Tortugas Bay: Great place to be stranded
September 16th – 17th, 2014 ($703 mxn)
Bahia Tortugas
Finding a good place to eat in a town you are not familiar with is not always easy. We rode early into Bahia Tortugas, a humble small town with mostly unpaved narrow streets, where life seems to go by very slow, and most everyone knows each other. We went around with no particular direction in search for a place to eat, and then I saw Maria who asked me with her limited English “You want to eat? Follow me.” This woman read my mind and was now leading us by foot to a nearby restaurant while we rode our motorcycles slowly behind her. “Should we be following this stranger?” is a question I seem to never ask myself.
We followed and, around the corner, immediately next to the bay, was a small house that had seen better days; the paint on the house was falling off, there was debris on the ground all over, and parts of the house were unfinished or had fallen apart. This was Maria’s house and she was inviting us to eat there. “Should we eat at this stranger’s house?” Maria was a woman short in stature, perhaps in her 50’s, who pleasantly welcomed us to town and offered us a place to eat excellent homemade food. She had a good vibe. You know how sometimes you get a weird feeling, like a warning you should not be riding at night in Nicaragua or staying at an odd man’s house in Belize, well I did not get this with Maria here.
During breakfast, Maria told us her house actually used to be a restaurant before it mysteriously burned down not too long ago, hence the appearance of the exterior. It definitely had the best location in all of town though, waterfront property with a patio looking out to the pier and the rest of the bay with unsettling cloudy skies in the distance. I am not sure how it happened but, between one conversation and the next, it was decided we would rent and stay in Maria’s living room/kitchen for the next day or two. We had now secured a great location to stay, it came with a genuine person, excellent cook, and a safe place to keep the motorcycles, too. We warned Maria we needed to bathe, to which she laughed and left to prepare the shower. When she came back, we had already changed into board shorts and begun bathing with buckets of water we filled with the hose on the patio. Despite using soap and water, I still had a peculiar smell; maybe I needed to shorten the frequency of my showers.
The horizon did not augur calm weather anytime soon. Via radio and word of mouth, we were hearing how hurricane Odile had struck the southern part of the Baja peninsula, and the damage had even caught some towns like La Paz and Mulege, which were not as south from where we were. This was not only concerning because of the difficult situation the affected towns were going through, but also we were making our way down that general direction. How would hurricane Odile affect our plans, our route, and our safety?
There is one season every year the residents of Bahia Tortugas become the busiest with work. That is lobster season, which began that day we arrived. However, no boats were going out that day due to the threat of Odile lurking off shore. Just as no boat left the shore for that day and the next, we decided it would be wise to stay in town as well. And so, for the next two days we drank beer, ate home-cooked food, dove off the pier, and played cards on the patio with a view of the bay, waiting for the bad weather to pass. What a great place to be stuck!
