This story appeared in the March 2002 issue of National Geographic Adventure and won a 2002 Lowell Thomas award for Best American Travel Journalism from the Society of American Travel Writers. I know, I know, it sounds like forever ago. But Baja is pretty much timeless and the story seems that way, too.

We’re driving south over a bad road. We’re driving south over a bad road because in Baja California even the good roads are bad. As for the bad roads themselves, well, they’re another whole level of bad. But each bad road in Baja California is bad in its own way, and if you spend enough time driving south of the border you become a connoisseur of them, a sort of bad-road snob, and you grow to appreciate, even respect, the many fine and subtle ways a road can be bad.

In Tijuana, for example, Mexico 1 features curves that tighten too sharply or drop away off-camber, exits requiring lane changes across speeding traffic, and grades more suited to the Inca Trail than to a route with superhighway pretentions. This is the badness of third-world engineering, and it can only be savored amidst a turbid mix of American SUVs, overloaded Mexican jalopies, and ancient delivery trucks.

In Bahia de Los Angeles, one encounters a moonscape of potholes; in Maneadero, unmarked speed bumps the size of redwood logs. In those cases bad means a certain, almost charming, unpredictability, a piquant rebuke to our north-of-the-border notion that highway driving involves a certain degree of monotony.

Then there are the obstacles: black cows crossing in the middle of the night, pedestrians on the road surface, and (rumor has it) banditos that could steal your vehicle. There are stories of police who will stop you for nonexistent traffic offenses and relent only when you pay a “fine” on the spot. Indeed, the last occurrence even has its own name, mordida (literally ‘bite’), and travelers often set aside cash just in case. As for me, I’ve driven in Baja so many times and never encountered mordida–much less banditos–that I almost feel a little cheated.

There are three of us, driving south in a big truck. The idea was mine–a dash through some of my favorite wild country–and I’d talked two of my more spontaneous friends into joining me. One is Sinuhe Xavier, a photographer, all-around outdoor athlete, and frequent traveling companion of mine. The other is David Craig, a old school buddy who’s now an editor for USA Today. Though game for an adventure, he admits he hasn’t been camping since passing out at a kegger on my college quad. And while Sinuhe is an old Baja hand, David has never been deep into Mexico and seems a little jumpy.

As we leave the border traffic behind, we’re committed to a road trip whose promise is limited only by the laws of time and space. I could spend months in a Kerouac-ian ramble, or set up camp and never come back at all. But we have jobs, commitments, schedules–and less than two weeks to get back to them. So we’ve given ourselves 12 days to drive 2,000-plus miles to Cabo San Lucas and back, to see how much of Baja’s buzz we can grab for ourselves. With luck, we’ll swim at Land’s End, dive with giant mantas, ride desert singletrack, dip our paddles in mirrored water, and see waves from inside their curling tubes. Six jugs of gasoline are strapped to the roof, insurance against the notoriously unreliable state-owned filling stations. We also carry three mountain bikes, two surfboards, one boogie board, five boxes of Pop-Tarts, two pounds of Turkish-grind coffee, a case and a half of Red Bull energy drink, a Meade telescope bought at Costco for $130, two packs of Immodium-D, and one extra-large squirt bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. We have music, a GPS, and all of Baja laid out before us. We’re driving south, driving south over a bad road that’s guaranteed to get worse, and we couldn’t be happier about it.

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