Well the offending ball joint has been replaced with a less offensive one, but the shock absorber looks and sounds buggered, too. It’s not a stressed point, though, not in the same way as the joint, so I’m slightly more relaxed about replacing it: time to turn the music up if it bothers me. I’m now filthy, having watched the stupid mechanic dislocate the driveshaft from the CV joint, allow the brake pipe to take the entire weight of the shaft + brake + hub, and fumble about trying get ge shaft back in. Anyway, time for a shower and a nap.

Looks like we took out a nearside lower bush on the car while driving on Baja’s worst road. Ah well, better it goes now than in the middle of nowhere. On top of that, found a nail AND a screw in the offside front tyre. No love for the front end today. Luckily Nico Lopez appears to be a top, top man.

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.

I’m sitting in Nico’s battered Nissan Pathfinder, must be mid-1980’s spec, heading up highway 1 back towards Guerreo Negro. Whether we’ll stop there, I don’t know, but we need a new lower wishbone mount, which is definately *malo* moving quite freely and smoothly, exactly the opposite of what it should doing. A new tyre on top of that, and refilling the two petrol cans completes the list.

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.