We’ll ignore Friday’s meaningless dirge on Wall Street for the moment, focusing instead on the seasonal delights of Baja whale-watching.  The following is a first-hand report from my sister Linda, a San Francisco attorney who was recently in Mexico visiting some old friends. She got first dibs on the writing genes in my family, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself hankering to visit the Baja after you’ve  imbibed this marvelously atmospheric piece. She writes as follows:

This has been a remarkable experience. Las ballenas are very different from you and me--and yet, they're willing to meet us as close to halfway as we can both get. For out part, to meet them, small groups of us went out on San Ignacio Lagoon in pangas, which are about the size of life guard boats. We were surrounded by the gray whales that go there to calve and mate--and store up on plankton for the return trip to the Bering Sea. They spout, breach and the males spyhop --poke their heads up out of the water, presumably to check out what's going on.

(Click on picture to enlarge)

For whatever mysterious reason, or absence of reason, the females and babies are willing to make contact with humans. The babies come up to the boats and let us touch them--scratch them on the head and under the chin--sometimes the mothers push them up on their backs, and sometimes the mothers want to play too. It's an indescribable sensation to touch these creatures, which apparently want to be touched and also could easily flip the boats we're in, but don't. One mother kept going under our boat, even occasionally bumping it, but she never turned us over, and for some reason, I never felt threatened by her 14-foot whale self, or by any of the whales we were close enough to touch. Without anthropomorphizing, it's incredible to be among them and to look them in the eye and believe they're looking back at us.

‘Colossal’ Skies

The camp we stayed at--Kuyima--was basic, but fine. The minimal electricity is generated by solar and wind. The drinking water is hauled in from a desalination plant somewhere in the area. The staff is great. The food was not bad--we had lobster one night, scallops another night--and always abundant. The stars at night were colossal. The woman who runs Kuyima is an impressive young Mexican, who has a master's degree in eco-tourism from U. Toronto. In addition to being very knowledgeable about the whales, she speaks almost unaccented English. She handled the challenging job of managing all the operations of the camp, the staff and the gringos very smoothly. The marine biologists who came out on the boats with us were both young women.

We were lucky to have 2 out of 3 boat rides with Ramon, the one boatman who also wanted to interact with the whales and knew how to do it. He was patient and cut the engine so the whales would come up to the boat. He was also funny and had us chanting, "come on, whaley whaleys," which seemed to have some effect in attracting them or holding their interest once they were there, but who knows? There was also a very habituated coyote, called Perro. He was comfortable enough with us to lie down outside the kitchen--with one eye open--and let us get close enough for a really good look at him.

Tracks to Nowhere

I took advantage of the camp's mountain bikes to go for a desert bike ride. Weird to see so many roads or tracks to nowhere. I went with a couple from Redondo Beach. Kathy and I told each other scorpion stories, while Ted scouted ahead. He led us down to the beach, where we rode past an endless mangrove swamp until the sand got too soft. Mangroves survive in brackish water through various adaptations for excreting salt. One variety has a "suicide" leaf--the plant sends the salt there so the odd leaf will die while the plant lives on. Another variety had two tiny ducts for excreting salt where the leaf joined the stem.

There was lots of bird life, including the big-pouch pelicans that dive for their dinner. Other usual seabirds, flocks of Brant's geese--more the size of ducks, with black head, brown bodies. And buzzards, in case we forgot we were in the desert. I took many walks on the beach and picked up things I had to put back because Ignacio is a preserve. As difficult as it was for an ardent collector of found objects to let go of a dolphin vertebra, I had to do it. We also saw live dolphins, by the way, but they were scarce, compared to the whales.

Clean Sheets a Mystery

We spent one night before we went out to the lagoon in an oasis town called Ignacio Springs, at a hotel made up of really elegant canvas yurts, run by an energetic and hospitable couple from Alberta. I never got the story of how they came to run a hotel in Baja--which is what I want to know about how people from a vastly different world come to settle in this almost empty desert. And how they manage to serve huge meals and have clean towels and sheets and do it without seeming to break a sweat, and all of this somewhere in the middle of about 1000 miles of serious desert, in a place where they have to drive either to Cabo San Lucas (which has Costco and Home Depot) or San Diego for supplies.

Loreto is a pleasant, funky-Mexican small town. It has a mission, of course, and about a half block of centro historico. The only interesting thing about the mission, other than its age (built in 1670) was the survival of pre-Christian goblin faces carved in the stone cornices and wooden doors. There's lots of good food here (most of it upscale, though my favorite was the down-market Super Burro, home of the semi-open-faced, we'll-bring-the-guac-chilis-salsa-onions-and-you-can-put-whatever-you-want-on-it burrito. There are also some good ex-pats, whose company and hospitality I've enjoyed.

Ye Olde Condos

But development is going to hit full force soon. I can already envision the traffic and the  ever-wider one-way laps around and around to try to get someplace you could once drive straight to. I've seen this before -- in Bali and Thailand. The place my friend and her husband bought is two houses (each the size of 2 hovels) in a suburb of Loreto called Nopolo -- about 3 km outside the town. It's not far from a nice beach, where we've walked every day we've been here. Behind the beach is where the 3000-unit eco-development is being built. It's attractive--ye olde adobe-style condos--but where will the water come from for all those showers, toilets and dishwashers? This is a true desert, with very limited ground water and little or no rain.

There was also a 7.x quake Monday night, which we didn't feel because we were in the car at the time--although that still makes no sense to me. Ginny's house must be on rock, though, because the pictures were straight and nothing fell off the narrow shelves of the hutch.

Just when I've begun to adapt to the desert--a difficult trick for a water sign, water baby to pull off--it's time to go. Maybe I'll be back. I think I could make a more than once in a lifetime experience of scratching a whale under the chin.