The Road Through Baja California - Tijuana to Ensenada to Bahía de los Ángeles,

As you drive into Baja California you shall cross over the Rio Tijuana – a black stream of water coursing through an immense aqueduct where thousands of displaced migrants live in tents and without shelter. The men and women and children comprise a chain of dispossessed masses stretching along the concrete embankment of the canal. Beyond this dark latitude of squalor and poverty lies greater Tijuana, the Pacific Ocean, and the shining city of San Diego – a place so close geographically yet so far removed socio-economically that only the drug addicts and Mexican immigrants may be able to relate to the level of destitution endured by those people struggling to survive in the effluence of the canal...

To get from Ensenada to the Sea of Cortez one must cross the Central Desert of Baja California. As you drive deeper into the heart of the high desert, the barren mesas begin to morph into a colorful landscape of dazzling cacti and desert flowers that are strewn across the painted hills like gumdrops. The psychedelic spectrum of green, pink, and purple cacti vary wildly in their appearance: the saguaro cactus (carnegiea gigantea) grows upwards of seventy-feet tall and provides housing for woodpeckers and arachnid colonies; hot-pink barrel cacti and spindly ocotillo plants capable of ejecting spines into your soles are scattered low throughout the desert floor; the lofty boojum tree bends and curves its shaggy arms and appears as though it has paused in motion and will carry on once your back is turned or beneath the light of a full moon. The desert is an ever-changing and surreal setting of cacti so rich in color and plants so bizarre in shape that they appear artificial – it is like some fairytale diorama or toontown backdrop where little devils with pitchforks leap upon the earthen crucible and dance on the alters with their shadows. Lightly dreaming clouds shaped like pale horses and ferris wheels and dragon boats drift through the boundless sky, and on the horizon electric storm clouds generate cells of rain that careen across the badlands like cyclones.

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