BACK TO BAJA:
Road Trip To Catavina

We recently returned to Baja ten years later. This time we drove directly over the border to northern Baja to a desert oasis called Catavina, which is literally in the middle of nowhere. One of the least frequented parts of Baja California, the Desierto Central is more rural than other parts of the peninsula. It has small farming towns, fishing villages and isolated ranches. In pre-Columbian times Cochimi Indians foraged its vast deserts and fished its extensive coastlines. Our desired destination was a sinuous 75-mile stretch of the Transpeninsular Highway between El Rosario and Catavina, which transverses a surrealistic landscape of elephant trees, cardon cactus (resembling the saguaro of the SW USA) and the twisting, drooping cirio (nicknamed 'boojum' for its supposed resemblance to an imaginary creature in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark). Set in a landscape of massive granite boulders, Catavina was a perfect place to get away from it all and enjoy the unique beauty and solitude of this desert in all its vastness and remoteness.