Isla Carmen & Isla Santa Catalina
Ghost towns are not what you’d expect on a voyage in the Sea of Cortez, but on the Sea Voyager sooner or later you learn to expect the unexpected. It was all there – the little church, the abandoned general store, the door of the doctor’s office swinging on one hinge, the rusted railroad tracks, the derelict mining machinery. But this was not a Clint Eastwood production – it was Salinas, the old salt mining town on beautiful Isla Carmen, a few miles from the Baja California peninsula. We wandered the dusty streets and walked out to the turquoise and white salt lake where people hacked out the ultra-pure salt beginning in Spanish Colonial times to the 1990s. After our fill of history, the shimmering crescent beach at the edge of town was too much to resist, and we traded our cameras for kayaks, snorkel masks, and scuba tanks, delighting in the goofy puffer fish, sinister moray eels, and the many other undersea creatures.
As the sun passed the meridian we took a break for a sumptuous lunch on board the ship and then cruised south to our last island destination of our voyage, the remote Isla Santa Catalina, famed for its unique giant barrel cactus and its complement of reptiles – every one of them an endemic species found nowhere else in the world. The divers among us dove, kayakers kayaked, and snorkelers snorkeled, and at some point nearly all of us hiked up the desert arroyo. We marveled at the sprawling elephant trees, stately cardons, and of course the island’s endemic giant barrel cactus. But it is hard to beat a day on which almost everyone got to see chuckwallas, desert iguanas, and (drum roll, please) the famed Santa Catalina Island rattleless rattlesnake. This beautiful and shy animal will still shake its tail in the air if agitated, but without rattles it is a silent legacy of its distant evolutionary past in a different place when there were large animals to be warned off. And as if this weren’t a full day, the entire kitchen staff came ashore and prepared a delicious sit-down barbeque on the beach. As the sky darkened, the beach fire was lit, the nearly full moon rose, Tom brought out his guitar and dusted off some more oldies before launching into a wild version of “La Bamba” for which many of us had made up our own rollicking verses.
A little story telling, Aztec myths courtesy of Adrian, the gentle lapping of the water – ho hum, another perfect day in paradise.
Ghost towns are not what you’d expect on a voyage in the Sea of Cortez, but on the Sea Voyager sooner or later you learn to expect the unexpected. It was all there – the little church, the abandoned general store, the door of the doctor’s office swinging on one hinge, the rusted railroad tracks, the derelict mining machinery. But this was not a Clint Eastwood production – it was Salinas, the old salt mining town on beautiful Isla Carmen, a few miles from the Baja California peninsula. We wandered the dusty streets and walked out to the turquoise and white salt lake where people hacked out the ultra-pure salt beginning in Spanish Colonial times to the 1990s. After our fill of history, the shimmering crescent beach at the edge of town was too much to resist, and we traded our cameras for kayaks, snorkel masks, and scuba tanks, delighting in the goofy puffer fish, sinister moray eels, and the many other undersea creatures.
As the sun passed the meridian we took a break for a sumptuous lunch on board the ship and then cruised south to our last island destination of our voyage, the remote Isla Santa Catalina, famed for its unique giant barrel cactus and its complement of reptiles – every one of them an endemic species found nowhere else in the world. The divers among us dove, kayakers kayaked, and snorkelers snorkeled, and at some point nearly all of us hiked up the desert arroyo. We marveled at the sprawling elephant trees, stately cardons, and of course the island’s endemic giant barrel cactus. But it is hard to beat a day on which almost everyone got to see chuckwallas, desert iguanas, and (drum roll, please) the famed Santa Catalina Island rattleless rattlesnake. This beautiful and shy animal will still shake its tail in the air if agitated, but without rattles it is a silent legacy of its distant evolutionary past in a different place when there were large animals to be warned off. And as if this weren’t a full day, the entire kitchen staff came ashore and prepared a delicious sit-down barbeque on the beach. As the sky darkened, the beach fire was lit, the nearly full moon rose, Tom brought out his guitar and dusted off some more oldies before launching into a wild version of “La Bamba” for which many of us had made up our own rollicking verses.
A little story telling, Aztec myths courtesy of Adrian, the gentle lapping of the water – ho hum, another perfect day in paradise.
