Baja’s Hardest Days

Paulette Perhach
12 min readMay 9, 2024

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Continued from Baja the Harder Way here.

The lights of the car leaving me there slid off my body as I stood in what felt like a field of sand, under the darkness and the stars, my backpack on the ground next to me. He had at least left me with his headlamp, as I had lost mine. But I didn’t need it now. I looked up at the bright stars over Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. I took a bite of the warm burrito in my left hand, a sip of the beer in my right. I realized how uncomfortable my family and friends would be with the level of trust I was putting into the fact that the guys would come, as they said they would.

I finished my standing meal and went to pee farther behind our campspot, in the field. I looked up at the stars, expansive silence cradling me on all sides, and thought, “Aw man, I have to pee inside next week.”

Day 9

218 miles from San Juanico to Guerrero Negro

In the morning, I linked up with Evan, from Ireland. A group has formed with him and a trail of others. They started driving together on the first day, and have been a roving band of about half a dozen rigs since. It’s kind of adorable.

Bill is an equine surgeon; Scott, a railroad engineer; Ruben has his own shop for cars; Carlos is in some kind of electronics; Kevin’s in construction; Ryan’s in fiberoptics.

“Everybody’s just working for the weekend kind of thing and you know,” says Evan. “Baja’s brought us all together.”

They start the day with donuts on the beach, and by that I mean the kind you kick up with tires.

Part of living, I think, is chasing that feeling that you’re making the child-you proud. As children, we imagine what it will be like to have these superpowers: to drive, to spend a paycheck, to not have to ask permission, and we fantasize about what we’d do with them. And then, for most, something goes awry. They wake up one day and wonder why they made the decisions they did, feel locked inside them.

Everyone here in Baja has managed to maintain some of the magic, the vision, the ability to see the opportunity of adulthood as one for deep play.

We are like the bike gang my friends and I had when we were little, only better funded, and, with the feeling of picking our bikes off the ground and heading for the trail, we rally the trucks around to head off.

But first, a race parallel to the beach.

He served in the Marines because the Navy recruiting office was closed that day, from 1991 to 2010. He’s worked in Iraq and on oil fields, as a Master Sergeant, a role I can’t picture with his kind lilt and easy laugh.

As he got ready for the rally, he laid everything out behind his vehicle, as old military habits die hard. He texted the photo out to the group, and fellow former Marine Small Scott texted back a nearly identical photo. Their next messages nearly collided in the passing:

“Fucking Jar Heads.”

“Fuckin Marines.”

We are Oscar-Mike, military speak for on the move, when Evan teaches me their military terms. A spotter is somebody who hops out in a slow, rocky section where you run the risk of damaging your truck. They make sure you don’t run over a rock that could damage your drive line or differential, which, of course, is a drivetrain gear assembly connecting two collinear shafts or axles (such as those of the rear wheels of an automobile) and permitting one shaft to revolve faster than the other.

I knew that.

Whereas I would say, let’s go in that direction a bit, they vector. If they tell you to watch your 6, that’s what’s behind you. Where I see a line of trucks, they see a column.

The guys in the front, the Scotts, are the lead vehicle. In the back, the tail gunner. Evan is in between, enjoying that someone else has been navigating the entire trip, though that means he’s driving through the dust behind them.

He teaches me about airing down, all the guys lined on the side of the road, knee in the dirt, air compressor tubes to the tires.

For him, street tire pressure is 45 PSI, off-roading is 20. It gives you a wider footprint, better traction, but mostly it’s for comfort. Less jostling for those pots and pans in the back. If you drove like that on the highway, the tire would overheat, the layers of rubber peeling apart, the weakened tire blowing.

Evan first fell in love with off-roading when he was 15 — “No, I must have been younger. No one ever asked me if I had a license.” He was working for a hotel in Inishbofin, an island in Ireland, sorting empty bottles, when his boss told him to take a Land Rover and go pick up scuba divers on the north beach.

“I took this old rickety ex-Irish army Land Rover that still had bullet holes from The Lebanon, and I took this damn thing across North Beach, this big, stony beach, like rocks as big as your fist.” Yellow levers and red knobs took him to lower range. No power steering. No power brakes. Yet even once the divers loaded up their gear, tanks, and lobsters, “I just did this big turn through the stones, and the thing was, like, fucking unstoppable. And that was it from there. I was hooked.”

In Ireland, people only had those vehicles for farm work. In the tough economic conditions, there wasn’t financial space for that kind of recreation. It toughened Evan up, though, made him the kind of person who could never take a car into a shop, determined to fix it himself.

Only once he came to the States at 18 did he find that people drove these vehicles on those rocky conditions for fun.

Though he’s been on adventures on motorcycles and four-wheelers, this is his first time in the real Baja.

“I’ve been to Cabo. And it’s so canned, so generic, so touristy and kind of like, tacky and fake, you know? Didn’t seem like real Mexico to me.

“I’ve always wanted to come down here to surf. But I don’t have a whole lot of friends that have the same kind of, I guess, adventurous drive,” he said. “But now, this is why I really thank Andrew for organizing this, because I never would have come down to do this without him. I would have never have met these guys, or had this level of fun.”

He heard about it from Kevin, whom he knows from the Gambler 500, an even goofier rally of cars supposedly limited to costing no more than $500.

Now, he says, he knows how friendly the locals are, how to change money, how to get the FMM (the Mexican Visitor’s Permit.)

There was a slight incident that might have scared someone else off. In Guadalupe Canyon days earlier, three guys had showed up in a pickup truck, asking who was in charge of the group. They were kind and friendly, but stern, “You can’t be here,” they said. Evan thought they were just ranchers, but others suspected they were from a cartel.

“I think I can just come down here on my own next time, or just see if somebody wants to come with me, and surf. It’d be like a surf trip.”

Adding a snorkel to his vehicle was the last modification he made. When he posted it on the Facebook group, he caught shit for it.

“What’s with the margarita blender?”

“Great job bringing the coffee pot.”

“You won’t need that in Baja.”

He didn’t plan it for submerging in water, though.

“That’s the last thing I want to do,” he said. “I’ve already ruined a nice Toyota Hilux in Japan, doing this kind of bullshit.”

An engine, he tells me, is an air pump. “Air comes in, mixes with gas, spark, boom, power, right?” Sure. The more efficiently you bring air into the engine, the more efficiently you produce power.

“When you start to get a whole lot of water, which is incompressible, into the engine, you’re gonna have catastrophic engine failure,” he said. “With dust, it will be a slow, lingering death.”

Whereas other cars will have to change and blow out their air filters, Evan said his snorkel catches the silt, so it can’t go into the air filter. It’s a method common in Australia and Africa.

But he understands the jokes. A snorkel can be a marker of what they call Starbucks Overlanders.

“This thing with people now with these, like overlanders you know, where they have every conceivable Swiss Army Knife bullshit stuck to the tops of their cars, and they drive around all year long with it. They never go to the desert. It’s like an image thing.”

Inside his snorkel, a cup of the desert swirled like a margarita being mixed.

We soon came upon the motorcycle crew, with Dom, who apparently crossed a witch and has been hexed, kneeling in the dirt with his front wheel off. The entire column slowed, and everyone got out. It was then that I became privy to a sacred circle that had eluded me somehow my entire life.

Men watching men fix things.

I’m overtaken by the feeling that there is no rush. A few beers are cracked, one offered to me, and as part of this holy communion, I partake. Patches are offered. Advice. The desert is quiet. The sun strong.

How long did we stay, an hour and a half? Two? It felt long and it didn’t.

Then we had lunch, me eating only 1/4th of a massive burrito, bringing it on the road with us.

Only during this stretch did we start to feel the time we had lost. The sun going down, the long road ahead of us to camp. The realization you still have hundreds of miles to go, today, snuck up on you fast in Baja.

It was late by the time we got there. Dark. It wasn’t like other nights of camp, an unmistakable tight group. Spaces were spread out. Our headlights roved over sand and scrub grass. Most sites were taken. Weariness met clusterfuckery. Though I was supposed to meet Wilson and Dave at a campsite, when we got there, found the number, the guys weren’t around.

Evan needed to get off to find his own site and set up camp. Apologetically, he had to leave me there. He gave me his headlamp, as I had lost mine. He gave me a beer.

And then, he turned to leave, but said, “Oh, wait!” He shuffled over to the car, popped the hood. There, on the running engine, rested my burrito, which he had been warming for me.

As he left, the lights of his car slid off my body and I stood under the darkness and stars, I took a bite of the warm burrito in my left hand, a sip of the beer in my right. Took a pee in a field and mourned the coming return to real life.

The guys would come.

And they did.

We had planned to go whale watching the next day, and then I would continue on from there. I’d heard magical things about these whales. But Wilson tells me they’re not going to go whale watching the next day, which meant I would have to find another ride. And I would have to have them up by 7 to do it.

Day 10

211 miles from Guerrero Negro to Catavina

I don’t want to give you the impression this was a booze fest, but I drank one to three beers/margaritas/cocktails a day for now what was 10 days, which apparently causes disruption of REM sleep and terrible anxiety, and the reason I knew this was that I woke at about 4:30 in the morning with terrible anxiety.

I wouldn’t know for another two and a half hours if the guys would indeed get up at 7. All I could do was wait in the dark.

I walked. Headed toward the ocean. I got to the beach and waited for it to make me feel better. Through the quiet, I sensed the watery sprinkle of movement, a surfacing in the sea. Somewhere close, the giant puff of a whale. That it was there without being visible to me, somewhere out there in the dark, the way nature is always happening whether humans notice it or not, made it more magical somehow. In the absence of sight, I felt it, the space we shared.

As for my predicament, I needed to make options for myself. At a camp nearby, there were some locals setting up, working already. I greeted them good morning. I asked them if they knew of a way to get to the whale tour, should I get desperate. Always ask the locals. They had someone maybe they could call, if I needed. Taking action helped me calm slightly.

I quietly cleaned up my own camp, avoiding the sound of zippers as much as possible.

Day 11

250 miles from Catavina to Tijuana

At 6:30, I shook the guys’ tent lightly. At 7, I straight-up woke them up, feeling terrible. My mental story was that they hated me by now. But they packed up and we were out by 7:30. According to the map and our ETA, I would be making the entire whale group wait, ticking off a massive wave of self-loathing.

“I’ve realize this is a mental game,” I told Wilson. “And I am losing that game.”

According to my calculations, Wilson would drop me off to a group of people hostile to my time management skills, and I would then have to see if any of them would do me the favor of letting me hitch a ride for oh, just 24 hours. They would all tell me to fuck off, and I would be stranded in this small, Mexican town, forced to make a new life as a one-eyed shopkeep. How did I lose the eye? I did not yet know.

“Listen, we’re not just going to leave you there,” said Wilson, flooding me with relief. “We’re not going to go until we make sure you have a ride.”

I could have hugged him.

We arrived to the group, who was not even waiting. I wasn’t even the last to arrive. I had barely grabbed my bags when Wilson said, “They’ll take you,” thumbing toward a young couple I hadn’t yet met.

And isn’t that how the road goes? You have no idea how you’ll make it, but you just do, step by step.

I met up with a couple from California who had been in the car together for 10 days and were happy to have a surprise guest star.

We were all standing around waiting for the whale tour, in front of Zihul knife shop, an incredible store where a grandfather, father and son made knives out of local flora. I bought a huge knife with a handle made from the cactus skeleton, as well as a leather holder that I could strap to my belt. I would use this for a total of about five hours, but they would be the coolest five hours of my life.

Zihul told us that at times, whales will come up to the boat. This, of course, wouldn’t happen on my trip. It was too incredible. That only happened to lucky people.

This is an area where momma whales teach their babies to swim. And there! From our small boat, a puff on the horizon. I raised my eyebrows and smiled in delight. Zihul opened his arms in a glee so unjaded, I almost asked if he had some for me.

Then, yes, it was my turn to have one of the best days of my life. The whales approached, a mom and her baby whale. And they nudged the boat, sliding under it. They turned so we could look them right in the eye. They opened their blowhole and we smelled whale breath. I got close-up photos of the barnacles on them.

And here, this is what you’re given, sometimes, when you put yourself out there, when you throw yourself to life when you say I will face the scary parts in search of something that feels like this. This is what you’re given.

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Paulette Perhach

Paulette Perhach has been published at The New York Times, Elle, Marie Claire, and Cosmo.