The next day, just as we heard that the Las Parras tour to Mission San Xavier was canceled due to lack of tourists, a weathered cowboy with a stiff leather hat and few words appeared in the lobby at La Plaza.  After two minutes of negotiations and ten minutes on the highway we turned onto a desolate dirt road. Winding up, down and around through the Sierra de la Gigantia the land looked much as it did when the Jesuits built this first link in the trails that would connect the Baja missions and would eventually lead to Alta California and the last mission in Sonoma, California. Three hundred years after the padres' advance, the land, punctuated with the top heavy elephant trees and 50-foot tall cardon cacti, still seemed the frontier of another planet. The parched desert made the palm-fringed oasis of the Las Parras Ranch all the more startling. After stopping to photograph the 200-year-old chapel we chugged slowly on reaching the sign for San Xavier around noon.

San Xavier sits majestically in an amphitheater surrounded by mountains. Built of squares of volcanic stone, it is as somber on the outside as it is dazzlingly white and gold inside. What must the hunter-gathering Cochimis have thought as light from chandeliers and candles played on the golden altar framing oil paintings and a statue of San Xavier? We know a little of what the converts thought - hell might be a good place to go as they would always be warm - and we know they had a sense of humor. Father Ugarte was startled to learn that when giggles broke out in the congregation it was because he had used suggestive words supplied by his neophyte teachers. One report states that the converts sang sweetly but there are no descendants to tell us. The original converts were essentially wiped out by the white man's diseases leaving the oldest Baja families the descendents of the soldiers.

The garden behind the church looks as if the padres had just left to conduct mass. Behind a gnarled olive tree is a stone irrigation canal built by the Jesuits to funnel water from a dam high in the mountains. Stopping in Mexico City before embarking for Baja, the padres brought slips of fruit trees, mango, avocado, and orange as well as date palms and vegetable seeds for the body and rose bushes for the soul.

We had lunch under a brilliant magenta bougainvillea cascading over the palapa restaurant beside the church. The owner presented us with fresh peas to nibble while he whipped up delicious burritos of fried onions, tomatoes, beans and shredded dried meat. Our hour long ride back to Loreto would have been a day's journey for the padres.

All the seafood restaurants in Loreto were good including McLulu's fish tacos but we stumbled on our best restaurant by chance. Obscured behind foliage beside the Flamingo snack bar were two tables in a homey setting. Since it was early Susan ordered chicken quesadillas and I ordered juevos rancheros. After waiting 45 minutes our simple order finally came. Susan's tender chicken was wrapped in a thin blue tortilla and my light, non-greasy eggs rested on the same blue tortilla surrounded by salsa and a sprinkling of cheese. The long delay was because every thing including the tortillas and salsa was made from scratch. What a pity we had made this discovery on our last night before we had a chance to try a real meal.

We had slipped into Baja time and hated to leave Loreto with its quiet historical ambience and all those restaurants we didn't have time to sample.

Catching the eight o'clock bus to Ciudad Constitucion we reached Puerto San Carlos by noon.  The trip through the Sierra de la Giganta was almost disappointingly uneventful. From the air the daunting mountains looked impenetrable but the road was smooth, sometimes skirting the sea and sometimes slaloming around the mountains until finally reaching the agricultural flatlands at Ciudad Constitucion. On the bus from Ciudad Constitucion, we met Carlos who said he could arrange a whale watching tour for us at two o'clock. When we arrived at the sandy, makeshift town of San Carlos he hailed a cab to the nearby Alcatraz Hotel where we joined three Canadians in the tropical patio restaurant.  By the time we finished fish tacos, they had joined our whale-watching expedition.

Our launch on the Bay of Magdelena was a sandbar with mangroves on one side and boats beached on the sand on the other. Captain Juan said he was 18 but we were skeptical. Even without whales it was fun zinging out to the mouth of the bay, the favorite haunt of calving mother whales after their 6000-mile journey from Siberia and the Bering Sea. We bobbed around for about an hour with plenty of ooos and ahs. No sooner had we spotted the heart-shaped geyser blow in one direction than a breaching whale would cause us to lunge to the other side of the boat trying to snap a perfect bow-knot tail poised above the surface.  More often there was just a crescent sliver of the mother followed by the smaller sliver of her 1500 pound baby. After two hours Juan whomped us back at break neck speed so we wouldn't have to pay for another hour. As it was we were out for three hours and were charged for two, resulting in a nice tip for Juan.

Our Canadian friends who had driven up from Cabo gave us a tour of the sandy town whose economy is based on the fish cannery and tourism. The highlight of the tour was spotting a small shed moving down the street with two tiny feet visible underneath. We were reminded of the Holy House carried by the angles to Loreto Italy. After taking a quick look at the weekly market's fruits, vegetables and plastic whales we had a Tecate at the hotel and then moved down the street to El Galeon for delicious fish soup. Back at the Alcatraz, the Canadians packed up their guitar around eleven and we bid our farewells. We had "done" San Carlos and would leave tomorrow.

The oasis town of Mulege with its pre-historic cave paintings would be our last stop. Backtracking through Loreto, we arrived at Mulege around three. From the bus stop we caught a cab to Las Casitas where eight small rooms hid behind a bougainvillea covered patio. The manager told us Salvador Castro, one of the guides licensed to lead tours to the cave paintings, would be at Las Casitas at six.

That gave us time to look at Mulege's three narrow streets, a small plaza with a grocery store, a corner bar where six gringos from La Serenidad RV Park were drinking beer while their wives tooled around town on their ATVs looking for tomatoes and onions. 

Mulege's two "must sees" sit on top of hills on opposite sides of the Mulege River. We followed the steps up hill in front of Las Casitas to the Regional Museum housed in the former jail.  Famous as "The Jail Without Bars", the prisoners were free to go to work during the day, returning at night when the conch sounded. Among the arrowheads, metates and copies of cave paintings, a surprising relic was the desk of Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason).  The mystery writer was among the early adventurers who became fascinated with the pre-historic rock paintings of Central Baja. The padres had mentioned the caves but a French naturalist, Diguer, made the first scientific report in 1893. It was Gardener's books and an article in Life magazine that popularized the paintings.

We walked back down the hill, across the river whose bridge serves as a dam, and up the hill to Mission Santa Rosalia de Mulege. The unadorned interior of the angular stone church contains only a statue of Santa Rosalia, a Sicilian saint who miraculously saved Palermo from the plague in 1624. On a knoll behind the church we were dazzled by the best view in all of Mulege. A graceful sea of date palms fed by an underwater river filled the valley. 

Salvador Castro arrived at Las Casitas at nine the next morning with the van loaded for the trip to the cave paintings. There were ten of us in the van: five Good Sams from the RV touring club, a young couple from a fishing lodge in Alaska, a volunteer dentist and Susan and me.

We drove out Icehouse Road and quickly found ourselves on trails unmarked except for the occasional fence.  Salvador stopped for a lesson in Baja flora. The most striking cactus is the cardon, whose heavy arms are filled with water and whose spines are used for fences and house posts. Besides furnishing food, building material and firewood, the desert is also a pharmacy. Plants for curing cancer, for snake bites, cuts, sunburn, kidney stones, tooth aches, mosquito bites, laxatives and soap are all there. We were confident that what ever happened to us, Salvador would find a remedy.

Around 10:30 two barking dogs announced our arrival at a neat ranch house, its three-sided outdoor kitchen designed for summer's heat. Below the house were the corrals for the goats and behind was a solar panel.  Salvador dropped the supplies for our lunch with the senora and we were off to see the cave paintings. Salvador kept up a good pace and we were at the first paintings in thirty minutes. How easy it was for us! Earle Stanley Gardner's entourage included two helicopters and several Pak Jaks, prototypes of ATVs.

At La Trinidad, the paintings were not in caves but on the cliff face and the first ones we saw were so vivid they could have been painted yesterday and not over 3,000 years ago. A stiff, white deer was upside down signifying that it was dead. A small stick figure in red portrayed a shaman-like figure and there were several sea creatures and a fish with an arrow through it. A line of small white hands seemed to wave "hello". A graceful deer outlined in red became the prototype of the deer that Harry Crosby called "The Trinidad Deer." Crosby took up where Gardner left off and rode a thousand miles by muleback eventually discovering several hundred sites. There are copious illustrations of cave art in his book, "Cave Paintings of Baja California". These paintings are the only messages left by the Painters who were already only legends when the missionaries arrived.

With a goat standing sentinel on a point high above the canyon, five of us started through the rose colored canyon where wild fig trees and cacti clung precariously to the steep walls. Five stayed back at the ranch even though Salvador assured them that the guidebooks were wrong. "It hasn't been necessary to swim through the canyon for five years". When we came to about a 30-meter pool we scrambled up two boulders with a scary descent. There was no toehold for the last step down to a rock held in a forked branch. Salvador held our foot tight to the boulder while we negotiated that maneuver. Without Salvador I think we would all have had to swim the few strokes across the pond.

The second set of paintings was on the ceiling of a shallow cave. Small fish, whales and manta rays were not as impressive as the first site but we wouldn't have missed the canyon trek even if there had been no paintings. At the ranch we could tell Salvador was nervous.  He had promised to get the Good Sams back to the Saturday pig roast at La Serenidad by three. "But", he said, " if every one agrees, there is something else I would like to show you after you finish your burritos." One Good Sam holdout finally gave in and we loaded into the van traversing another unmarked trail.

It took binoculars to find the dramatic petroglyphs pecked high on the canyon wall. There were tall shamans with upraised arms and a parade of animals. Even the Good Sam holdout lingered until Salvador insisted we return to the van.

Susan and I had planned to go back to Loreto that night, but something about Baja makes all tourists friendly and we were having such a good time over a lobster dinner at Las Casitas we decided to leave the next day and arrive in Loreto in time for our afternoon flight.

At lift-off from Loreto airport, looking down on the now familiar mountains, I was thinking about all the trails we hadn't taken, the caves we hadn't seen and the people we hadn't met, when Susan said, "I wonder if my boyfriend would like to come to Baja". I quickly replied, "Well, Salvador said he would have time in October to take us on some overnights where we could base ourselves at ranches and go to the caves from there." By the time we reached the clouds, we were already dreaming. We had both been bitten by the Baja Bug. 

The following are other articles that Dorothy has written for the magazine:
 

• Cancun Night Out ~ Where To Go
• Armenian Odyssey ~ Discovering The Soul Of Armenia
• Highlights Of Thailand: Bangkok, Chiang Mai And Phuket ~ From Day One With My Digital Camera
• Wandering Through Georgia ~ Journey From Yerevan, Armenia Through The Former Republic Of Georgia
• Jumping Ship On The Nile ~ Seeking Relief From Pharaonic Egypt

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