Baja California Sur, Mexico

June 2018

I pressed the ignition switch on my Suzuki at our first gas stop in Mexico. It made a whirring sound and didn’t fire. I winced. My friends Shane, Lorn, Shawn and I had just driven the entire length of the west coast in twenty-four hours. Without resting, we’d ridden south of the border through one-hundred-twenty miles of salt flats to San Felipe.

Flakey ignitions weren’t new to me, but my DRZ400SM was loaded with a surfboard and another hundred pounds of camping gear. I rolled the bike for a compression start. It fired once, then crumbled to a stop. Oh fuck. We had 1,900 miles to go.

Our Baja dream was four years in the making. Visions of the trip were what originally got me into motorcycles: ride from the border, camp in the desert, and surf all the way down. It was my entire bucket list and every year we didn’t do it ate at me.

I tried to pass off my broken motorcycle as a sleep deprived hallucination from the all night drive. I’d done so much to prepare before we left. I’d even replaced my starter motor. I could hear the clock ticking on PTO from jobs back home. We had two weeks to make it from Seattle to San Jose Del Cabo and back again: 2,100 miles on the bikes and 4,600 miles total. Shane’s lifted F-350 van we’d trailered the bikes down on was stored in long term parking back in Calexico.

I reminded myself that adversity far from home was why I signed up.

The sound coming from the bike while rolling was horrifying even with the engine off. Like broken bones grinding. It was clear after ten minutes that the wrenches in our tool rolls weren’t enough. I approached a group of locals to ask about mechanics nearby. They invited me to jump in the back of their truck.

The locals took me to Jaime Motos (pronounced Hai-may) run by a father and son both named Jaime. Jaime Sr. didn’t blink when I described my problem. I took it as a sign of either his confidence or my poor Spanish. I met the guys back at the station and towed my broken bike to the shop behind Shane’s DR650 using a canvas strap. Shawn and Lorn who went to scout camping spots also returned reporting that everyone for miles, including a retired DEA agent, said the Jaimes were the best in town.

The next day I found out the bike was in even worse shape. I’d sheared all six bolts connecting my flywheel to the starter clutch. The broken bolts had gotten into my stator and chewed it to pieces. Without a new stator to run my electrical system I wouldn’t get thirty miles down the road. I’d have to replace both it and the sheared bolts, but where was I going to find a DRZ stator in this part of Mexico?

Jaime Jr. led me to a dusty junkyard owned by “Tito”. Tito said he thought he had an old Suzuki but didn’t know what model or year. I thought for sure it would be a larger DR650 model, since those are more common down south. We went out back for a look. Under a pile of disassembled ATVs was an ancient DRZ400s carcass, half buried in the dust. I let out a whoop and shared a fist bump with Jaime Jr. The stator was the only thing still intact.

There are few sounds I enjoy more than a motorcycle that starts. Within three hours we were on our way.

The stretch of coastal highway south of Puertecito is beautiful and treacherous. It leaps and dips through rocky bluffs that kick basketball sized boulders onto the road surface. A strong crosswind blew out of the desert with gusts up to 40 mph. I planted a knee to steady the nose of my surfboard in the rack beside me and we fought for every mile. I tried to anticipate as Shawn would get blown into the other lane ahead of me. We rode like that for fifty miles. The four of us all tilted forty-five degrees to the wind, white-knuckled and sneaking glances at the blue water and volcanic islands in the Sea of Cortez.

Midway through Baja Norte the highway left the ocean and devolved into an unpaved desert path through the mountains. Large piles of round boulders decorated with cactus gave it a Joshua Tree National Park vibe. The picturesque scene clashed with the tractor trailers we saw high centered on the tight switch backs.

Exiting the mountains put us back on a freshly paved track. It wound through an enchanted forest of Cardon cactus and Boojum trees — bizarre upside down carrots that slouch over at the top like lazy Dr. Suess fauna. In the late afternoon the mountains blushed purple in the background. I was pumped the forest went on for a hundred miles because I couldn’t get enough.

The mishap in San Felipe put us a day’s ride behind schedule. The swell from Hurricane Bud that had already gifted us with dust choked headwinds in the salt flats, would be dying soon in the south. To catch good surf we had to hammer miles. In San Felipe, Shane bought Mexican amphetamines that are used by prescription to treat narcolepsy back in the states. We broke into those and crossed into Baja Sur.

In the town of Ciudad Insurgentes we had our first wreck. Shane turned the wrong way down a one-way street at the same time his throttle stuck. His wheels launched up the median curb while his bike drove him to the ground underneath it. We followed him onto the one-way to block traffic. His soft luggage and hand guards had taken most of the blow. He was fortunate to walk away with an eight inch hematoma the color of the Grave Digger on his hip. We were on the road fourteen hours and five hundred miles that day. Half a pill next time.

We made our first surf stop on the Pacific side, ten miles down a dirt path bordered by sand berms and cactus. We camped in a cave of succulent trees on the bluff where surfers had made a bone shrine of sun bleached skulls and spinal columns. The shrine might have cursed us because the next morning Shane crashed again. This time landing board side down, snapping the nose of his Psycho Killer between his tank and the sand. The rest of us who’d been so cautious in the sand on the ride in but hadn’t crashed like Shane, were sending airs in third gear on the ride out.

On day four we were within striking distance of East Cape and spent it canyon carving Highway 1. We leaned so low in the curves I listened for my saddle bags to scrape pavement. I was almost disappointed when they didn’t.

We arrived on the East Cape of Los Cabos through Cabo Pulmo. The final thirty miles of unpaved, hurricane damaged roads and roaming horses were the crux of the trip. There were three foot deep sluices cut across the roadway by flood waters, amid rocks, steep banks, and loose sand. We applauded as the last rider reached the bluff. The surf below was still firing.

We spent four days camped on East Cape, a forty mile stretch of mostly empty, rural desert coastline just outside San Jose. World class surf breaks dot every other mile. The swell held for two days and we enjoyed every minute.

Eventually the wind picked up and ruined the surf. The guys were determined to drink tequila on the beach and complain, so I set out alone on a waterfall mission a few hours away. It was hard to imagine shittier roads after East Cape, but I was stoked to find them on the way to Canyon de la Zorra, an oasis in the mountains. I took the long way into the nature preserve and I forded my first river on a motorcycle. It felt badass until I passed a group of Mexicans in a Cadillac sedan doing the same thing.

We used the rest of our down time near San Jose to repair the bikes. Shawn lost most of his fork oil to a leaky seal, I broke my surf rack doing burnouts, Shane’s headpipe came loose, and Lorn’s chain was about to snap.

Mercifully, no one went down on the ride home. The only time we had to use the first aid kit was for a dog bite on Lorn’s hand. But there were other close calls. On an unpaved section in north Baja my rear tire took a bad bounce and swung my bike sideways. In the thick dust cloud I could only keep my bars pointed the way they’d been going. If I’d been able to tell just how out of control I was, I probably would have panicked and high sided. Lorn said he thought he was riding into a pile up.

We unwound at a fishing outpost fifty miles south of Puertecitos. In a small cantina, we drank beers and shot the breeze with a Mexican Army officer while his men cleaned their rifles. We spent our last night bivied by the ocean on the leeward side of a dune.

The miles had tested our friendship like it tested our bikes. At the start of trip we used Bluetooth headsets to talk to each other. By the ride home, we’d turned them off. The tension melted away with the heat when we crossed the border into the parking lot where we’d stored the van. Four dudes stripped to their underwear and waterfalled one another with cold Tecate. Grateful for the miles and grateful they were behind us.