Two Days in Todos Santos

February 26-28

Yard art over lettuce in one of the many art galleries

This month seems to be made for exploring the state of Baja California Sur, most recently to the west coast town of Todos Santos. After years of ranching, fruit and sugarcane growing, the Todos Santos aquifer dried up in the last century and by 1965 the town was basically a ghost town. However we had heard great things about its revival, with surfing and a fine arts community driving the economy plus a return to agricultural endeavors. Bonney and Jeff were up for the trip.

Cane crushing machinery rusting away. Behind photographer
is a big brick chimney for boiling down syrup to make candy.

By good fortune we really hit the mark going this week. As it happened, the local Palapa Society had a tour of historic buildings. Also the Todos Santos Film Festival was running. After a great lunch as Modo Todo Hotel, actually on the tour, as it was once the general store (bottles of fine booze grace the shelves formerly occupied by brassieres), we visited the cultural center where local kids now go for enrichment classes in computer, art, science and so on. It actually had a museum like collection of art and historic photos plus, in the courtyard, a one room wattle farmhouse typical of early dwellings in the region.

Houses on the tour typically were occupied by gringos who had restored old buildings. We visited the Brookses, a couple of teachers whose back yard is now a mini citrus orchard.  Neil gave us a sample from his grapefruit tree. I haven’t tasted a better one in years! (Their sailboat is kept in Deer Harbor!)

Wattle farmhouse at Cultural Center

The town square and church were next to the theater where we bought tickets for two delightful movies. One, El Ambulante, about a man who travels through rural Argentina stopping in a town, getting locals to work on making a film with him, and moving on. His income is the proceeds from the showing. It was a wonderful, heartwarming story! The next night we watched Los 100 Sones Cubanas about the trademark sounds of Cuban music, reminiscent of the Buena Vista Social Club. 

On our second day in town we headed for the beach, planning to take a walk to the turtle nesting area and do a little birding at La Poza (aka lagoon). As we crested the dunes we found ourselves faced with a parade of gray whales heading north. Some were very close to the beach. The sandy bottom comes up steeply here and the waves make interesting scallops of the shore. In fact they seem to come from south and north at once, smashing in the middle and sending up spray geysers. Very unusual. I can’t imagine surfing there. We walked south and found lots of birds at the lagoon including many ruddy ducks!

A local fisherman was surf fishing by throwing his baited hooks up into the wind, then running up the beach to jig and pull the line in. He caught a couple of fish in this fashion.

Next to Bonney a turtle trail?

We walked back, checked out the only turtle nest we could see, and loaded into the car. A little way out the sand road we passed a couple of elderly women, one wearing stunning toy glasses. Stopping to joke around we learned she and her companion were lost! They’d been on a walk with younger relatives and found they couldn’t keep up. When we learned that they were staying at a classy posada on the Pozo’s inner shore, we decided to rescue them. Not really, but it was fun to tour the beautiful hotel and grounds all planted by the current innkeepers, a Swiss couple. And those nice ladies bought us a round of drinks which we sipped from the rooftop lounge overlooking the lagoon.