Mexican Road Commentary

After making a quick incursion into Mexico the previous day to buy a tourist card at the San Ysidor crossing, I opted to cross the border with the cars to avoid getting my bike stuck in the turnstyle, then swung onto the walking pathway to avoid the glass-covered freeway cloverleafs that are the only way to drive into Tijuana. Dirty, glass covered streets scored with potholes defined the first few kilometers of the ride. I stopped a couple of times and found my non-existant Spanish surprisingly useful in ensuring I was on the right road.

Though the roads were terrible, cars and buses all gave me a large margin when passing. I didn´t see any other bikers, but once I got out of Tijuana a nice guy in a car sporting a bike rack stopped and gave me a low-down on the roads to Ensanada. He encouraged me to take the toll road, but as noted before I found that, while the shoulder was wide, it also sported many glass hazards, was incredibly rough, and was separated from the regular surface by a brutal rumble strip. I eventually got off on the regular road and found it not that bad. In areas with heavy traffic it sported more than two lanes and otherwise didn´t have much traffic.

That changed after Ensanada. I rode out early, at six. Yet already the road was choked with rush-hour traffic levels and the road shrank to two lanes with no shoulder: a form it would maintain for nearly the entirety of the peninsula. Still, cars were giving me a fair amount of room. It did not make for pleasant biking, but was not as terrifying a ride as some sections of highway 49 in CA, where drivers seemed intent on passing me regardless of the lack of shoulder and oncoming traffic levels, often at speeds that seemed to exceed the 60mph speed limit considerably.

The surface of the carretera peninsulara (the road that goes all the way down the Baja) is mostly good. It has recently been redone and most sections are quite smooth surface-wise. There are two exceptions: inside towns and maybe 30km of road scattered throughout the peninsular that didn´t make the repave cut, for some reason or other.

Traffic levels are for the most-part reasonable. The road will not premit two trucks passing next to a bike. With only a handful of exceptions, truckers inevitably slowed down rather than pass me in the face of oncoming traffic. Sometimes they did so even though they practically had to come to a grinding halt and even though I occassionally moved off the road and signalled them to pass. I don´t know where they got their ettiquette, but it was an impressive display of courtesy. Not all busses and cars, however, follow the same rules. Overall nothing in Baja approached the level of danger I felt on 49, but there were certainly some exciting moments.

Going off of the main road can prove treacherous. In some towns the roads are only sand and my tires would sink in deep and I´d wind up walking. However, I could always anticipate when the ground would about to become a brake. In other areas the shoulder of the road appeared solid, but when I strayed onto it, it proved dangerously soft, almost causing me to wipe out a couple of times. Overall, me and the bike survived, though my gears certainly must have worn more than normal in the face of the sandy conditions.

I did not see a single other cycle traveler during my time on the Baja. However, I heard so many stories from Gringos and locals about all the cyclists coming through that I could hardly feel special.