Hell’s Half Acre

Baja is a different county.  It is hard to recognise that the penninsula is simply two more states of the United States of Mexico, because it is so incredibly different.  We’ve only been in mainland Mexico for 2 days, but it feels like we’ve travelled to a different country.

Municipal markets are in every town.  Very much like the markets of all the cities in South America; they simply do not exist in any of the cities we visited in Baja.  The terrain is very different.  Baja has chocolate and red and orange stark earth mountains with little to no vegetation.  Sinola (the state we’re in now) has beautiful "typical" Mexican mountains; shrubbed and olive green and the valleys and countryside is very agricultural.  It is humid here and we’re gradually getting used to it.  Baja is so very very dry and we got so very used to it, that it became normal.  Perhaps it isn’t so much that it is humid here, but that we got very accustomed to desert climate.  City water in all the cities was "clean" and we didn’t worry about drinking it.  Here, the agua purificada (sold in large, 5 gallon bottles) tastes strange; with an almost dirt-like taste.  There are people EVERYWHERE here.  In Baja, the cities were few and far between and the people the same.  Here in Sinola, the roads are full of vehicles and the roads are full of cities.  The roads in Mexico are GARGANTUAN after the teeny tiny narrow roads of Baja.  We’ve even driven on kilometers of FOUR LANE HIGHWAYS!!!  Almost all roadway (even the freeway "libre" (non-toll)) has a shoulder (!!!) and many of the roads and freeway are four-lane. 

Jamie warns me not to let the kids in the bathrooms at night; between the freaky lizards, the flying cockroaches and the millions of spiders (honestly, the spiders are simply amazing here), he knows they’d have nightmares for weeks.