February 19, 2015 - Playa Tecolote to Puerto Lopez Mateos

We got an early start this morning, about 8:30, so we could beat the caravan when they left the beach this morning. We know that WE travel slowly, but we didn’t want to be behind EIGHT RVs traveling slowly together! We also saw another caravan of RVs coming toward us and there were 17 LARGE Class A type rigs traveling together. It was amazing to see.We passed this place going in and out of La Paz and thought it was a pretty interesting use of tires. They stacked them and used it as a road base into their little housing area.We stopped in La Paz to pick up a few more groceries and check emails while we would have cell service, then finally got out of La Paz about 10:30! As we left La Paz, we finally took a picture of the giant Dove of Peace statue that marks the west entrance to the city.

Once we left the city, we began retracing our steps along Highway 1. The road crews had paved a few more miles of the road northwest of the city, but we still had miles of gravel roads and road construction.

We passed through hills and areas of datillo, which are a type of yucca. It looks like a small tree, probably most similar to the Joshua trees found in the southwestern United States. We also passed not one, not two, but THREE dead cows along the side of the road which had been hit by vehicles! Yikes! I am sure the vehicles had extensive damage. Glad it wasn’t us!

We continued on to Ciudad Constitucion where we stopped at Palapa 206 RV Park to dump and fill with water for which they charged $60 pesos (about $4.30 USD). We also need to fill propane and the cost per liter is $8.46 pesos (about 60 cents per liter or $2.28 USD/gallon).

We turned off Highway 1 just north of Ciudad Insurgentes and headed out to Puerto Lopez Mateos. We saw several osprey nesting perches as we came out to this area and saw one land on the nest. It was cool, but we couldn’t get a picture.

We are camping in the parking lot area near where the whale watching tours take off. There are five or six little restaurants and some souvenir stands also. It cost $15 pesos to park overnight (just over $1 USD!). There are two other RVs here tonight.

There are four different “companies” that do the whale watch tours in the bay and they all charge the same price, one hour boat tour = $1000 pesos (about $72 USD) per boat. You can put up to 6 people in a boat, so if we decide to go, we need to find 4 others to share the boat with us to bring the price down. I asked how many whales they were seeing when they went out and we got different answers varying from 4 to 10 whales which is much fewer than we saw at Guerrero Negro. We need to decide whether to go, or not.We walked down to the end of the dock and sat for a little while before dinner. The tide was out, and most of the boats were in. On our way back to the RV, we spotted a heron along the shoreline enjoying the last bits of sunlight.

After dark, Tobey went out to look at the stars and came back to get me – not because the stars looked so good, but because of the sounds he was hearing! From the parking area you could hear the whales spouting! We walked back to the dock and could hear them spouting, even though you couldn’t see anything. It was really a fun experience!

GPS: 25.19448N, 112.12321W
RV CAMPING – BAJA CALIFORNIA SUR