I made it to the southern tip of the Baja. It was quite an adventure to get here. Pedaling through the desert puts me in an information vacuum and so it wasn't until the day after I was in a hurricane that I even find out what it was. I was in my hammock between two trees growing in a wash when an intermittent rain started just as I was falling asleep. I got up to shower in it and hang my rain fly over my hammock. It was hot that night so when I saw clouds moving in I wrote in my journal that I was hoping for a little breeze to cool me off. I got my breeze. It started blowing and raining raining at 4 in the morning. The trees were waving and so I was bobbing up and down as more and less tension was placed on my hammock. Not knowing if it was going to last I tried riding it out but by 9 AM everything was wet and it showed no signs of stopping. A river had already formed in the wash but fortunately, not right under me. The rain was warm and the air was warm and I was comfortable. The wind blew me every which way but not so hard that I needed to get off and push. I went to town about 6 miles away and bought groceries. The power in the store was flickering in and out and eventually just went off. It still had not occurred to me that I was in a hurricane and I was having fun biking in the rain so I tried to leave town but didn't get very far. The streets were flooded nearly to my hubs in many places. A guy flagged me down and told me the road out of town was flooded and I needed to go to a hotel. Maybe the road is flooded for cars I thought but I'm going adventuring. I biked out of town a couple of miles. The few cars passing me in the other direction were waving me back but not actually stopping to tell me what was ahead. Two guys in an SUV pulled up along side me and took a video of me biking in the rain. I smiled and gave them a thumbs up then they turned around and went back into town. Probably they went home to show their friends the "Loco gringo" (as I've been called) biking in a hurricane. Eventually the many indicators to turn back started to add up. I crossed the road to stop someone and ask how bad the road was ahead. A road worker in his truck stopped who didn't speak English but made it clear I could not go much further. He offered to give me a ride to a hotel so that's what I did. I ended up at a motel with a few guests but no one was working at the front desk. I waited for a while for them to come back but the office remained dark and locked so I went around back to a hallway that the rooms exited into. It had a roof but was open to the weather on both ends. I found a chair blowing in the wind and set up in that hallway to watch the storm until one of the guests invited me in for a quesadilla. The power was out all over town and so we sat in the dark and talked over the noise of the storm. I spent that night laid out on my thermarest in that hallway with the wind and rain whipping just a few feet away. The rain stopped that night but the flooding continued through the next day. I waded through flooded roads four times as I continued south.
The afternoon after the storm I met Craig at a convenience store. He bought me a beer and then a few more as we drank into the evening. Three other guys joined us for a drink, I got out my guitar and it became a party. Craig was in town with his family at a nearby resort. He had come down to look for snakes to take photographs of, which he later sells. He took me out searching for snakes that evening but we didn't find any.
Five days after the storm I made it to Cabo San Lucas at the southern tip of the Baja. The storm had hit there the worst and it was completely wrecked. The power lines were down all over town, every building had damage, sometimes quite severe and truck trailers along the highway had been toppled onto their sides. It was a real mess. I heard that looting had occurred after the storm, but a large police and military presence had solved that by the time I arrived.
Seeing the storm in person and the the amazing damage has given me a better perspective of such things. I'm going to be a little more cautious the next time I find the wind picking up and the world flooding around me.
A view from my hammock
