Here's the crew just south of Ensenada, where the real Baja begins.  The Tahoe ran like a champ on the entire trip.  John used my N70 to grab this shot of Sue and me next to the Tahoe.  Life is good...

These photos show Sue and Erica silhouetted against a Cardone cactus, which is similar to the Saguaro we U.S. citizens are more used to seeing in Arizona.  I took these pictures just as the sun was starting to go down in the Vizcaino desert.  The first photograph shows the girls with the cactus in the background.

The second Cardon photograph (which shows Sue and Eri next to the same plant) provides a better sense of just how large these cacti are.  This is only a moderate one.  Some of the Cardone cactus are 50 or 60 feet tall.  They are amazing plants.

When you travel in the Baja peninsula, the best hotels are in the La Pinta chain.  They average about $60 or $70 for a room, which is cheap by U.S. standards but expensive in the Baja.  Most of the other hotels are in the $20 to $25 range, but the accommodations are, well, not five star.  This is the La Pinta courtyard fountain in Catavina.

The mission in San Ignacio.  You could easily spend a full day here photographing the town and its mission.

These next three photographs show some of the mission's interior statues.  The San Ignacio mission is not a tourist mission, as are the ones we have in southern California.  The San Ignacio mission is a working church.

This is a very interesting church in the center of Santa Rosalia.  It is unlike any of the others I had seen in Mexico.  Does the architecture look familiar?   This church was designed by Gustave Eiffel, the same man who designed the Eiffel tower.  Santa Rosalia's church was originally designed for an African nation, with its all-metal construction designed to resist termites.  Apparently the people in the African town did not like it.  Eiffel was visiting Santa Rosalia to assess their copper, so he brought the church along and it was erected here instead of in Africa.     This was a tough photograph.  The front of the church (as you see it here) faces east, and the sun was setting behind it when I photographed it.  I metered on the front of the church with the N70.

The interior of Santa Rosalia's Gustav Eiffel-designed church.  I found myself wishing I had the Nikon 24-120 lens.  I could have used the extra 4mm over the 28-70 Sigma I used for this photograph.   The stained glass windows at the west end of this church were really beautiful, as you can see in the photograph below.

Here's a better photograph of the stained glass windows in the Santa Rosalia church.

 

Moonrise on the Sea of Cortez.

I shot this photograph leaving Santa Rosalia with the N70 on a tripod, in the Aperture mode, just as the moon was emerging.   The moon had an orange glow, which I knew would disappear as soon as the moon moved much further above the horizon (and it did only moments after this picture).   You can get on a ship and sail east for 19 hours (toward the moon), and you will be on the other side of the Sea of Cortez (which is mainland Mexico).

We had a few Tecates and a good night's sleep in the date palm groves in San Ignacio, and then it was on to the town square in the morning to get in a beat-up old van for the 60-kilometer bumpy and dusty dirt road ride to San Ignacio Lagoon.  We shared the van with a family from England.  It's funny thing:  On all my trips to Baja, I have typically seen more visitors from other nations than the United States, even though we are Mexico's next-door neighbor.  Some day, when the secret of the Baja's beauty gets out in the U.S., this place will be deluged with visitors.  Right now, that situation doesn't go much further south than Ensenada, but it will.  This is an amazing place.   Okay, enough philosophizing...on to the whales!

Captain Ahab and her first mate...

 

Thar she blows!

We were very excited when we saw the first whale spout.  In a few minutes, they were popping up all around us, like lawn sprinklers when the timer kicks in.

A California gray whale, up close and personal...

Dr. Porsche, eat your heart out....

The adult whales are about 50 feet long.  The boats are about 18 feet long.   As Jonah said, you do the math....

Our boat and its captain.

The California gray whales migrate from Alaska to the Baja lagoons every year to mate and have their babies. The herd (estimated to total about 21,000 worldwide) was hunted to near-extinction when the whalers discovered these lagoons in the 1850s, but the Mexican government stepped in to protect the whales.  The herd is believed to be at pre-whale-hunting levels now.  This is their life, migrating annually between Alaska and Mexico.  They don't live anywhere else. To say that the whales are amazing would be an understatement.  They are magnificent, and they appeared to be as curious about us as we were about them.  The whales and their calves came right up to our boats, rolling over in the water to see us better.  They were playful.  One blew a bubble underneath us that was almost as big as our boat.  We saw several hundred during the three hours we were in the lagoon.  We heard estimates that there were as many as 5,000 whales in San Ignacio Lagoon while we were there.   This was one of the most fun things I've ever done.

We had a little rain on the last day during our drive back to the Estados Unidos, but it was worth it:  We saw three or four rainbows that day.  The colors in these Mexican rainbows were very vivid, far more so than any others I have seen anywhere else in the world. This is actually a double rainbow (you can just make out the second rainbow above the first one).  I had never seen rainbows before that revealed both ends at the same time.

Always the ham... Traveling through the Baja peninsula with a camera is my idea of a good time.   If any of you have plans to visit the Baja and you would like more information about where to stay, what to look for, etc., let me know what I can do to help by sending me an e-mail.