The Road to Ensenada
We left Tijuana in one of the dozens of small white vans that line up at the corner of Avenidas Frontera y Madero and set off every few minutes like shots, whipping down the street and bumping over potholes until someone yells “parada, por favor!” and the bus jerks to the side of the road to let them out.
I was the only white person in the van to Rosarito. In the seat next to me was a woman in a hot pink v-neck and blue jeans with bumps covering her skin and her burgundy-streaked hair in a high, bouncy ponytail. She held the hand of a little girl eating a Lion King Happy Meal.
The hamburger smelled the same as its American equivalent, but the other scents were different than what I’d smelled that morning on the other side of the in San Isidro. Car exhaust, strong and sharp, filling the street. Fried dough and sugar, sweet and heavy, wafting off the churro stands.
The colors were brighter and the streets were wider. Buildings were more likely to have exposed concrete walls separating them and loud signs proclaiming what they housed: PAN CASERO. DIVORCIAS Y ESCRITURAS. LICUADOS DE PLATANO. The BP looked like a BP but the gas prices seemed super-sized—regular, 18.89—until I realized it was listed per liter.
Getting here wasn’t difficult. We crossed the US-Mexican in the easy direction: north to south. We walked across the border on foot, bags strapped to our backs as we navigated the steel-lined corridor dividing the countries, and entered Mexican customs, where we got our passports stamped before proceeding to the tourist center inside a storage unit just down the path from the crossing and asking for directions. It was so easy. I felt my privilege every step of the way.
We followed the directions we were given and arrived at the right corner of Tijuana to catch the bus to Rosarito.
Off to a Bad Start
And after 45 minutes of bumping along, we arrived into what has been called “the perfect Baja California destination” and what I would more accurately describe as “a loud, crowded town hugged by a dirty grey beach filled with far too many pharmacies hawking off-brand Viagra.” But I suppose that didn’t rank as high on the SEO keyword research.
I don’t know what we expected in the first real Mexican beach town, located a scanty 16 miles from the border. Of course it was overrun with day-tripping tourists and Mexican families for whom this is the closest stretch of coast. Of course it wasn’t the glittering water and shacks of fishmongers that I suppose I’d seen on a postcard and extrapolated all of Mexico to be.
Aesthetics were bad and available lodging was worse; we found ourselves wandering around, sweaty and strapped into our backpacks, looking for a place to sleep that was within our budget. After several blocks of fruitless searching, I found myself cranky and hot and decided that budgets really were absolutely useless and that I’d book us a bed at the nearest place with a cold shower, which turned out to be a family resort that charged us a full $80 (and this after a Booking.com discount; their listed prices were 60% higher) for an air conditioning-less room with two hard double beds and grimy tile floors. It did have really nice soap, though, and a spectacular balcony view, so we bathed ourselves, literally and figuratively, in those positives and set out to eat tacos.
I’d read that Tacos El Yaqui tacos were the best in town, and though I sometimes prefer to find my own way around a place and its culinary offerings, and we were in need of a win. We walked the four blocks from our hotel to the locale, where a line snaked past the parking lot. I joined it while Diego went for a six-pack of cold beer to make the shadeless line more bearable, and four cans and forty minutes later, we were at the counter.
Diego ordered for us—two tacos each and a quesadilla to share—while a man with a ten-inch cleaver went to town on the still-steaming steak that was arranged on a slice of tree truck on the counter. He chopped back and forth and side to side without looking, cutting strips of arrachera that the man next to him scooped up with nimble, oiled tongs and deposited on tortillas covered in melted cheese freshly slipped off the grill. That same man poured a ladle of beans on top, then dashed, in quick succession, diced white onions, bright guacamole, and thin salsa on top of those.
At the next station, we paid for our meal and smiled at the woman in a tight hairnet who was marinating giant cuts of meat in the back. We carted our tray over to a table, where I piled what I thought were grilled serrano peppers onto my taco, took a bite, realized they were jalapeños, and coughed for four minutes straight, interrupted only by my attempts to take bites of radish to numb the pain, which did not work, and chew the edge of the quesadilla, which did, a little.
The food was delicious, if taste-bud-destroyingly spicy (for me, the gringa; Diego had no qualms), and was the highlight of the day.
We spent the next morning splashing around our hotel pool before hitting the streets to ask locals about ways to get to Ensenada, which was another 85 kilometers south and which the entire hotel staff had told us was an impossibility to get to without paying $35 for a private van. We found a friendly señor who pointed out the right bus, we bought two $3 tickets, and we bumped along in relative peace—aside from the driver’s music wafting down the aisles and a quick stop for quesadillas and juice—to Ensenada.
Ensenada Expectations > Ensenada Reality
I should’ve already figured out that our catch-as-catch-can approach—which had worked surprisingly for when lapping Utah’s national parks and had already failed us in Rosarito, what with the super-expensive-last-minute-hotel and all—wasn’t going to work in Baja California. I’d read that; the few blog posts about the region that I’d come across warned of its lack of tourist infrastructure. But still, I was surprised at just how unready for travelers the city was.
There were all of four properties on Booking.com that were within our price range (that is, not $500 villas out in wine country—more on wine country in a minute). I booked one of them for a night, and we arrived and found it fine for what we needed, which was mostly a place to hole up and spend the afternoon catching up on work.
We went out briefly to tour the malecón and eat some seafood for dinner, both of which were underwhelming.
The city’s tourist side felt like an afterthought: vendors hawking even more obviously mass-produced versions of the mass-produced sombreros and shawls that we’d find all over the rest of the country, signs in English taped in windows advertising massage specials, and two streets near the port that were kept by-and-large clean, which created a shocking contrast between them and the rest of town: printer-sized holes in the sidewalk haphazardly covered with plywood, bars on the supermarket windows, prostitutes lined up outside the two mostly-empty pool halls glowing with the light from neon beer signs.
I wasn’t inspired to stay longer in the town, but we did want to make it out to the Valle of Guadalupe, recently touted as the Napa Valley of Mexico. Even though I’ve recently committed—very publicly; once you say something in a personal essay on the internet, it’s with you forever, right?—to stop drinking to the point of drunkenness, I wanted to go Mexican wine tasting, and I wanted to do it with Diego, who had never been wine tasting before. I envisioned us swirling a heady red among dusty vines, laughing as the wind rustled our hair.
That’s not quite what happened.
To the Vineyards We Go (And Barely Make It Back From)
Our hostel didn’t have availability for another night, so I booked us an Airbnb that was half a mile away and more expensive at $55/night, than I was happy with, especially when we walked in, after eight long blocks with all of our belongings strapped on top of us, and saw what it was: two concrete-block-walled rooms with concrete-block furniture (tv stand, coffee table, bed frame: all made up of 16-by-8-inch pieces of concrete) and a bathroom with a shower nozzle at the height of my neck (I’m 5’4”).
But we left our stuff in the closet, dealt with the fish stew that had exploded from its shoddy plastic container when I set it on the comforter, and headed out to catch a cab to the valley, stinking only slightly of cod.
The Valle of Guadalupe began its serious winemaking efforts in the 1830s, when the Dominicans built a mission there—the last one in their long line of missions built all along the California coast—and began producing sacrament wine in earnest. (Other Spanish explorers and locals had figured out the arid climate was good for grapes a few centuries earlier.) But a few decades later, a liberal wave swept Mexico, and in the 1850s, indigenous president Benito Juárez implemented laws that confiscated church property, including the vineyards, and made them available for public purchase. (He also changed a long-standing law that said only Catholics could be counted as citizens.) The struggle between liberalism and conservatism in Mexico culminated in the 1910 Mexican Revolution, which officially separated church from state; the land in the Valle never returned to religious hands, but instead to Mexican, Spanish, and Russian families who built the first commercial vineyards and started offering their products to the public.
Now, a hundredish years later, a hundredish wineries that are spread out among the 1,000-foot Mediterranean microclimate of the Valle of Guadalupe make reds and whites and roses, and if you ruck up and ask nicely, they’ll be thrilled to share them with you.
Diego and I took an Uber to the vineyards, thinking that we wanted to be responsible and not drive and also that we’d be able to walk between the various wineries we wanted to visit. Our first point was a good one, our second wasn’t; as we climbed out of our little Corolla and watched it pull away in a cloud of red-orange dust, we realized it was incredibly hot, that our clothes were not apt for scrambling up and down rocky hills, and that the distances between bodegas were a lot farther than they looked on Google Maps.
But! We walked in to the first winery, made a plan to try to ingratiate ourselves to anyone with a car, and asked for a tasting.
Chateau Camou was all ours. Not only was there no one to beg a ride from, but there was no one to share the tasting room with; it was us, three bottles of wine, and our private sommelier. We sunk back into the leather banquette and swilled our glasses and dragged crusty bread through a shallow dish of glowing, golden olive oil, made by the winery, and luxuriated in the cool room, the rich wine, and our guide’s stories of planting, production, and design.
[photo]
It was everything I wanted for Diego’s first tasting. We felt like royalty. We felt miles away from our all-concrete Airbnb and the carry-ons that held our worldly belongings. We clinked glasses and looked for legs and inhaled deeply, over and over again.
It wasn’t as well-run as other tastings I’ve been to; we had to pull information about the wines out of the staff and they charged extra for a tour of the grounds (both of which were par for the course at the other wineries, too). Like much of Mexico, the key ingredients for a truly great tourism moment are there, just not connected well, and honestly, that’s fine—it’s their land and their businesses and they don’t have to do it in the ways I’d most appreciate. We had a good time anyways.
Three glasses—and then another two, because the sommelier liked us and there was no one else there—later, we walked back out into the full weight of the afternoon sun. Tipsy and optimistic, we set out for the next closest winery, Torres Alegre & Familia.
It felt like walking through a mirage. I could see the waves of heat coming off of the asphalt as we passed one telephone pole, one scraggly tree, one row of baby grapes at a time.
Twenty minutes later, we came up through the back side of the winery. We made use of the first bathroom we came across—which did not have a door—then dusted ourselves off and walked in through the terraced tasting area.
A Mexican couple was sprawled out over the balcony and its couches, so we sat at the bar. I would not say I was soused, but I would say I’d remembered I didn’t really love the taste of a glass of wine (and loved more the experience of seeing the skyline reflected in its depths), so we ordered one tasting to split. The sommelier, a lovely, round young man with serious glasses and a scruffy beard, was in a good mood, and told us he’d give us a tasting of his favorites, versus limiting us to the three wines that came included in the price.
We swirled and sipped and poured over the design of the wine. We learned that Torres Alegre really is a family affair—the daughter does the graphics, the father still oversees the production of their 3,500 barrels/year—and that for their premiere line, which we got to try, they collect each grape by hand. That line is called Cru Garage, which is a reference to a quality wine—cru—and to the legacy of small-batch, “garage” winemakers that inspired their process.
Eventually, we’d stayed so long and befriended the sommelier so thoroughly that he offered the services of one of his coworkers to drive us to our next stop, a vineyard-cum-restaurant where we’d eat our first solid food of the day. We climbed into the coworker’s car, a 15-year-old VW beetle with over 200,000 miles, dust covering every surface, and missing door panels, and made small talk for the ten minutes it took to arrive at El Cielo.
Though we hadn’t had a tour of winemaking facilities yet, and I’d wanted Diego to see that, we realized we were tired, sunburned, and more in sync with applying the $25 that the tour would’ve cost us to the cost of sustenance, so we found a table outside and ordered steak and mariscos and watched the sun slowly sink behind the mountains as we waited for them to arrive.
We ate a lot and drank nothing, despite the alluring on-brand names of El Cielo’s collection—the mid-level line was called “Astronomos” and featured Copernicus, Hubble, and Kepler; the next level up was “Constelaciones,” starring Centauro, Orion, and Perseus.
When it was time to leave, we looked at the cost of an Uber, but seeing it settle in the $18 range—which would send us even farther into the stratosphere above our daily budget—we decided to rough it. Rough it entailed walking 25 minutes down the one road in town to the bus stop, which was actually just a plank of wood laid across two rocks. But the walk was refreshing, and from our perch on the plank, we saw the sun finish its descent and an orange glow rise above the grapes into an indigo-blue sky. It was beautiful.
The bus finally came and collected us and a half-dozen Mexican college students in Ensenada on a conference, which they told us about after I saw that one of the girls was wearing an AIESEC sweatshirt and I chatted her up about the international student organization I was also a part of in college. We were on the bus’s last run of the night, which meant it stopped at every intersection, house, and hovel on the way back into Ensenada; the return to town took an hour and a half, and I found myself lamenting not investing in the 20-minute Uber ride, but we eventually arrived safe and proud of our restraint.
Onwards to Baja
We slept poorly that night, and the next morning, we stopped by an Anthony-Bourdain-approved tostada stand where Diego ate ceviche that he loved and I had an uni-on-crunchy-corn that I hated—Diego later brought me a fish taco to breakfast on instead because he is a dream come true—before heading to the bus stop for our first long-haul Mexican bus ride: 14 hours to Mulegé.
Now that we’ve finished Baja (and the rest of the coast, at least for now; I’m finishing this from Mexico City), I can look back and say that Ensenada was a good stand-in for the rest of the peninsula and maybe for Mexico in general. So much potential, so poorly executed, with some truly lovely pockets of food and drink and scenery and culture and people, but with none of the ease of finding that I experienced in places like Uruguay or Argentina, and none of the pleasantness, if not ease, in finding that like I had in places like Colombia, due to an absolutely murderous climate (our fault for going in August), astounding levels of trash and pollution, and a heightened sense of cautiousness and care.
One more time, more synthesized: Mexico’s food, drink, nature, and culture definitely pass muster; its cities, infrastructure, and climate definitely do not.
Mexico may not be for us long term. (It may be; Diego and I are settling in for three months of a test period in CDMX and may travel more here afterwards; we’ll see after more data is collected.) But even if it’s not, that’s okay—that’s part of what travel is, too. Seeing the reality of a place and accepting it, even though it’s different from the version you dreamed up in your head before you set out. Letting the dream go, making the best of the reality, and moving on.