I respect a man who takes his carbs apart in the rain. Some fuel problem stopping us leaving the parts store and going back to fix our car. I initially thought it was fuel evaporation, priming the carbs by hand - Nico sucked some fuel into a pipe and dribbled it in - but it fails to carry on running. Hmm. Nico’s wife in red there. 
Ricardo, right, runs this place, a hotel, RV stop and bar, an official stop on the Baja 1000 rally. Top fella, top place. Sadly, we’re the only ones drinking tonight, at half-nine, as all the other residents are too old to be out late. i.e. They’re over 50.
Erg what a day, running around dealing with bloody mechanics whose own cars breakdown, mending ball joints and replacing tyres. All part of the fun. Rice & Beans was an ok place, bit noisy, bit leaky, but I’m sitting in a yurt - a wigwam, basically - at Ignacio Springs just up the road, run by Gary and Terry from Canada. And it’s quite blissful. The weather is a bit moody, and it’s bloody freezing, literally hypothermia-inducing cold, in the desert at night, so my enthusiasm for getting mules down into the canyon to look at caves, going on hefty treks, and camping out, has been slightly, erm, dampened. 
The route to the lagoon is rough enough to make you question the sanity of anyone who drives it in an ordinary passenger car. For the most part, it’s bumpy as hell, but the fast sandy bits make up for it. Time to go watch some whales… Edit: just been told it’s the worst road in Baja. Marvellous.
Made it to Pachico’s for some whale watching. All good, nice people, minor annoyance of some oblivious teenage girl whistling five notes over and over.
This is a correctly-constructed margarita. It should be too heavy to casually lift with the unassisted hand. Hence the straw. Margaritas should only be drunk between 6am and 10am, hence getting a nasty stare from the barstaff when I ordered one.
The brunette buys a goat. $100. She was trying to save it from the chop. Precisely how we were going to help matters remains unknown.
As we head into the arid south, a cactus is a common and obvious sight. But I was pretty surprised at the diversity and variety. Tree sightings fade into the rear-view mirror and thousands of cacti stand to attention. I’ve seen one or two landscapes in my time and this was magic.
Among all the dire warnings regarding Mexico, the last one we’ve taken seriously was about the lack of petrol stations en route, or at least the large distances between them. To compound this, the car only takes premium - 91 octane - and I’m not prepared to risk lower, not yet, anyway. Lower octane fuel burns less cleanly and on a smooth-running engine like a V6, engine noises can be harder to detect, more subtle. Petrol is nationalized here, with fixed prices and station attendents doing all the work for you, but not every station has premium. And nor does the guy who sells gas from his cart.
