Baja, California Sur: 3

Bahía de Magdalena is a little fishing village. There is nothing touristy about it, even the two hotels are just places to be at night so you can go watch whales in the day. Everyone besides the people in the hotels in this town is a fisherman who might also take people out in boats to see whales.  No whales sketched in my book , but we did see them up very close from a small boat that only fits 5: Humpbacks that passed under our small boat and swam only 10 feet from us. It was magical.

I love drawing in a place like this. Gritty, real, rusty, sand covered.

Slightly falling apart boats and trucks were everywhere. And scrawny street dogs.

Adan was our captain when we were out on the waters whale watching. It’s incredible how he could spot a whale about to surface way out at sea from the changing color of the water as it came closer to the surface. I drew him and some boats with my small limited color palette when we stopped at an island for a bit.

The nice thing about a place like Mag Bay is that with not much else to do, time slows down. We sit around. Take a long time over a bowl of warm oatmeal. Slowly share a guacamole and chips plate over the evening, fall asleep from the exhaustion of doing nothing except watching from a boat, drink a good hot chocolate, very slowly.

The bottom of this last page, in my scrawl, says this “Baja California feels like a continuum of the deserts of So.Cal. One country, in vegetation and culture, divided by artificial borders.”

The start of this Baja Sur trip in Cabo here in Post #1
The next bit in La Paz here in Post #2