Baja 2003
Spring break 2003, and I was
lucky enough to take my daughter and three of her friends deep into
Mexico's Baja peninsula. We covered a quick 1,400 miles in three
days, packing in incredible scenery, good food, visits to quaint Mexican
towns, whale watching, and prehistoric cave paintings. This was a
great way to visit one of the world's best-kept secrets, the splendor of
Baja California.
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| Here's the team on a quick
detour to the Mission of Santo Domingo. |
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Wow, that looks great! |
| Here they are, hamming it up
for my Nikon! The big Chevy Tahoe 4x4 was perfect for this kind of
travel. The Nikon did well, too! |
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I woke up early at our first
hotel, the La Pinta, located in the boulder fields in Catavina. I
grabbed this silhouette shot of a giant Cardon cactus just before
sunrise. |
| Here's my little girl and me
having breakfast in Guerrero Negro, our point of embarkation for the
whale-watching trip. |
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Do these people look like they
are having fun? |
| Whoa! A mama California
gray whale and her baby. I used a polarizer on the 24-120 Nikon
lens, which helped to let the lens see beneath the surface a bit. |
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Mama and the little one coming
by for another look. |
| This was really great! |
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Here's the little one again,
popping up for a better look at us. |
| The girls seem to be having a
good time. |
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We encountered quite a few
Mexican Army checkpoints as we went deeper into Mexico. Usually,
the soldiers just wave people through, but this infantry platoon decided
they needed to inspect us more closely.
I wonder why....
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| The mission in San Ignacio, as
seen through the Sigma 17-35 lens. |
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One of the statues inside the
San Ignacio mission. |
| And another one outside the
mission... |
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This is a side door leading
into the mission. I thought it made a nice shot. |
| Here's the mission viewed from
the south. I've photographed this mission many times, but this is
one of my favorite shots. I used the 17-35 Sigma, cranked all the
way over to 17mm, to get rid of some power lines in the upper right
corner. |
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Here's the stream at San
Ignacio, with what might be a volcano in the distance.
San Ignacio is actually an oasis (the
real thing, a genuine oasis) in the Vizcaino desert.
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| Cave paintings near Catavina,
created by an unknown society that lived thousands of years ago.
These cave paintings are found throughout central Baja.
There are literally no other remnants of the society that created these
paintings. This is real Indiana Jones stuff, and it is just one of
the things that makes traveling through the Baja so mystical. |
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Our cave painting guide,
silhouetted against the Vizcaino boulder fields. |
| A final photo...checking out
the cactus in Baja. There are hundreds of cactus species here,
many of which grow no place else on earth. |
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