3

Tuesday

At nine, we were told we should show up at 11:30 at the Aero Cedros office. When we landed up at 11:10 and enquired about the plane, the man grunted something about 11:30. Passengers filled up the place, the office and the pavement outside was littered with assorted cargo to be flown to Isla Cedros; Grumpy would periodically talk into a radio-phone from a truck; there was no word of the plane. Twice a week, this craft did a Ensenada-Cedros-Guerrero Negro-Cedros-Ensenada trip. Finally at 12:30 he announced that rains at Ensenada (which was difficult to believe, if the local weather was anything to go by) had delayed the plane, and we should be back at two.

So we pottered off to Malarimo for lunch. This is the standard gringo place in Guerrero Negro, and serves good food at Zona Rosa (Mexico City) prices. It was their White Bass that I particularly liked. If you're vegetarian, food is a major problem in Baja. Seafood and meat is staple, and I wonder if any vegetables are eaten, let alone produced there. Within a week, Revathi was sick of arroz y frijole (rice and bean-paste). Fresh salsa and nachos provide the occasional relief. Malarimo has a pleasing interior, service was not too quick that day, so to kill time I set up my camera on a tripod to get a picture with good overall sharpness. Tourists tramping in with red faces and shorts wondered what I was doing with that contraption. The longish exposure and my strict injuction to stay still explains the dazed look on Revathi's face.

Burpingly full, we ambled out of the restaurant. As we approached the Aero Cedros office, something appeared distinctly funny. It was eeriely empty, and the door was locked. Oh no! did the guy mean two o'clock at the airport? It was five minutes to; scrambling madly, we got a taxi, bundled ourselves and all our stuff into it (a dangling camera and a swinging tripod are not your greatest allies in these situations). Fortunately, the airport is only ten minutes away, and the plane was nowhere in sight when we arrived. The airport consisted of one small room (that served as departure lounge, check-in counter, and any other office you imagine is necessary for the smooth functioning of an airline), couple of hangars, and smallish airfield.

We were told to put our luggage on the weighing machine. When they insisted that even the small carry-on backpack be weighed, I asked with irony if they wanted to weigh me too. Yes! After the baggage, it was my turn to be weighed. Actually, they went pretty discreet and tried not to weigh individuals (particularly women) separately, but two at a time. The idea was that the total weight of the plane's contents (animate, inanimate) should be within a certain limit.

The truck with the radio-phone served as the air-traffic control tower, and the grumpy fat red T-shirt man (who, when challenged, vehemently insisted he'd said two o'clock at the airport) was the traffic controller.

By the time the plane arrived, loaded and unloaded stuff, and finally took off, it was half past three. Effectively, we'd nearly wasted an entire day to do the thirty minute flight to Isla Cedros. From the plane, we could see the dunes at Don Miguelito, but the effect was that of the sun being a huge on-camera flash. Nearly overhead, its rays were colinear with our angle of vision, with the result was the sight was hardly as interesting as it could have been. Either our pilot was not too competent, or small planes are less steady – the flight had a distinctly tentative feel about it; the whole plane would shake as the engine revved up, there would be sudden losses of height that gave one the unpleasant roller-coaster feeling in the stomach, the beachside airports meant there was not too much margin between landing safely and a watery grave: to sum up, not something I'd recommend to an FDA- and FCC- and FAA-pampered American citizen.

Part of the reason for coming to Isla Cedros was to visit yet another island – Isla San Benito. Cedros is a dusty, mountainous island about twenty-five miles long, mostly desert, but with an incongruous temperate vegetation at its highest peak, Cerro Cedros. The hike to this peak and the rapidly changing bands of vegetation promised to be interesting. The sight of the backlit warm glow tent at Don Miguelito had stayed in our minds and camping on the beach seemed an alluring option too.

In winter, San Benito is known for the elephant seals that colonize its beaches, mate and bring up pups. Winter is also the time for diving for abalone, a shelled creature with flesh of culinary interest, that has to be prised off underwater rocks. During the season, a supply ship is run by the Fishing Co-operative to take food and water to San Benito and bring tubs loaded with abalone back to Cedros every day. For the budget-traveler, this is a godsend, as is the co-operative's generosity in letting people hitch a voyage. Our first job in Cedros was to drop in at the Co-operative's office and get a letter of permission to be presented to the captain of B.M.(Barco Marin, equal to M.V.) Tito. The dirt roads of Cedros wouldnt lead you to expect mannequinly dressed and made-up women in the co-operative's office; I'm sure that make-up required hourly visits to the lady's room to maintain; their eyes glazed over in wonder when I said I was from Nueva York. It's not as if the area doesnt get visits from people from New York, but they'd be taking whale-watching cruises from San Diego, not cadging free rides on supply boats from Isla Cedros.

The permission to travel by B.M. Tito was given in minutes; it was about four; there was still a few hours of daylight to go. Our flight back was on Friday, which meant we'd have to visit San Benito on Thursday. We'd hoped on having two days in Cedros to hike to the peak and along the coast – now it seemed we had hardly more than a day to squeeze these plans into. Knowing it would take at least four hours to trek up to the Cedros peak, we decided to camp the night at the beach and attempt to traverse the island up to the peak next morning instead of taking the usual trail up from the village.

The driver of the taxi that had brought us from the airfield was hanging about with friends around the co-operative office; we asked him if he'd take us to the Playon – the beach. He called out to a friend asking him if he was interested in a trip to the beach; if you're a young man in Isla Cedros you dont have too many avenues of diversion open, so these two guys drove us to the Playon. On the way we badgered them with questions about the trails in the island, if there were alternative routes to the Cedros peak, and the general lie of the land.

It was a ten kilometre dirt road to the beach, where the coast curved inwards giving a deceptively compressed view of miles of shoreline; the driver pointed out a white structure in the distance – that's a fishing camp – if you hurry you can make it in two hours. That was about all the time there was before dark; also, the tide might come in, he warned. If we could make it, I figured I might be able to sup on the freshly fried catch of the day, and we might get useful tips about getting to the Cedros peak without having to go back all the way to the Cedros village.

It was our first day of carrying our load for any length of the time; the day had been spent in relative inactivity; we had a pleasant time walking along the shore, the sea on the left and steep cliffs on the right, the fishing camp apparently maintaining a constant pinhead size in our view no matter how much we walked. As a parting shot, the driver had warned us of perros (dogs), and Revathi kept turning her head to see if an army of canines was following our very trackable footprints. As the sun was setting, I was torn between the desire to stop and take pictures and hurry on towards the fishing camp (and pescado frito).

In two hours, the structures in the distance had grown somewhat in size; however, we soon ran up against a stretch where the sea was splashing against cliffs – it would require us to walk inland to get to the camp. A few minutes before, we'd passed a break in the cliffs where there seemed to be some tire-marks. We decided to get back there and camp for the night. The spot was some fifty feet from the current tideline and four or five feet above the beach; we betted that the sea wouldnt be covering all that ground during the night. Another worry was whether the spot was along the path of a dry arroyo (that had created the break in the cliffs in the first place); we had been warned that these can get flooded in a few hours of rain. However, it was rapidly getting dark, we didnt have much time on our hands to spend worrying; we managed to finish pitching tent by flashlight.

Sitting in the tent, we unzipped the flaps that served as windows, and had our dinner: cheese sandwich and diced fruit in syrup. Since getting off the taxi, we had not seen a soul. Walking down to the beach, we saw the electric lights of the fishing camp.

From inside the tent, the pounding of the waves felt chillish; looking through the flap, we would see breakers lighting up the sea for miles with a cold, muted white light. Sleep wouldnt come easily, and at midnight it started raining. The taut surface of the tent serves as a pretty good amplifier for raindrops; combined with the roar of waves, the possibility of the tide rising, our camp being in the way of a rejuvenated stream, we could really feel solitude and vulnerability in our bones.

Wednesday

Very soon, the sun came too far up and washed all color away; the sea being too cold to swim in, we decided it was time we wound up our tent and made for the fishing camp. The tire-tracks next to which we had pitched our tent led to fairly straight to the camp, taking a few detours to avoid gullies going seaward. Revathi was expecting the camp to be a fortress guarded by a pack of hungry dogs, but reality was unpleasantly different from that picture.

All that we found at Camp Wayle were some semi-permanent dwellings made of brick and corrugated sheets, couple of pickup trucks, a few gulls. Not a human being we could ask for directions to Cerro Cedros. As I had feared, everybody had left early in the morning for fishing and might not be back for a long time.

We tried for a couple of hours "guessing" possible tracks to Cerro Cedros. Trouble was that the entire island seemed criss-crossed with tire-marks going all over the place; trash (coke cans, gum-wrappers) is liberally littered along these tracks, but there wasnt a human being to be seen to tell us which track, if any, would take us where we wanted. Meanwhile, we were getting hotter (the sea, fortunately, kept the temperature tolerable and gave us our bearings), the backpacks were getting heavier and the tripod was becoming simply unbearable.

Cutting short our explorations, we decided to get back to the beach and walk back to where the taxi had dropped us the day before. Where a 10 km walk to the village awaited us.

The cliffs along the beach vary in height and have occasional breaks. One of these breaks would lead to the track that our taxi had taken the previous evening. But which break was it? We climbed a couple of cliffs in the hope of spotting a road from the height. We felt like kicking ourselves for not noting the land features the day before. Several innovative products that could be used to mark paths in the wilderness came to mind – what about a bio-degradable paint that would vanish, say, within a week of being applied? returning the wilderness to its pristine, unmarked form for the next group of adventurers.

We reassured ourselves that we couldnt really get lost – if we walked far enough along the coast we'd eventually come to the dock where the salt-ships are loaded. However, we had no idea how long a walk that might turn out to be.

We came into a rocky part of the coast that we didnt seem to have seen the day before. Did that mean we had walked past the track that would take us back to the village? Or was it that the tide had been hiding these rocks the previous evening?

Eventually, it was in this rocky area that we found … people!! – couple of guys fishing for molluscs that get trapped in the small pools formed by the rocks when the tide carries them in. I asked them how they'd come from the town. That was a fairly broad hint, and they immediately offered to give us a ride in their construction vehicle that was carrying back sand.

Wouldnt you love, after such an ordeal, to have a hot shower and get under white sheets? If it's Isla Cedros, forget it. One of the local cab-owners keeps a few rooms for the occasional traveler; in these spartan quarters, a block of bricks cemented together serves as a bed, and a thin flow of bone-chilling water will have to make do for ablutions. What about a hot meal? Well, you have one restaurant to choose from. The extension of the family kitchen, it features a TV for the entertainment of its guests. By the end of our stay in Cedros, I could identify the soaps from a few minutes of an episode – Tres Mujeres (Three Women) seemed to be the current hot thing on Mexican airwaves. Typically, a woman would get off a red convertible and be promptly slapped by a fuming guy. She'd get back into her car, vowing (I guess) never to return.

Thursday

When the boat ultimately showed up, it was quickly loaded by means of a winch with cans and sacks of food, gallons of drinking water, and, most importantly, empty tubs for bringing back abalone. The captain was an old man with a lined face and a worried expression; he didnt have any captainsque elegance about him; I guess this isnt too grand or lucrative a job, stewarding a supply-boat between two islands day in and day out. We showed him our letter of permission; he didnt say much, but it seemed OK to come aboard.

One of the first people we got acquainted with was Edward, who spoke fluent American and wore a baseball cap. An inspector with the government's fisheries department, his job was to make sure that people were practising sustainable fishing and not draining the oceans of life in a single generation to bring starvation and misery to subsequent ones. As we sailed past Isla Cedros, we could see Camp Wayle; Edward pointed out the part of the coastline that he had hiked on one of his inspection trips. The north tip of Cedros, Punta Norte, supposedly has an elephant seal colony, but the only way of getting there was to hire a launch, which would be way more expensive than the free ride we were getting to San Benito. Edward liked his job because it let him see the wildernes and meet people; he'd lived in the US for a while, but didnt quite like the people – polite without being friendly? I suggested; he couldnt agree more.

"We're having shrimp for supper," informed Edward, "so if you like shrimp you're on the right boat." So saying, he led me into the kitchen and introduced me to the rest of the crew. My Spanish is hardly up to making conversation with a group of people, so I figured the best way to build camaraderie (and earn my board) would be to participate in cleaning the shrimps. This consisted mostly of decapitating the things and pulling off the thin, transparent, cuticle-like layer that covers the body. I told them that in my country, we loved chewing the head too, and proceeded to remark on the similarities of construction between the shrimp and a cockroach. Even with a marine-biologist present, I knew I was on sure ground, as they'd taught me in school that both belong to Class Insecta. They found it revolting to hear that roaches were eaten in parts of Asia. My mother-in-law finds it revolting that shrimp is eaten anywhere.

The kitchen was in the front part of the boat and it was subject to much more pitching; this, together with the wafting odours of raw shrimp, convinced Revathi that she was much better off towards the rear, in the open deck. The boat would rock more when it passed close to land; I suppose the waves hitting the shores and ricocheting back make waters choppier. In case Revathi felt sea-sick, Edward suggested that I let her throw up to heart's content and then make her drink a bit from the sea. The treatment didnt appeal to me and I didnt think it wise to convey it to a potentially sea-sick person.

Our delayed start was made worse by a coastguard patrol that we ran into. These guys came off a destroyer in a small motor-boat, all toting guns – one guy kept an eye on the crew and us with rifle cocked, while the officer and others turned the boat upside down, inspected every closet and corner, and generally took up a lot of time. While Edward cursed them, the captain murmered resignedly Una revision de rutina – a routine inspection. Finally the officer approached us – "Identification?" We handed our passports. "Did you get any permission to come on board?" We got the captain to show him the letter. "I was in Bombay for some time … why do they use English in India?" – "It was a British colony – same reason as they speak Spanish in Mexico" – "But not everybody speaks English in India, right?" He'd hit upon the subtlety that India was colonized far less completely than Latin America. Well-spoken and intelligent, he was a capable ambassador for the Mexican forces that were only giving Americans a hand with their drug problem.

It was a four hour voyage to the San Benito archipelago; the tedium was broken by a generous helping of boiled shrimp that the cook (a young man of twenty) emerged onto the deck with; dipped in mayo and dunked in a spicy, citric sauce, it was a treat. Revathi was amazed at the reservoir of sociability that I can draw on when food is at stake.

Tito anchored a little distance from the island; small boats ferried cargo and people to land at no charge. How long could we spend on shore? Una hora was the captain's strict injuction.

We were a month behind the optimal seal-watchng time. In January and February the shores are supposed to be carpetted with seals; now, only some females and pups remained. A guy who worked for the security force took us to a spot where a number of them were having a siesta. With their grey color they're almost indistinguishable, for a moment, from the sand and rocks they lie on. I set up my tripod and 100-300 lens and got to work, almost mechanically. On seeing the slides, I realize that the better shots treat these cylindrical (there's no polite way of saying this) animals as abstract shapes, and present a frame of interesing arrangement, with an odd catchlight in the eye or a sharp whisker adding the life touch. These are not animals to be caught in action, but observed in leisure till they fall into a composition.

Our hour was up, and I offered our guide a tip; he refused with dignity, and took the money only after some persuasion. "If you'd come a month before and brought a tent along to spend a couple of days here, I could have shown you lot more elefantes."

Edward was coming ashore as we were getting into one of the small boats that would take us to Tito – they're waiting for you, he said. As we climbed into the ship, I asked one of the sailors redundantly – are we late? Yes, he said.

The ride back was much smoother; the wind came up stiff and chill; soon, there was more shrimp coming my way, this time batter-fried, and hot coffee around the kitchen table when it got too cold and dark to sit outside. The sailor who'd curtly told us that we were late turned out to be a friendly man with a beard that made him look like a good humored Surd. He was born on Isla Cedros and had spent all his life working on fishing-boats. We got talking about sports: soccer, its lack of popularity in the US; I was about to bring up the inanity of a bunch of grown men calling themselves Cubs and Bulls when it turned out that Mexican teams too carried such names – he was familiar, though, with more intelligent nomenclature like AC Milan and Manchester United.

When Tito docked at Cedros, we respectfully waited for the abalone to be unloaded, apologized to the captain for having been late (he waved it aside), and made our way back to the room. A truck full of abalone, to be cleaned, frozen and eaten months later in a richer country, trundled past us, raising a cloud of dust.

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