MEXICO
Los Cabos, Baja California's new luxury playground
The rich -- and the famous -- lead travelers to a new place to play.
My wife and I are relaxing in the hot tub, which is also occupied by a handful of other adults and exactly two children--a pre-teen girl and presumably her younger brother, whom she's carrying on her hip. The boy is having a fine time, and eager to let his father know it.
"Dad!" he yells, waving enthusiastically. "Dad! Dad! Dad!"
I look up the terraced hill to see if anybody is noticing. Someone is. Sporting a navy-blue baseball cap and a gray T-shirt, a man is gently waving back. Dad.
Richard Gere.
And I settle back into the warm water and think, "This definitely wouldn't happen in Cancun."
Which may seem like an odd observation, but part of my mission here in the Los Cabos region is to compare this peninsular tourist magnet with the one on the opposite side of the country. Specifically, is rampaging development and runaway tourism turning this beautiful area into another Cancun?
The short answer: Yup. But Los Cabos has a ways to go before it catches up.
For one thing, Cancun's coastline is jammed shoulder-to-shoulder with resort hotels, interrupted by the occasional, grudging, public beach access. Los Cabos--which includes the coastal towns of Cabo San Lucas, San Jose del Cabo and the 20-mile oceanfront corridor separating the two --has plenty of beachfront resorts as well. But there's so much more land here that quite a bit of ocean frontage remains (for now) undeveloped. Driving between San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas, there are long stretches of highway where you can see the beach from your car. That's almost impossible to do in Cancun's hotel zone.
And though both areas are overrun with tourists, Los Cabos has always been more of a rich person's playground, going back to when Hollywood types flew here on private jets before commercial air service began. My Richard Gere moment, for instance, took place within the confines of the ultra-exclusive Palmilla resort, where the junior suites run about $800 per night in high season. I don't think Cancun has any properties in that price range, whereas Los Cabos has a few, including Las Ventanas al Paraiso, which is the equal to Palmilla in just about every way, price included--and, with but 61 suites, is even more intimate. Palmilla, by contrast, has 172 accommodations (61 rooms, 91 junior suites and 20 one-bedroom suites).
Cancun has some pretty good restaurants, but, as far as I saw, nothing on the order of the high-end establishments Los Cabos claims--including the newest place in town, the Palmilla resort's C. That's C as in Charlie Trotter, the other reason I dragged myself here in the middle of Chicago's winter. (For more on C, see the
The Los Cabos area is also a golfer's paradise, not that it matters much to me (I've swung a golf club a few times in my life, but never to any real purpose). This tiny stretch of land is home to no fewer than seven world-class golf courses, according to magazines that know about such things, and there are other courses besides. You'll pay $200 and more to play a round, but serious golfers don't seem to mind.
"The golf here is outstanding," raves one visitor, a gent who hails from Louisiana. "This morning I was shooting toward the green, facing the ocean, and just as my shot landed right near the cup, I saw a whale spout. I turned to my friends and said, `Excuse me, I'm having a sexual moment right now.'"
Ah, yes. The whales. Another powerful tourist draw.
Los Cabos occupies the southern extremity of the Baja Peninsula. To the west, the rugged Pacific Ocean. To the east, the calmer Sea of Cortes. From January through March, gray whales (along with blues, humpbacks and others) arrive in the area to raise their young in the warmer, safer and saltier (i.e., more buoyant) waters off Los Cabos. Two hours after we arrived at Los Cabos, my wife spotted her first whale--from her beach chair. We made at least a dozen other sightings in our four days.
Of course, many tourists aren't content to stare at the sea from the beach or balcony, waiting for that telltale water spout and hoping for a glimpse of whale. They head out to where the whales are swimming. Lots of companies offer whale-watching tours, from two-hour jaunts in pontoon boats (running about $40) to all-day trips that include a quick Cessna flight to Magdalena Bay, reportedly a major calving site (about $300).
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