Disappearing Into Todos Santos
I first heard about Todos Santos more than a decade ago from my friend Rebecca. She had a gypsy soul and made her living peddling words to glossy travel magazines, a perfect mating of vocation and avocation. She once spent nine months driving the coastlines of Mexico in a beat-up Toyota Celica, a trip that yielded hundreds of pages of inspired writing about the "hidden" places she discovered. Rebecca mentioned Todos Santos to me only in passing as a place she might flee to when she was ready to write her novel. Her affection for Mexico, especially Baja, was obvious, but I wasn't immediately tempted to copy her dash across the border.
Instead I remained enthralled with my first love, Southeast Asia, and my part-time home in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Hence, when a California publisher called in 1991 to ask whether I'd be interested in writing a Baja guidebook, I demurred. I suggested Rebecca, of course, but as it turned out, she was too busy. This time around, though, she made sure I got her message, bombarding my wine-addled brain one evening with glowing tales of deserted moonlighted beaches, halibut tacos and burro trips to prehistoric painted caves. I took the job, and not long after I found myself hurtling down the 1,000-mile-long peninsula south of San Diego for the first time.
Tijuana and Ensenada alternately depressed and disappointed me. The Pacific coast below these towns showed promise, but I knew I wasn't in the "real Baja" until I took on the no-nonsense middle reaches of Mexico 1, the famous Carretera Transpeninsular (Transpeninsular Highway). Once past the hilly fishing-and-farming town of El Rosario, the classic Baja scenery kicked in, splashing a montage of cactus greens, arroyo reds and rocky grays across the windshield. I passed relatively few cars and saw almost no signs of animate life along the highway, a state of affairs that began to produce an eerie mental solitude. The sensation bordered on a fear of the unknown I know many Americans instinctively feel the first time they drive in Mexico.
About 400 miles from the U.S. border, something changed. It sounds like a travel cliche, but by the time the last rays of sunlight flickered over the tops of the Sierra de la Giganta near Loreto, my unease had faded, and I knew I'd entered a special space. Noting each loncher'a (Mexican diner), Pemex gas station and Spanish mission ruins along the way, I fell into a soft rhythm bordering on meditation.
By the time I'd crossed the Tropic of Cancer and come face to face with the wood-shuttered, pastel-colored houses ringing the quiet Bay of La Paz, I began to understand the attachment, if not the fanaticism, many Californians have for Baja. I felt peacefully far from the United States yet similarly distant from Mexico, as if I'd discovered a parallel universe that was neither one nor the other. People spoke Spanish but often knew English, and swirled the two languages together to produce words like yonque, for "junk."
Near La Paz I made an excursion to Puerto Balandra, a large, clean, shallow bay hemmed in on three sides by steep desert cliffs, where I encountered a Mexican family of five and an American. When one lone countryman encounters another on a near-deserted beach in Mexico, a conversation is almost unavoidable. I don't remember who spoke first, but I passed a pleasant half-hour taking in the warmth and experience of a man named John O'Neil, an artist who had spent the better part of two decades living in La Paz. He knew the best, and cheapest, places to eat and stay in Baja California Sur's state capital, often cited as the most Mexican city in Baja because of its tighter cultural connection with the Mexican mainland (in part because ferries transport people back and forth across the Gulf of California daily).
When I told O'Neil my next stop was Todos Santos, his face lit up. It was a look I'd seen on Rebecca's face when she'd talked of the town. O'Neil said it was one of his favorite places to paint, that the light--the angle or the quality? I can't remember now--made him see in a different way. One or two expatriate artists lived in Todos Santos full time, he said, having bought historic buildings for a pittance. Then he said something I've since repeated to others who have asked about Todos Santos: It's a world of the invisible, a place some people disappear to yet others don't see. That two-lane highway takes visitors in at one end of town and spits them out at the other without revealing too much.
The flat, barren plains of la paz along the first third of the one-hour drive on Mexico 1 between La Paz and Todos Santos suggested a monotony that I decided might easily be mistaken for invisibility. After I made the turnoff onto Mexico 19, traffic thinned to a trickle, and the flats gave way to rolling hills and deep vados, or stream beds, that are dry most of the year. In the distance to my left, I could make out the dark, undulating outline of the Sierra de la Laguna, Baja's most solitary mountain range. As Mexico 19 swooped southwest, the highway came closer to the sierra, and the desert along the highway erupted into a thick green curtain of mesquite, paloverde and tall columns of cardon and pitahaya cactus. This heavy foliage--technically not desert but rather "thorn forest," as I later found out--flourishes on the abundant runoff from the mountains. Incongruous-looking ball moss, nourished by moist Pacific trade winds buffeting the Baja peninsula's narrowest section, hangs from tall cacti here.
The curves in the road intensified as I approached Todos Santos. Off to my right I caught a glimpse of a roofless adobe ranch house and adjacent windmill, a landmark that has since become my favorite "welcome home" signal.
Shortly afterward my rental car descended a final hill, and I caught a first glance of thousands of fan palms filling a mile-wide arroyo to one side of the highway, cliffs and hills on the other. And in the distance, behind this desert oasis, an iridescent Pacific. O'Neil was right. No sooner had I entered the town than it seemed to fade away through my rear windshield, like a mirage. Was that really Todos Santos? My instant recall played back only dust and faded storefronts.
If I hadn't had a writing assignment, I would have kept on driving, straight south to finisterra, "land's end," the much-photographed spot where the Sierra de la Laguna tumbles into the sea and Cabo San Lucas serves up coastal Mexico on a platter to planeloads of pasty-faced tourists. I knew how to deal with "gringolandia," as expatriate North Americans like to call tourist resorts in Mexico. A ghost town was another matter. Once I'd parked the car and began moving around the tiny town on foot, however, I quickly found another Todos Santos.
The buildings along Avenida Juarez and Avenida Colegio Militar, the two parallel asphalt thoroughfares in town, had been plain boxes of modern cinder-block construction. Yet one block off Juarez, along cobbled streets near the simple town plaza, I came upon an Andalusian-inspired neighborhood of brick and adobe. One- and two-story affairs, they were built of hand-made Mexican brick laid in double or sometimes triple courses, or layers, and topped by flat parapet roofs, surrounding hidden courtyards. Tall windows and doors bounded by pilasters and molded lintels evoked the classic provincial Spanish style, reminding me of colonial neighborhoods I'd seen in Sonora or Sinaloa on the mainland.
Mexico's National Institute of History and Anthropology recently declared this area of Todos Santos a national monument, enforcing restoration guidelines to preserve the lingering air of antiquity. But when I first arrived in 1991 the only inhabitants who seemed interested in the stately buildings were relatively new arrivals such as Ezio and Paula Colombo. Ezio, a burly, mustachioed Italian artist, and Paula, a lithe ex-New York model, had bought a cavernous 150-year-old adobe casona (mansion) just off the plaza and turned it into a restaurant. His flair for matching Mediterranean cooking with fresh seafood, locally grown produce and herbs from their garden, along with Paula's tasteful interior design, gradually drew the attention of discerning palates in the surrounding cape region, from La Paz to Cabo San Lucas. Word spread internationally, and by the mid-1990s their Cafe Santa Fe had become a social pilgrimage point for anyone touching down in Todos Santos, particularly among the steadily increasing number of celebrity visitors.
But on my first visit the town was more bleak than chic. In the newer eastern half of Todos Santos I came upon a more typical architectural trend: small cottages of adobe brick or mud plastered over woven palo de arco (trumpetbush), often roofed with palm fronds. The plain cement walls of newer homes linked the historically grand to the recently humble. A survey of local market shelves turned up a few wrinkled tomatoes, moldy stalks of green onion and stale rolls. No wonder the Cafe Santa Fe was so popular with out-of-town visitors, I thought.
I took a room at the simple, two-story Hotel California on Avenida Juarez. I'd heard nothing of the legend that said the hotel inspired The Eagles' 1976 album of the same name, but it wasn't long before another guest, an American backpacking his way to Guatemala, filled me in. When I asked the Mexican manager about the story, he solemnly nodded his corroboration, and I filed the intriguing local myth away for later examination.
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