Slow Baja

In today's Travel Talk with Slow Baja, we sit down with Sheila, the gregarious owner of Zopilotes Ice Cream in San Bartolo BCS. Originally from Salmon Arm, BC, Canada, Sheila, and her husband first visited Baja Sur in 2008. They returned with a fifth-wheel camper in 2009 and bought a house, sight-unseen in 2010. How was the experience of fixing up a home in a country where you don't speak the lang...

In today’s Travel Talk with Slow Baja, we sit down with guide and outfitter Steve Hayward of Paddling South in Loreto, Baja California Sur. Hayward has traveled extensively and has paddled in Chile, Alaska, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Ireland, Wales, BC, and Baja. He has guided and developed programs for Sea Trek for over 25 years. For the last 15 years, he’s run the Baja operation in Loreto -a b...

Marshall Kramer, Jamie Wolgemguth, and Craig Dieffenbach are The Desert Dutchmen; on today's Slow Baja Podcast, they break down their drive of the 2019 Baja XL Rally. The trio from Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, began building a 2000 Jeep bought on the cheap from a relative. The build progressed at a glacial pace, and the trio moved to Plan-B. They booked a modern Toyota 4Runner from California Baj...

David Kier is a historian, cartographer, and expert on the Missions of Baja. As a young boy in the early ’60s, he began traveling to Baja with his parents. Wedged between his parents in their Jeep Wagoneer, a copy of Gerhard and Gulick’s Lower California Guide Book in hand, Kier provided turn-by-turn navigation. The experience burned the dirt roads and landmarks into his young mind and created a l...

Happy New Year! Thanks for tuning into Slow Baja. As I prepare for the upcoming  Baja XL Rally , I wanted to share one of my favorite podcasts initially released in May last year. This podcast is very dear to my heart and was transformational for me in many ways. I want to thank Joy and Hayden for opening their home to me, and I was delighted that Scott braved a rainy morning on his old BSA t...

“The wind still hurled us down the coast, the occasional tendril of kelp wrapping the rudder blade like a tentacle and then breaking free with the inexorable force of our momentum. Though my hands, arms, and shoulders were knotted with fatigue, I was prevailing in the fight to keep the boat steering in line with the waves. I even got the hang of riding out the bigger ones, and actually hooted once...

Paul Ganster began traveling to Mexico with his friend and former high school teacher, Harry Crosby, in the early 1960s. When Crosby landed his 1967 commission to photograph the El Camino Real, he asked Ganster, then a graduate student at UCLA, to make the trip with him. In retracing the original Portolá missionary expedition of 1769, Crosby and Ganster covered 600 grueling miles, mostly by mule....

Jesse and Sarah Beck met while surfing in San Juanico when they were teenagers. Jesse had been going to Baja since he was a baby. After a few years camping in various spots, Sarah's family had recently bought a home in San Juanico. One morning, she was surfing by herself at dawn when Jesse paddled out. Mildly perturbed that she would have to share the waves, she was surprised to see the red-haired...

"Long before social media, Cameron Steele was doing social media. He is one of off-road's early cross over pioneers, sharing his love for desert racing, adventure travel, and all things Baja with the world outside of the off-road community." - From his 2018 Off-Road Racing Motorsports Hall Of Fame Induction. A lifelong Southern Californian, Steele began traveling to Baja with his father, Baja race...

In today's Travel Talk with Slow Baja, we sit down with Ensenada Restaurateur and Chef Massimo Zaretti. Born in Rome, Zaretti moved to Las Vegas with his family when he was a teenager. He grew up working in his father's restaurants in Las Vegas and Santa Monica. When it was time to get out on his own, he landed a position with Fleur de Lys in the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Attention to the smallest detai...

Andrew Szabo created the zany Budapest-to-Bamako Rally and the 3000-mile-no-support-Baja XL Rally. In this podcast, Szabo gives us an update on the latest developments for the 2021 Baja XL Rally, starting on January 29, 2021, and ending on February 7, 2021. Here at Slow Baja, we were thrilled to drive in the 2019 Baja XL Rally, which featured 300 entrants in 140 vehicles hailing from more than 25...

Javier Plascencia’s first book, The Soul of Baja , describes his approach to life (and cooking) like this, “His creations reflect the love for his homeland, his respect for ingredients, and the permanent cultural exchange experienced every day in his native Tijuana.” He grew up cooking alongside his grandmother in the kitchen of Giuseppi’s , his father’s pizza restaurant. The sights, sounds, and s...

Tru Miller, the lovely and gregarious owner of Adobe Guadalupe Vineyards and Inn, is the Grande Dame of Baja’s wine region. Originally from the Netherlands, Tru spent much of her youth exploring the world. She has distilled that lifetime of travel into her casually elegant hacienda. When she and her husband, Donald Miller, bought the land in 1997, they began hiring the best. Hugo D’Acosta became t...

We met Gerald Lee in Ensenada, at the October 2019 NORRA 500 Rally . Lee and Kansas native, Miles Hasselquist, competed in a Ford Ranger pickup in the non-race, Savvy Safari 4x4 Class, for street-legal vehicles. It was Hasselquist's first trip to Baja, and Lee let him do all the driving. I've learned he's generous like that. Whenever we caught up with them, Hasselquist and Lee seemed to be in a sm...

Shari Bondy has been studying whales for more than thirty years. At eighteen-years-old, she moved to Vancouver Island, British Colombia, from Ontario, Canada. She wanted to get close to whales and Tofino, was the place to be with a population of Grey Whales, Humpbacks, and Killer Whales to study. Following the whale migration South, Bondy found herself in Laguna Ojo de Liebre in Baja. Instantly, s...

Malcolm Smith is probably the greatest name in American off-road racing. He’s won more races in more places on both two wheels and four. Smith’s list of racing achievements is stunning. Between 1966 and 1976, he won eight gold medals in the International Six Day Trial (the Olympics of motorcycling). He’s won the Baja 1000 six times (three times on a motorcycle and three times in a car), including...

Tim and Kelsey Huber bill themselves as two ordinary people living an extraordinary life. For the last two years, they've lived in "Goose," a 1995 Toyota Land Cruiser modified for camping with a custom interior and pop-top. After a year secretly planning, saving, and divesting themselves of all salable possessions, the duo crossed into Tecate Baja, California, on June 25, 2018. They spent most of...

When she was ten years-old, Sarah Beck began traveling to Baja with her family to escape the drizzly Oregon winters. After several trips, they decided to put down roots and moved to San Juanico. A few years later, while surfing at dawn, she met her future husband -and a Baja love story was born. In our conversation, Sarah shares her passion for the people and the places that make the Baja peninsul...

79-year-old Pete Springer has been traveling to Baja for over 60 years. He attended the 1969 Mexican 1000 as a spectator, raced a home-built single-seater in 1970, and won the Baja 1000 in 1973! In this conversation, he shares tales from his many years of Baja adventures. Highlights include; driving a 1940 Dodge Flatbed to Bahia de Los Angeles. Running out of gas while flying a small plane -and su...

Eighty-four-year-old Eve Ewing made her first trip to Baja in the back seat of her father's plane in 1952. Her father, the legendary Oceanographer Gifford Ewing, would fly his plane down annually to perform an aerial census of the California Grey Whales as they calved in Scammon's Lagoon. In those days, they landed right on the salt flats of Guerrero Negro. There was no town, just a grouping of fi...

Zachary Plopper is the Associate Director of WILDCOAST, a 501c3 non-profit organization that conserves coastal and marine ecosystems and wildlife in the United States, Cuba and Mexico. An avid surfer since his childhood in Solana Beach, California, Plopper started competing at age twelve and was sponsored by the time he was 13. He competed professionally during high school and won the National Sch...

Sports Illustrated called Bisbee’s Black & Blue Marlin Tournament the “Super-Bowl of Billfishing.” Now in its 40th year, with prizes and payouts in the millions of dollars, it is the richest independent family-run fishing tournament. The event was founded in 1981 by Bob Bisbee Sr., who ran a fuel dock, and tackle shop in Newport, California. He was always looking for reasons to go to Cabo, and...

Trudi Angell has been living in Baja since the mid-'70s. She made her first trip South to attend a 12-day Sea Kayaking course at the National Outdoor Leadership School in Mulegé. Angell fell in love with the people and the place -and stayed six-weeks. When she finally returned home to Calistoga, she quickly bought a folding Klepper Kayak, a roof rack for her 1964 Rambler American, and blazed a tra...

Mike Pearlman, talking about NORRA Mexican 1000, and the making of the Happiest Race on Earth. In the early 1960's, Mike Pearlman was a teenager growing up in Los Angeles when his father, Ed Pearlman, bought a used 1964 Toyota Land Cruiser. Ed was an avid hunter, and the utilitarian 4x4 looked like the perfect vehicle for the upcoming deer season. Not long after, Mike's friend was driving the Land...

Edie Littlefield Sundby was arrogantly healthy when she received word that she had stage-four gallbladder cancer. The doctors gave her three months to live. "I had to kill cancer before it killed me," Sundby said. Seventy-nine rounds of chemotherapy, five-and-a-half years, and four radical surgeries later, she was in remission. The battle took half of her liver, ten inches of colon, two inches of...