Sunday 18th-Wednesday 21st October-Loreto, Baja California, Mexico

We have spent 4 wonderful days in the lovely, small town of Loreto on the coast north of La Paz. This has been one of our favourite places of the last 3 months.

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It feels very Mexican here. It is green and hot. The garden of the beautiful Damiana Hotel is full of fruit trees and butterflies and a hummingbird.

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Everything is colourful and the people are lovely. We have lain in hammocks and chilled out and I have done a lot of work on my thesis. It is very easy to think here.

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The hotel is really a special place. We have a gorgeous casita in the garden which the owners have given us for a reduced price. We were even welcomed with a free bottle of cold beer each when we arrived hot and tired.

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It is quiet as it is the low season and we almost have the place to ourselves.

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We can cook in the wonderful outdoor kitchen on the 1953 vintage stove.

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Shopping for food is not as easy as we hoped. It is actually hard to get good quality vegetables and the sourcing tinned beans is very difficult, unless they are refried in lard. I guess most Mexicans cook their beans from dried. Avocados are also sold unripe for you to ripen at home. The town is really cute with a few craft shops and plenty of restaurants and an old mission from 1679.

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And some odd shops. Notice no apostrophe.

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It will be very hard to leave but we are heading for La Paz tomorrow, after I do a Skype interview with a school in Brazil in the morning!

Thursday 15th-Sunday 18th October-Baja California, Mexico

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We have had three wonderful days crossing the desert from El Rosario to Loreto. We crossed another time zone and travelled through some awesome landscapes.

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Baja is much better than people tell you. The skies are the biggest I have seen.  And the emptiness is impressive.

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Also after 48 hours of feeling disoriented in a less developed country, I now feel like I have always been here and remember all of the reasons that we have chosen to travel almost exclusively in the less developed world for the last 20 years.

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The highlights of the last 3 days have definitely been the landscapes. Baja is much more mountainous than I ever imagined.

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It is also much greener than you think.

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The weird cacti are a major highlight.

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They just go on for ever. We have been riding through landscapes like this for over 500 miles. I have not got tired of them yet.

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Last night we stayed in the oasis of San Ignacio. This was just like oases I remember from travelling in Egypt, full of date palms. We saw vermillion flycatchers on the way to breakfast this morning. 

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Doing yoga out by the pool at 6am was wonderful. The air was so cool.

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The town came to recognition in the 1700s due to the mission built here by the Jesuits who used the town as a base to spread Christianity across Baja.

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We have also seen a fair few volcanoes today which were unexpected.

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We have seen both the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez which is effectively a massive, almost lagoon separating the east coast of Baja  from the mainland of Mexico. We will be spending more time on this coast over the next few days.

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One of the highlights for Dave has been the off road riding where there are roadworks.

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He loves the sand a lot more than I do.

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