more of a burden to the people there then I already was, as a journalist hitchhiker.
Then, at the airport, my bag did not arrive. This was the beginning, my anxiety said. My bag would not come, I’d hold these good people up with no other options, becoming a burden, a total disaster.
The bag was in the oversized luggage area.
Adlai and Casey had exactly a human + backpack-sized niche in their backseat amid gear packed for a 10-day adventure. They served as the support vehicle for Casey’s brother, Patrick, riding on a motorcycle.
At the camp, rigs rolled in honking, a parade of cars the spectrum of tricked out trucks to a tiny Miata. They admired each other’s mechanical toys, studied the maps over beers, and buzzed with something like the first day of a music festival while the stages are still being set.
That night, in my tent with no vehicle next to it, it was so cold even Ron Jeremy would not have gone clothing optional. In the bag I’d gotten for myself, I was just warm enough.
Day 1: The man who made all this
208 miles from De Anza Springs to Diablo Canyon
The first day, I rode with the organizer, Andrew Szabo. If Andrew started a cult, I’d request a brochure. He’s the kind of person who makes you wonder why the hell you, personally, are so boring. He named his company the Institute for Unsafe Living. Insurers don’t love his style, but the people who attend his events do.
He runs two rallies, alternating years, one in Baja, the other in the Sahara. Otherwise, he can be found pack-rafting, taking his family to islands, cooking outdoors, or biking through his home city of Budapest. He’s completely the kind of badass I’d love to become, though I can barely remember where I parked my car outside Trader Joe’s.
I’ve only just done my first multi-day hike, and fell in love with it, bemoaned that I didn’t do more serious adventuring with a 20- and 30-year-old body, but as I looked at the Jeep, I realized one of the benefits of off-roading is that you can buy your muscle.
Our first stop was to be some hot springs, but when we got there, the road he’d expected simply was not there. Instead, there was a pile of rocks.
He took it in stride, and we merely moved on, driving with mountains cutting into the sky, talking about the death of true adventure and his attempts to invite people to it, as well as that time he almost got shot when he had no choice but to “borrow” a tractor from what he’d thought was an abandoned farm, when his truck got stuck in sand in the middle of nowhere.
Finding camp, we pulled onto a dried lake surrounded by mountains, circled up and lit fires, trucks lighting up the swirling mixture of smoke and dust with the cones of their headlights, well into the night.
As we set up, Andrew asked me to scrounge up a shovel.
“I have a shovel,” I say.
He looked at me with a smirk. “You have a shovel?”
Day 2: My kind of family bonding
236 miles from Diablo Canyon to Bahia De Los Angeles
In the dark before dawn, the sound reminded me of the wobbling of a metal plate, but as I came to, individual yips became clearer, teaching me what a pack of coyotes, celebrating, sounds like.
When we got up, the sun laid pink light across the desert, and Andrew told me that when he heard them, he was planning his escape route. I couldn’t tell if it was a joke.
We were nowhere. Just here.
On this day I rode with Craig and his friend Paul, plus their sons trailing in the truck behind them. I would have killed to go on this kind of father-son trip, even though I’m a daughter. The things we think we’re bad at, like auto maintenance — so often, no one ever bothered to teach us.
The Baja XL offers two experiences: the competition class, which is a kind of navigational scavenger hunt for points, or the touring class, which is a chill do-it-yourself tour of whatever taco stand or overlook you want to stop at. In the touring class, and not in a rush, Craig at one point let me drive his truck through Valley of the Giants, surrounded by cacti that can grow up to 60 feet tall.
His 500-horsepower Ford truck has aftermarket suspension all the way around, with 16" of travel, which makes it softer off-road (a tradeoff for the tight suspension you actually want on-road, I learn.) When I drive, I feel it, something like the relationship your body has with your feet when you’re walking home late from the bar.
He splurged for upgraded wheels and tires, flood lights in front and back, CB radios. The catalog of toys one could get for off-roading are never-ending, and he’s found that with more experience, he’s actually learned to bring less. Besides the basics, he relies on baling wire and duct tape, which we’ve already had to use to fix a wheel well cover that came loose, most likely when the screws vibrated out from the rough road.
“On this rally, if we were sitting on the side of the road right now broke down, I bet you five cars would stop within an hour asking if they can help,” said Craig, “and between those five people, you’d figure it out.”
After a lunch of birria tacos, I switched over to the truck with the young guys.
They immediately charmed me, as Good Kids™️ do. They told me how much time in the real Mexico has taught them about their own luck to be born in the United States, how much more in touch with reality they feel than if they’d just flown into Cabo.
“You just keep learning, that’s what I love about this trip,” said Craig’s son Kason, 20. “When I first went, it was somebody else’s car, I went with my dad, and he was more responsible for me, because I wasn’t as old as I am now. This trip, I have my truck, with my friends, we got our own navigation system, we kind of got to figure things out on our own if stuff happens. I’m learning more about my truck, I’m learning more about camping, learning more about Mexico — it’s all about learning, soaking up all this information.”
Could I myself learn? About engines and suspension, wheel wells and baling wire? Enough to be out here with just myself, my own navigation, and my friends? Could I ever be successful enough to buy my own truck with a 16" suspension? Could I ever take care of myself so well in regular life that I could also adventure like this?
Day 3: There’s no tow truck coming to get you
300 miles from Bahia De Los Angeles to Bahia De Concepcion
That night, I got dropped off at the campsite, my pack looking tiny against the desert backdrop.
I was supposed to ride out with Wilson and his cousin/co-pilot, Cullom, at 5 a.m., so early because we were going to start the day fishing. I called to confirm on my satellite phone (“sat phone” if you’re dusty), giddy to have a reason to use a sat phone. Most campgrounds have a hotel about half an hour away, so at each stop riders have that option, which they’d taken that night. They confirmed we were good for the morning.
After a few minutes of sitting around a fire with some of the guys, talking about, surprisingly to me, the benefits of journaling, I dove into my tent.
I dreamt of a sailboat, sail rippling in the wind.
I woke up and heard:
“We gotta tell her we’re not going fishing!”
I realized the sail was the sound of my tent being shaken.
“I swear, she’s in there!” said another voice.
I unzipped the tent and poked my head out.
Wilson couldn’t meet up at 5, so they’d driven all the way from the hotel they were staying at, half an hour away, to camp to tell me.
In the morning, the Miata got stuck in the sand.
We all watched as their friend in the old cop car pulled them out, also got stuck, and had to be pulled out by a truck, in a string of three vehicles. More and more people left camp, and I wondered where my ride was.
Someone offered to take me to meet them. “I’m not going to let you be the last person at camp,” he said. I worried about passing my ride, but we thought it would be impossible not to see them.
It happened anyway, and they had to turn around. The burn of burden singed, but Dave, who buddied with Wilson and Cullom during the rally, told me not to worry about it.
That day, I ended up riding in Dave’s Gladiator Mojave Jeep. As soon as I landed at the first camp, people had started telling me I needed to talk to Dave. He is a legend.
Though he’s been down to the peninsula often, this is his third Baja XL. His first he did in 2019 with his buddies Phil and Jeff after buying some old cop cars at auction.
“I think the first year they thought the three of us were just complete idiots. We pull up to the starting hotel, we’re doing donuts, three goofballs, all driving in a Crown Vic.”
Then one of the guys in the crowd watching, Craig, noticed they had a spare drive shaft packed. As Dave tells it, he said, “These guys might not be as big of idiots as we think. They’re carrying a spare drive shaft. Nobody down here has a spare drive shaft.”
During the rally, the goofballs then proceeded to pass everybody.
Dave, a third-generation mechanic working in a shop his grandpa started in 1945, and his friend Phil are legendary for the day they’d ripped a control arm off the right suspension of their Crown Vic, 200 miles from anywhere. Please note I have no idea what that really means, but it sounds bad. It required a fix that would have been unthinkable to anyone else. They sent their teammate Jeff ahead with the other cars.
“I looked at Phil and I said, ‘Well, we’re in a foreign country. We don’t really speak the language. Now we have a car that can’t move. We’ve got a couple packets of Oreos, some water. I think we’re pretty much we’re crushing the game right now,’” said Dave. “Phil looked at me and he’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we signed on for, right?’”
Meanwhile, Jeff was telling everyone who was planning to come back for them in the morning, “You guys know they’re gonna drive into camp, right? They’re not gonna be out there all night. They’re gonna fix it. Trust me.”
Dave didn’t want to ruin anyone’s day with a six-hour rescue diversion. Working in the night while Phil flicked scorpions off this torso, they hooked the vise grips they had holding a welding rod they’d brought up to the four batteries in the car (needed for the disco and LED strobe lights) with jumper cables and used the car batteries to weld. Again, I personally have no idea how this MacGyver move works, but to hear others tell it, as I did many times, they often looked in the distance as if remembering the time they saw God, shaking their heads slightly in disbelief that it ever really happened.
Dave and Phil rolled into camp at 5:30 in the morning, their siren (because of course they had a siren) blaring.
“That’s the thing, you learn kind of how to improvise constantly,” said Dave. “There’s no tow truck coming to get you.”
In this temporary community where mechanical knowledge and supplies rule, Dave, both knowledgeable and generous with that knowledge, is the person you want to roll up on you when you’re struggling. Anyone he passes stopped on the road, he pauses to ask, with a thumbs up, “You good?”
His vehicle was packed not only with supplies and spare parts, but with toys for the local kids, and, next to the slim red jerrycan that holds extra gas, his signature yellow one, a color that’s supposed to signify diesel, sloshing with margaritas, ready to pour at camp.
I had sandwich supplies. I asked Dave if he wanted a PB&J, but he declined. So, rocking back and forth with the Jeep, I balanced the two pieces of bread on my knees and made myself a sandwich.
As I took my first bite, he looked at me with a side-eye and a smirk, asked, “Have you been on boats?”
As we paused in towns to give out the toys, I realized that although I am a mechanical idiot, I actually did have something to contribute.
I’ve been learning and practicing Spanish for fifteen years. So when he went give out the presents, I could explain with a little more detail that these were gifts. We shared in the glory of a mother’s face as she imagined how happy a doll would make her daughter.
This year, Dave almost didn’t come. After 33 years of friendship, Phil died of COVID in November of 2021.
He and Phil had planned to do a similar route down Baja independently with their wives. “Well, one of the last things Phil said to me was, ‘Hey, I don’t care if I’m there or not — go on that trip.’”
Which the three of them did.
Death has been looming around Dave for nearly all his life. His brother was sick, requiring decades of dialysis, and then passed when he was in his thirties. During one era of his own life, Dave, working 80 hours a week, was nearly toe-tagged when all his organs started shutting down.
“So many people make a bucket list of things they want to do before they die. And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t do any of them,” he said. “This is the kind of thing that keeps you going.”
Just then, we catch up with a motorcycle rider who’s struggling. Wobbling in front of our vehicle, he goes down.
Dave gets out, rights his bike, gives him some tips.
Back at his own steering wheel, watching through the windshield as the rider wobbles, Dave mutters, “Feet on the pegs. Feet on the pegs.”
He goes down again.
I’m watching someone who’s in over his head, remembering all the times I’ve tried riding the proverbial bike without the proper training, skinned my knees on life’s rocks, been pinned under my decisions, needed others to help me get up. Dave could get himself out of anything, I think.
What a question for life: How do you know how far to push yourself? How do you know what you can handle and what you can’t?
I don’t want to be a wuss. I don’t want to be a burden. And sometimes, the only way to know what your limits are is to go too far.
That night, as we set up camp on the beach, I’m glad I took this risk, though what I’m getting is the bowling bumper rails version of the real thing.
Day 4: How far out of your comfort zone?
352 miles from Bahia De Concepcion to Las Cruces
The question you hear most often out here is: Is this a road? Is that the road?
Like any word you turn over enough times in your mouth, it starts to feel funny, and you overthink it.
As far as many of the people back home are concerned — and they are concerned — all of us down here have left a certain kind of road.
Wilson and his wife Heather got involved in the rally in 2019 because she’s the cousin of the organizer, Andrew. Wilson is a PR VP who lives an hour South of San Francisco.
“I didn’t know you could literally drive for two days and not see anybody,” he said. “And I didn’t know Baja is actually super safe if you’re not being an idiot.”
Wilson has now brought others down with him. He was five days out from a trip with a friend, just the two of them driving from SF to Cabo, when the guy backed out.
“This is just so far out of my comfort zone,” said his friend, “that I’m just, I’m freaking out.”
He stayed home. Wilson went alone.
Wilson has doubled down on his love of off-roading, finding himself swirled in the addiction to buying off-roading toys and vehicle upgrades for his Toyota 4Runner.
“I’m pretty skilled at self-justification,” said Wilson. “I can pretty much write off anything in my mind.”
He brought masks and flippers, a button that can call a helicopter, fishing gear, solar panels. His Toyota 4Runner has skid plates, and a mechanism that almost makes him want to get stuck in the sand, as it wiggles you out by applying power to the wheels differently.
“This suspension was totally worth it,” he said, referring to the $9,000 investment. “Even on the road, it just drives better.”
Dave was following behind us, and over the radio or by pulling alongside each other, they conferred over maps, routes, possibilities. With the dust that gets kicked up, no one wants to be the second car.
Wilson said he’d be driving even faster without me in the car, though I can hardly imagine it. Inside the vehicle, where Cullom kindly let me ride shotgun, it felt an airplane in prayer-inducing turbulence. Anything strapped down or attached moved on one level, with the vehicle. Bumps filtered out anything not strapped down, like a three-dimensional spreadsheet, separating cans, sunglasses, change a foot into the air. I momentarily forgot to hold my camera, and suddenly it was floating in the air in front of my face before I snatched it down.
In the shaking, all tiny objects sifted toward the floor, and I lost my damn pen. I was embarrassed to ask Wilson for one. I’m supposed to be a journalist.
But once I did, he laughed a high laugh, and pulled something out of the center console.
“I’ve got this battle pen my dad gave me the first time I came down here. He was like, ‘You’re gonna need something.’”
Guns aren’t allowed across the border.
Wilson handed me a thick metal tactical pen, which, with a sister who’s a former Marine, looks familiar.
“I’m not a trained pen weapons expert. What am I going to do with this metal pen?” He mimed a kind of fencing. “Stand back, sir! My dad got me this pen!”
Wilson didn’t know a thing about Baja or navigation when he came down in 2019. He met Dave that first night, and they realized they live about an hour from each other. He’s become part of the subculture that trades in routes, waypoints and GPX files or find find them on Wikiloc and iOverlander.
Dave, of course, has a library of tracked routes he’s happy to pass you to load in your own GPS, so you can make the same trip.
One time, Wilson took route Dave had given him and found the bushes on both sides scratching his car. Wonka-esque, the road became narrower and narrower. He barely got through. Afterward, he asked Dave about it. “Oh yeah,” said Dave. “I did that on my dirtbike.”
He and Dave rib each other about their driving over the radio.
“A lot of people who come on this race — there are just some crazy, crazy people that will just do anything crazy,” said Wilson. “But they are just the nicest, most solid — like if I had babies, I would trust them with my babies — you know, they’re great.”
As we hit some bumps, I mentioned trying to make a PB&J in Dave’s car the day before, but Wilson interrupts me.
“Oh, he’s told everybody at the campground about it,” said Wilson.
“First words out of his mouth,” added Cullom, throwing on the excited tone of a Dave impression: “‘She’s there making a sandwich like it’s nothing, right during the hardest part. Made it look easy.’”
Wilson chimes in: “He said, ‘“Paulette’s a badass. She made a fucking PB&J while we were bouncing down the jankiest road that I’ve been on since we got here. I have never seen anything like it. It was legend.’”
Yes, Dave can battery weld in the field. I can balance two pieces of bread on my lap. Legends, both of us. But I beam. I am a middle schooler again, trying to hang out with the cool girls, and one just said she likes my shirt.
Memento Mori
Before the day is over, Wilson shows me a coin he had made into a keychain, a memento mori with a skull and a hourglass. On the back, it says, “You could leave life right now.” He gave one to Cullom, and another to Dave as well. He will later give one to me.
This is what I feel, out here. This is where my own addiction to travel comes from. That if we are floating in space and if there is cancer and Covid and we could leave this life right now, shouldn’t we be doing wild shit exactly like this as much as we possibly can?
But there’s also PTO and bank balances and deadlines. I want all the feeling of the wind in my hair, and none of the 9–5 job most of these guys have to pay for it. I want all this, all the time.
I could leave this life right now. I think often about the moment I might die, because I’m weird like that. I swerve on a highway dipping a McDonald’s chicken nugget in honey and think, oh god, don’t let it be while listening to a book on tape about productivity, somewhere north of Orlando.
Here, in Baja, I could die this way. But I’d like to live long enough, actually, to come back. I’d like to overcome all my weaknesses, bring the Bronco Sport Badlands I dream of buying with my hard work, use skills I learned at the local off-roading school I randomly found later in Florida, which I’m determined to go to one day. I would like to use this life to do something that makes me feel as alive as I’ve felt the last few days, without plunging into disaster.
