Ephemerica

We ended up spending three nights in Guerrero Negro waiting out the storm that came through. The first day, even though there was evidence of rain in the air, we decided to go whale watching in the afternoon. Had we known at this point we were going to stay an extra day, we probably would have waited and gone the next day (more on this later).

Guerrero Negro is known for two things: whales and salt. We went whale watching with a tour that was run by a hotel down the street from us. They drive you to the nearby Laguna Oja de Liebre (Eye of the Jack Rabbit Lagoon) past a giant salt factory. One of the reasons that the grey whales like to give birth in the lagoon is that its high salt concentration gives their young greater buyoncy as they are first getting used to breathing and swimming. The lagoon also provides raw materials for one of the biggest salt harvesting operations in the world. We saw giant mountains of salt being loaded onto barges that we were told were being shipped around the world, mostly for industrial use. The water from the lagoon goes through a system of concentrating pools, taking 8 years to travel through before it gets harvested as salt. It was very interesting, although apparently there have been many battles over the environmental impact of the salt factory on the environment that the whales and a lot of migratory birds depend on.

After driving past the salt operation, we finally made it out to a dock on the lagoon where 3 boats were waiting. Cindy and I were in a boat with a German couple (the other boats were full of large groups that were part of a tour). The weather had gone from bad to worse by this time—the tour company had big yellow fisherman-style raincoats for everybody, but it didn’t do a great job of keeping out the cold and wet. So we went out into the lagoon for 3 hours. It took a while for us to find some whales, but once we did, it seemed like they were everywhere. Lots of mama and baby whales swimming side-by-side. Although we’ve heard that sometimes the whales will come right up to the boats and let you touch them, the closest we got to any was 5 meters or so. However, with the rain being out of control for most of the trip, we decided to keep the camera dry, so no pictures of whales (the gate will have to do). With about an hour left, the rain let up and the sun came out, so we had an enjoyable ride back to the dock. We ran into the German couple randomly on the street in town the next day, and they said they had gone again the next morning and that the weather was great, and the whales were much more frisky. Oh well. We spent most of that day putting out clothes to dry that were still wet from two days previous. After checking (and re-checking) the forecast, we were convinced enough that we were going to have good weather that we could move on the next day.

Our next day was only notable for the fact that I sweet-talked us into a free camping space, in Spanish no less! At the end of the day, we pulled into a town that we didn’t even know existed. There was a hotel, but we thought it might be expensive and since we had planned to camp, I (inadvertently) found the owner of the hotel and asked if we could put up our tent on the hotel grounds. He said it was fine and that it wasn’t necessary to pay. We decided out of goodwill to eat at the hotel restaurant as payment.

Posted by Matthew on February 2nd, 2007 | Filed under: Mexico