(285 km/177 miles)
Today well return to Guerrero Negro and a different campground which includes a unique restaurant, Wi-Fi and a good place to collect scallop shells! Due north from Guerrero Negro is Malarrimo Beach, famous for it’s spectacular beach-combing. The geographic “hook” of Baja collects jetsam and flotsam that drifts down the coast from further north as far up the coast as Alaska and Japan.
It is a beach-comber’s paradise, this J-shaped cove. Upon its shores, the ocean currents conspire to deliver a large portion of the Pacific’s flotsam. Anything and everything has been found here. Throw something into the water, off the coast of Japan, and the chances are it will wash up here: Malarrimo Beach, BCS, Mexico.
People come from miles around, most of them Mexican, though a fair few on road-trips from the USA or beyond, to sift through the ocean’s offerings. After a good storm, where high waves have crashed heavily upon the coast, the volume of treasure-hunters rises considerably. Much of what is found here is trash, but there is also a strong likelihood of discovering something quite remarkable.
The tides are powerful out there. Before a storm, in the 1970s, buried it with sand, there was a huge shipwreck lodged on this beach. The ship hadn’t floundered here. It had been carried the distance from the depths of ocean. Whole engines have washed up on this beach, dislodged from wrecks out in the wide Pacific basin.
The list of what else has ended up here is seemingly infinite. It includes: large timbers from sunken galleons; sea-bleached trees; the carcasses of sometimes large, sometimes rare, marine creatures; antiques of all varieties, though with an emphasis on those found in seacraft; torpedo’s and other items from the two World Wars, as well as those from earlier battles; and electrical appliances (in a camp on the beach, made entirely from salvage and driftwood, there is a rusting refrigerator. It too came from the sea). They are all well washed and no worries, the beach does not smell like a junkyard.
Note: Change your watch when you leave Guerrero Negro (actually at the giant Eagle monument just north of town) which is on the 28th parallel. Mountain Standard Time on the south, Pacific Standard on the north side.
Guerrero Negro, Baja California Sur, Mexico
