"Nothing weird happens here"

But I may or may not have proof otherwise

“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen down here?”

I watched from the backseat while our host, a 40-ish Frenchman named Greg, pondered my husband’s question.

Greg designed the electrical system for Walter, our big yellow adventure truck, and helped us problem-solve via numerous video calls when our recycled Tesla batteries went south back in October. Greg and his wife Ginger used to travel the world in a four-wheel drive ambulance they converted into a camper similar to our rig. That’s when we met them. But they have lived the last couple of years in Los Barriles, Baja California Sur, in a fifth wheel trailer parked on a sandy plot of land decorated with rocks and cactus and solar-powered twinkle lights.

We were piled into Greg’s SUV and headed to one of his favorite restaurants so we could treat him to dinner, a small gesture on our part to say thank-you for all the extra time he put in during our difficult power crisis.

As his blue eyes scanned the white sand road in front of us, he wrinkled up his nose. “The weirdest thing?” He scratched at his rust-colored whiskers, then continued in his heavily accented English. “I don’t really think I’ve seen anything weird. Nothing weird happens here. It’s just a normal life.”

I smiled. Just minutes before, he had told us about the overzealous border collie belonging to his friend, who also lives in a camper on their property. Greg finally had to install a gate across the driveway—not for security, but because the dog, whenever bored, would round up all the local ranchers’ free-range goats and bring them expertly up his driveway.

Nothing weird happens here, huh? Ha!

As we continued our drive across the arroyo, I began mentally listing off other weird things that are normal here in Baja (all things we ourselves have witnessed or experienced in this past month):

• waiting for the tide to go out to make a path for walking to the nearby village to buy homemade tortillas

• a random sign behind a restaurant that advertises cold water bucket showers for a dollar (hot water showers for a dollar-fifty, provided enough notice is given for the restaurant owner to heat the water in a cooking pot on her stove)

  

  This was such a wonderful shower experience!

• somehow accidentally leaving the keys in the door to the truck’s habitat while parked in an alley, and not realizing it until the next morning arrived with no issues

• buying fresh seafood and fresh produce and fresh pastries from guys with ice chests, or the backs of family cars, or grandmothers carrying baskets

• jugglers and other street performers in intersections, putting on shows for pocket change while drivers wait for the light to turn green

• stores that are open from 8 AM until 2 PM, and then again from 4 PM until 8 PM

• camel poop on a beach

  

• herds of goats wearing bells, intentionally shepherded for entire days by ranchers’ dogs—with no human caretakers in sight

• wild burros who like to seek out pets and booty scritches from humans

• wild horses, alone or in groups, wandering through town or the countryside

  

  It was early in the morning, and I think this guy was as startled to see me as I was to see him.

• cows wearing cowbells roaming the hillsides without a ranch in sight for miles, or wandering the streets of downtown

• whales spouting and breaching, manta rays flipping and flopping, and dolphins jumping and slicing through the ocean swells—so frequently that it hardly stirs any reaction

• newly hatched baby sea turtles scampering down the beach into the rising tide

• the most amazing shrimp tacos made fresh in a decrepit converted school bus

  

  Oh, the char on the shrimp in those tacos!

• jacking up a 14,000+ pound truck on a beach and completing a repair with tools not designed for the job

• a tiny remote town with three massive pickleball resorts, ranging from 12 to 24 courts each

• local small business second-hand stores filled with items tagged in English —the leftovers from American Goodwill stores

• seventy-five-year-olds and/or families of four with beefy quad runners as their primary transportation

• getting stuck in soft sand on beaches or backroads (even locals!) and needing someone to help pull or push your vehicle out

• fresh produce for sale from folding tables with hand-written signs, right in the Walmart parking lot

• employees making tortillas and peeling the flat paddles of prickly pear cactus to make nopales-themed items to sell in the grocery store

  

• squads of men running car wash operations in the parking lots of grocery stores

  

• squads of uniformed soldiers, fully armed with body armor and assault rifles, riding in the backs of troop carrier trucks through the streets

  

  We have seen much more impressive military and police displays than this, but I am generally hesitant to make it obvious I am snapping photos.

• security checkpoints on highways where heavily armed officers can ask to search your vehicle, inside and out

• curbs painted red to show where you can park and painted green to show where you cannot park

• buying the household’s water from a monthly water delivery service and storing it in a large tank in the yard before filtering it for drinking, or buying pre-filtered drinking water by the liter from an agua purificada service

• art and whimsy created from found materials—both natural and man-made—EVERYWHERE

• creative tile work EVERYWHERE

  

• creative travel rigs EVERYWHERE

  

• never flushing toilet paper down the toilet, always putting it in the trash can provided

• a simple hook & eye latch on the outside of bathroom doors as well as the inside

• thatched roofs, stone walls, and other naturally found building materials

  

• randomly running into people you know, hundreds of miles from where you last saw them

• making new friends almost every single day

The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder if Greg was actually right, after all. I suppose there aren’t weird things happening around us. Very normal things happen here in ways that seem foreign to us. I suppose that’s why they call it a foreign country, right?

Getting a car wash in the parking lot while grocery shopping is brilliant. Walter’s bath cost more and took a little longer than most cars, but those were pesos well spent.

Red means stop when it comes to traffic lights and stop signs, so using that color to indicate legal places to stop and park is completely valid, just foreign to us.

Thatched roofs over patios are easily destroyed in a hurricane, but a fierce wind ripping them off won’t cause damage to the rest of the structure, and they are cheap and easy to replace. It’s a logical choice.

A hook on the outside of a bathroom door keeps critters out, but can’t be engaged from inside the stall, so it shows at a glance which stall is available. That makes sense but feels foreign at first.

It’s not weird; it’s just different. Mexicans are just going about their daily lives. Parents raise children. Generations work hard to get along well and create a happy home. Residents join together to make their communities safe and secure. Folks help their neighbors and extend kindness and hospitality to strangers. People are resourceful and creative to make ends meet and bring beauty to their lives. They shop and recreate and foster relationships. Animals do the things animals do—sometimes with human guidance, and sometimes without. What’s so weird about all that?

If all you know about Mexico comes from the American news media, which is constantly seeking advertising dollars via ratings by posting dramatic stories of the most outrageous things they can find on both sides of the border, you are missing out.

If your only personal experience with Mexico is the hustle and chaos and gaudy tourist-trap-shopping of a border town or a cruise ship dock or a resort hotel, you have only seen a tiny sliver of life here—and not a very accurate one at that.

If you believe the stereotypes you grew up with casting Mexicans as lazy or dangerous or dirty, you are the one who is truly impoverished.

There is so much more to Mexico. And we have only traveled the Baja Peninsula! We look forward to getting to know this place even better in the weeks to come, crossing the Sea of Cortez by ferry and driving across the mainland. So many new experiences await. So many new friends. So much learning and growing.

Until next week,

Sherry

P.S. We did have a bit of a snafu this past week, but it’s resolved. We found damage to Walter’s rear axle—perhaps from some of our recent scary off-road adventures—and had to do a repair job. First, we managed a stopgap procedure on a beach, with the help of borrowed tools and new friends and neighbors; then we brought the truck to the city of La Paz and found an auto shop where a great crew was able to fully address and resolve the problem. All better.