Day 7: Back to the Sea of Cortez
We camped right next to the water and went for a morning paddle in the mangroves. We found a long skinny tunnel we set to explore but it eventually became impassable and we had to turn around. We also cleaned up tons of plastic from the beach and hauled it away in the van.
It was a little disheartening how much trash, particularly plastic, we collected on the beaches on the drive. Please be aware of LNT principles, leave only footprints!!
Then it was time for the final long drive to La Paz where we walk around the Malecón, La Paz’s waterfront area. It was nice but driving at night isn’t so we went a little north to Playa El Tecolote which is the vanlife go to spot. There were at least 100 rigs there and we chatted with a few neighbors. Some shipped their vans from Europe to travel around the peninsula or all of South America.
Day 8: Scuba Diving
We had an 8am departure from the marina and along the way, Amanda got pulled over for “running a red light” but it was really for “driving while gringo.” La Paz is notorious for the police pulling over people and trying to extract a bribe. We did a two tank dive, the first was at Isle Islotes to play with the massive colony of sea lions, and interestingly enough, I was here snorkeling eight years ago while on a small cruise. My old GoPro doesn’t handle water depths below 5m very well, so a few times the button got stuck in TimeLapse mode. Thus it was just taking one poor quality photo every two seconds and I had hundreds of photos to sort through, most of which were garbage.
The second dive was at a reef that was teeming with a wide variety of fish. After diving we went to a beach near Tecolote to have lunch and take some group photos. Then it was back to the city to have some drinks and watch the sunset from a rooftop bar.