Logs and salty sea dogs...

We arrived in La Paz in the rain. La Paz, Baja California that is, NOT Bolivia as one of our travelling mates thought. They accused us of flying in the process as they’d (probably correctly!) concluded there’s no way we could have got there overland in a week from northern Baja. Me? On a plane? On this trip? With my reputation?

To enhance the damp ambience La Paz’s main street was being resurfaced creating an obstacle course of wet cement, open man-holes and drains, piles of new metal street furniture and the odd dangling electrical cable to add to the excitement. Ravenous we ate a spicy ‘sopas mariscos’ in a very local cantina, complete with obligatory blind guitar player strumming away in the corner. The soup later repeated slightly on us and our Spanish travelling companions but it wasn’t as odd as the meal the following night - ‘Pollo Perchuga’. Which consisted of half a deboned chicken, stuffed with spinach and goats cheese then liberally smeared with what looked and tasted like half a jar of apricot jam. Just plain weird.

Many years ago one of the books that inspired me to become a marine biologist was John Steinbeck’s ‘The Log from the Sea of Cortez’. It’s about a trip he made with his friend the legendary American marine biologist Ed Ricketts, in the days when field work was all about catching bizarre new species and shoving them into glass jars of formaldehyde. Being in La Paz and gazing out over the same azure blue waters I wanted in. However as I haven’t dived in a decade and can’t tell an ‘O’ ring from my arse-hole we went snorkelling.

Our boat took us out to Los Isolotes, a series of pinnacled crags jutting out of the sea and home to Baja’s biggest colony of California sea-lions. The rocks were red but topped by a thick white crust of dried guano – ‘shite-washed’ by the resident sea-birds. We could hear, and smell, the sea-lions as they honked away at us like marine dogs from beneath the cliffs.

In the water they effectively demonstrated the millions of years of evolution that separate us from our marine mammal cousins, gliding elegantly around our flailing limbs in mutual curiosity. The sleek young pups swam right up to our masks, barked in our faces, bit our mate Laia’s blonde dreadlocks and generally swam, sleek rings around us. As well as the sea-lions the water teemed with a kaleidoscope of coloured parrotfish, surgeonfish, groupers and jacks. Whilst on the rocks above massive bull seals aggressively defended their harems of breeding females from adolescent males attempting to sneak in for a crafty shag.

We shared the boat with a group of Spanish divers and in the afternoon they did a wreck dive that was too deep for us to snorkel down to. The ‘Fang Ming’ was a Chinese people smuggling vessel that the Mexican authorities had intercepted, impounded and then sunk deliberately to form an artificial reef. One assumes they removed the cargo first.