Around here, we are lucky—damned lucky—to have such a cool neighbor as Baja, sprawling south from our sleek San Diego lives.
I remember the first time I drove the length of the peninsula. Crossing into Tecate knowing I had a thousand miles of trouble and rapture ahead of me, I was content. The long, feverish vein of Highway 1 unraveling before me like a dare and plenty of country music on the radio? Surely this is what dreams are made of.
I soon found out. Highway 1 is a raving, dangerous road requiring concentration, skill, and luck. Goddess help you if you’re careless—the narrow asphalt twists like a rattlesnake that’s been spotted. Eighteen-wheelers come at you around blind turns with barely enough lane for one. Vehicles of questionable roadworthiness demand a pass. Checkpoints. Searches. Propinas. But if you’ve got a lunatic’s stomach and you’re willing to wrestle the beast, the rewards are many.
Ping-ponging between coasts, watching a sun wet with golden glitter rise over the gulf at dawn, only to smother itself into the Pacific come nightfall from some no-name beach found at the end of a scrub brush–shrouded turnoff in the desert. Nights under a billion cold stars. Waking in a truck bed; coffee on a small gas stove. Sweaty mornings watching whales breaching, their breathy spouts blessing the dawn with holy water. Endangered California condors in the high country; Seussian forests of endemic Boojum trees near Cataviña. No algorithm can match this.
If you do it right—with respect to the land, the people, and the uncertainty—this place can prove a pilgrimage. A baptism. A reset from polite society. It is a land that reporter Fernando Jordan called “el otro México” in his 1951 book of the same name. The other Mexico. A place Jordan saw as radically different—geographically, culturally, and historically—from the rest of the country. To Jordan, Baja California represented a Mexico that had been neglected and misunderstood for centuries yet was rich in natural beauty, mystery, and potential. He was right. His book remains a classic.
Like San Diego, Baja is blessed with variety. Deserts, mountains, coast. But San Diego this is not. Baja is a dagger of dusty granite thrust down into the Pacific like a sheath on California’s waistband. Savage, sunburned, reckless. It’s a place where wild animals and wild ideas thrive.
But before you get to the chaos, there’s Valle. A sane jaunt south and you’re steeped in a different kind of alchemy, spun from agriculture and intention, where improbable grapes grow in a valley of avant-garde experimentation and audacious plates can be found at the end of rivulet-scarred gravel driveways. It’s an artful retreat from the peninsula’s ruggedness where something unrestrained still lives—you can taste it in the terroir and see it in the architecture. The community in Valle de Guadalupe is doing surprising, creative, and delicious things. If you haven’t been recently, consider this an invitation.
Few places on Earth encompass as much fire and flavor as Valle, which is why, for our annual travel issue, we’re focusing on this nearby piece of paradise and checking in on the rest of the peninsula from Tijuana to Cabo, where the good people of Baja are cooking up new concepts and bucket-list meals. So pack a cooler and tent, gas up the RV, or simply pop down for a weekend. With this as your guide, you’re sure not to get lost—unless that’s what you’re itching for. In that case, get gone. There’s no shortage of reasons to cross the border and to cross it often.
