Drifting into Todos Santos by Joe Cummings
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I first heard about Todos Santos from Rebecca. She had a gypsy soul and made her living peddling words to glossy travel magazines, a perfect mating of vocation and avocation. She once spent nine months driving the coastlines of Mexico in a beat-up Toyota Celica, a trip that yielded hundreds of pages of inspired travel writing about the 'hidden' places she discovered.
Rebecca only mentioned Todos Santos in passing, as a place she might flee to when she was ready to write her novel. Her affection for Mexico, especially Baja, was obvious but I wasn't immediately tempted to copy her dash across the border.
Instead I remained enthralled with my first love, Southeast Asia, and part-time home in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Hence when a California publisher called in 1991 to ask whether I'd be interested in writing a guidebook to Baja, I demurred. I suggested Rebecca, of course, but as it turned out, she was too busy to take the assignment. This time around she made sure I got her message, bombarding my wine-addled brain one evening with glowing tales of deserted moonlit beaches, halibut tacos, and burro trips to prehistoric painted caves.
I took the job. After scaling a wall of guidebooks and travel literature written by those who had come before me, I found myself hurtling down the thousand-mile geographic projectile south of San Diego. Tijuana and Ensenada alternately depressed and disappointed me. The Pacific coast below these towns showed promise, but I knew I wasn't in the 'real Baja' till I took on the no-nonsense middle reaches of Mexico 1, the famous Carretera Transpeninsular (Transpeninsular Highway).
Once past the hilly fishing-and-farming town of El Rosario the classic Baja scenery kicked in, splashing a montage of cactus greens, arroyo reds and rocky grays across the windshield. I passed relatively few cars, and saw almost no signs of animate life along the highway, a state of affairs which began to produce an eerie mental solitude.
The sensation bordered on a fear I know many Americans instinctively feel the first time they drive in Mexico. About halfway down the peninsula, 400+ miles from the US border and a lifetime away from San Francisco, something changed. It sounds like a travel cliché, but as the last rays of sunlight flickered over the wrinkled tops of the Sierra de la Gigante near Loreto, my unease faded, and I knew I'd entered a special space. Noting each roadside lonchería (Mexican diner), Pemex gas station, and Spanish mission ruins along the way on the microcassette recorder wedged below the handbrake, I lost the usual feeling of a pounding tedium when faced with nuts-and-bolts travel research, and instead fell into a soft rhythm bordering on meditation.
By the time I'd crossed the Tropic of Cancer and come face to face with the wood-shuttered, pastel-colored houses ringing the quiet Bay of La Paz, I began to understand the attachment, if not the fanaticism, many Californians have for Baja. I felt peacefully far from the United States, yet similarly distant from Mexico - as if I'd discovered a parallel universe that was neither one nor the other. People spoke Spanish, but often knew English, and swirled the two languages together to produce words like yonke for 'junk'.
Near La Paz I made an excursion to Puerto Balandra, a large, clean shallow bay hemmed in on three sides by steep desert cliffs. Although only a half hour north of La Paz, this solitarily beautiful spot receives just a trickle of visitors, most of them locals who come on the weekends to gather a few clams for a beach barbecue. On the day I cat-walked along the narrow cliff-side path here, that takes one from the dirt access road to the mouth of the bay, I encountered a Mexican family of five and a lone American.
When one lone countryman encounters another on a near-deserted beach in Mexico, a conversation is almost unavoidable. I don't remember who spoke first, but I passed a pleasant half hour taking on the warmth and experience of John O'Neil, an artist who had spent the better part of two decades living in La Paz. John knew the best, and cheapest, places to eat in Baja California Sur's state capital, often cited as 'the most Mexican city in Baja' because of its tighter cultural connection with the Mexican mainland. He even revealed the location of a $5-a-night La Paz pensión where I could spot an authentic 18th-century Spanish baroque oil painting hanging on the wall among a dozen other local paintings of no discernible value.
When I told John my next stop was Todos Santos his face lit up. It was a look I'd seen on Rebecca's face when she'd talked of the town, although Rebecca had held back all details (saving them, as it turns out, for a brilliant article she later wrote for a national travel magazine). He said it was one of his favorite places to paint, that the light - the angle or the quality? I can't remember now - made him see in a different way. One or two expatriate artists lived in Todos Santos full time, he said, having bought historic buildings for a song. Then he said something I've since repeated to others who have asked about Todos Santos: It's a world of the invisible, a place some people disappear to, yet others don't see. That two-lane highway takes visitors in at one end of town and spits them out the other, without revealing too much.
The flat, scantily vegetated Plains of La Paz along the one-hour drive on Mexico 1 between La Paz and the turnoff to Todos Santos suggested a monotony that I decided might easily be mistaken for invisibility. La Paz itself fades away after a couple of Pemex stations and a row of plain shacks selling flea-market goods, ceramics, and rustic wooden furniture. Then one flashes through tiny San Pedro, known for its brickworks and a number of rustic eateries serving carnitas, the Mexican equivalent of pork barbecue.
After I made the turnoff onto Mexico 19, about 15 miles south of La Paz, traffic thinned to a trickle, and the flats gave way to rolling hills and deep vados or stream beds that are dry most of the year. Unpaved until the mid-1980s, the highway provides the only vehicular link with Todos Santos, 32 miles away (Mexico 19 continues on to Cabo San Lucas via the Pacific coast). In the distance to my left, I could make out the dark, undulating outline of the Sierra de la Laguna, Baja's most solitary mountain range.
As Mexico 19 swooped southwest, the highway came closer to the sierra, and the desert along both sides of the highway erupted into a thick, green curtain of mesquite, palo verde, and tall columns of cardón and pitahaya cactus. This heavy foliage - technically not desert but rather 'thorn forest' as I later found out - flourishes on the abundant runoff from the sierra. Incongruous-looking ball moss, nourished by moist Pacific tradewinds buffeting the Baja peninsula's narrowest section, hang from the tall cacti here.
The curves in the road intensified as I approached Todos Santos. Off to my right I caught a brief glimpse of a roofless adobe ranch-house and adjacent windmill, a landmark that has since become my favorite 'welcome home' signal. Shortly afterwards my rental car descended a final hill and I caught a first glimpse of thousands of fan palms filling a mile-wide arroyo to one side of the highway, cliffs and hills on the other. And in the distance, behind the desert oasis, an iridescent Pacific.
O'Neil was right. No sooner had I entered the town then it seemed to fade away through my rear windshield, like a mirage. Was that really Todos Santos? My instant recall played back only dust and faded storefronts. If I hadn’t had a writing assignment, I would have kept on driving, straight south to finisterra, 'land's end', where the Sierra de la Laguna tumbles into the sea and Cabo San Lucas serves up coastal Mexico on a platter to planeloads of pasty-faced tourists. I knew how to deal with gringolandia, as expat North Americans liked to call tourist resort towns in Mexico, even if I didn't particularly like it. A ghost town was another matter.
Once I’d parked the car and began moving around the tiny town on foot, however, I quickly found another Todos Santos. The buildings along Avenida Juárez and Avenida Colegio Militar, the two parallel asphalt thoroughfares in town, had been plain boxes of modern, breeze-block construction. Yet one block off Juárez, along cobbled streets near the simple town plaza, I came upon an Andalusian-inspired neighborhood of brick and adobe.
One- and two-story affairs, constructed of hand-made Mexican brick laid in double or sometimes triple courses and topped by flat parapet roofs, surrounded hidden courtyards. Tall windows and doors bounded by pilastres and molded lintels evoked the classic provincial Spanish style, reminding me of ex-colonial neighborhoods I'd seen in Sonora or Sinaloa on the mainland.
Mexico's National Institute of History and Anthropology recently declared this area of Todos Santos a national monument, enforcing restoration guidelines to preserve the lingering air of antiquity. But when I first arrived in 1991 the only inhabitants who seemed interested in the stately buildings were relatively new arrivals like Ezio and Paula Colombo.
Ezio, a burly, mustachioed Italian artist, and Paula, a lithe, latté-brown ex-New York model, had bought a cavernous 150-year-old adobe casona (mansion) just off the plaza and turned it into a restaurant. His flair for matching Mediterranean cooking with fresh seafood, locally grown produce and herbs from their own garden, along with Paula's tasteful interior design, gradually drew the attention of discerning palates in the surrounding Cape Region, from La Paz to Cabo San Lucas. Word spread internationally, and by the mid 1990s their Café Santa Fé had become a social pilgrimage point for anyone touching down in Todos Santos, particularly among the steadily increasing number of celebrity visitors.
But on my first visit the town was more bleak than chic. In the newer eastern half of Todos Santos I came upon a more typical architectural trend, small cottages of adobe brick or mud plastered over woven palo de arco (trumpetbush), often roofed with palm leaves. The plain cement walls of newer homes linked the historically grand to the recently humble. A survey of local market shelves turned up a few wrinkled tomatoes, molding stalks of green onion and stale bread rolls. No wonder the Café Santa Fé was so popular with out-of-town visitors, I thought.
I took a room at the simple two-story Hotel California on Avenida Juárez. I'd heard nothing of the legend that said the hotel inspired The Eagles' 1976 album of the same name, but it wasn't long before another guest, an American backpacking his way to Guatemala, filled me in. When I asked the Mexican manager about the story, he solemnly nodded his corroboration, and I filed the intriguing local myth away for later examination. Todos Santos scribbled itself onto several pages in my notebook as I explored more of the area than necessary for the purposes of my all-Baja assignment.
The history fascinated me. Attracted by the two substantial pozas (natural springs), in turn fed by underground rivers that originated in the nearby Sierra de la Laguna, Jesuit padres had established a farm community and capilla de visita (visiting chapel) called Todos Santos here in 1724 to supply the mission community at La Paz with fruits, vegetables, wine, and sugarcane. By 1731 Todos Santos was producing 200 burro-loads of panocha - raw brown sugar - annually, along with figs, pomegranates, citrus, and grapes. Two years later, Padre Sigismundo Taraval founded Misión Santa Rosa de las Palmas at the upper end of the arroyo about two km inland from the Pacific. By the mid-1700s, Todos Santos had outgrown La Paz. Renamed Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Todos Santos in 1749, the town remained an important mission settlement until secularization in 1840.
Anglo whalers visiting Todos Santos in 1849 praised the town as ‘an oasis’ with ‘friendly and intelligent people.’ In the post-mission era, Todos Santos thrived as Baja's sugarcane capital, supporting eight sugar mills by the late 1800s. Sugar prices dropped precipitously following WW II, and all but one mill closed when the most abundant freshwater spring dried up in 1950. The remaining mill closed in 1965, though smaller household operations continued into the early 1970s. The town faded into near obscurity.
Around 1981 the spring mysteriously came back to life, and the arroyo once again began producing a large variety and quantity of fruits and vegetables. Tourists began arriving when the road between San Pedro and Cabo San Lucas was paved in the mid 1980s. The road also brought an influx of artists, starting with Charles Stewart. Stewart had run his own gallery in Taos, New Mexico since 1949, and as the Southwestern town became too 'boutique-ized' for his preferences, he and his wife Mary Lou sought a new place to live and paint. They moved into an old French-built terrace home in the middle of Todos Santos in 1986, and for several years Charles was the only resident artist in town.
By the time I first arrived in Todos Santos in 1992, Stewart's abandonment of Taos had begun attracting the notice of various other artists. A sufficient quantity of them now work here either full- or part-time to constitute what the travel media affectionately term an 'artists colony'. I last counted a half dozen art galleries in town, most of them showcasing the work of the owner and no one else. However the most successful art house, the Galería de Todos Santos, specializes in the work of Baja-resident artists, along with world-class works by artists hailing from New York and Mexico City.
Operated by Michael and Pat Cope, refugees of Los Angeles's speedy art-and-fashion scene, the gallery occupies a corner of the historic Todos Santos Inn (see Guidebook for details). Michael's own brightly painted oils of local todosanteños are heavily favored by monied collectors in nearby Cabo San Lucas, where art as décor is much in demand. Not content with maintaining the most winning art stewardship in town, Michael and Pat frequently host large, self-catered dinner parties as a focal point for the socially mobile. To receive an invitation to the Cope house, a simple palapa-roofed adobe perched atop a desert ridge undistinguished save for a sweeping ocean view, is to earn a chair at Todos Santos's unmovable feast.
Along with the creators and purveyors of the more traditional fine arts came representatives of what is America's most globally favored modern art, the movies. Film editor Eva Gorda, who in 2001 released An American Rhapsody, her first effort as a director, chipped in with a few screenwriter friends to purchase one of the old sugar mill offices. An imposing two-story brick edifice displaying rows of Gothic windows, the oft-shuttered house has been dubbed Casa Dracula by local children who believe it to be haunted.
At about the same time I purchased a piece of land of my own five minutes walk from the beach in 1993, special effects makeup artist Pat Gebhardt and her hairdresser-to-the-stars husband Dennis Glass bought a chunk of acreage a stone's throw away.
At first part-time residents, Pat and Dennis eventually built a couple of guest cottages in back of their home, and became among the first expatriate residents in Todos Santos to develop a small vacation rental business. Over the last eight years they've been spending considerably more time in Todos Santos managing Las Bougainvilleas and less time doing films.
I've noticed a similar pattern among several local expats who have made this town of 3500 people an escape hatch from high-stress film and media occupations in the US, Canada and Europe. Robert Fleming, retired from the editorship of the San Francisco Examiner's international section, had originally moved to Mulegé, a Baja town on the Sea of Cortez town. A few years later, after exploring the region more thoroughly, he and his wife Barbara found Todos Santos more to their taste, and they built an architect-commissioned house next door to the patch of land that eventually became my own home. Barbara has opened her own Mexican folk arts shop, filling it with artesanías selected on long trips to the Mexican mainland.
Todos Santos's artists, writers and Hollywood exiles are, without exception, quirky and engaging. Yet I was just as drawn to a cast of other expats in town. Holding fast among them are a handful of building contractors who have left behind the permit-and-lawsuit-ridden world of California construction. Each boasts his own style, his own repertoire of materials and techniques and his own rapport with local artisans. When my wife Lynne and I decided to take the plunge and build a house across the arroyo from town, our first and perhaps most crucial task was choosing a local contractor.
Bruce Kramer grew up in San Diego in the beach house of his father, a city lifeguard and longtime Baja-naut. The envy of all his friends, Bruce had first crack at the San Diego surf every day of the year and was an avid surfer by the time he was 15. When Bruce got fed up working days as a mason and surfing the crowded beaches of San Diego on weekends, he began packing his board south of the border. In Todos Santos he found what he'd only previously fantasized about - surf breaks in practically every seasonal swell, with plenty of room to carve. He also found the love of a Mexican woman and while still in his 20s he became part of her extended local family.
Just as he'd enjoyed the inside surf track in San Diego as a boy, Kramer got to know the local construction scene at its most basic level - from the albañiles (skilled workers) of Todos Santos. The bright and eager Kramer quickly learned to speak fluent Spanish - not just the standard Mexican tongue but the local patois, partly formed of a relic 18th-century Spanish dialect long since lost to the rest of Mexico - and formed his own building company.
I initially contracted Kramer to build a simple two-room cottage roofed in palm leaves, not wanting to get in too deep until we could see what he could do. When he finished that project on time and under budget - a feat we'd never seen in San Francisco - my wife and I invited him to build a garage, a patio, and finally a 2000-square-foot house of our own design. The latter came with a three-story whale-watching tower we penciled into the plan so that we could see the winter Pacific's spouting gray whales over the tall palms between us and the beach. As with the earlier building projects, he earned our continued admiration by completing the house on time and under budget.
Meanwhile friends using various other contractors around town complained about extended budgets and schedules, constant worker turnover and the seemingly endless red tape involved in getting building permits and hooking up to sewer, water and electricity. While he was building the second house, I was frankly puzzling over our good fortune. "What's the secret," I asked the 30-something Kramer one day over a cold Pacífico, "of getting through the Mexican bureaucracy?"
"Family," he answered. "My family and the officials' family. After talking familia we deal with the problem. If you talk only about the problem then that's all you have - a problem. You can't force it. You deal out of humor and respect. If they know you're losing patience they'll make you wait longer." He smiled, as if the game pleased him as much as completing a fine work of masonry.
Take Kramer's story, turn it inside out, and you have Cuco Mayrón. Born in nearby La Paz, Mayrón worked his way north to the United States to further his studies and earn dollars when he was just out of high school. There he crashed head-first into the American hippie movement, which among other things taught him to value the traditional Bajacaliforniano ways. Mayrón eventually returned to Baja, and began a new life in on a thorn-forested hillside south of Todos Santos, within five minutes walk of a long, deserted beach.
Turning his back on the North American urban dream, he set about learning everything he could about the Cape Region's little known interior. At two-hundred-year-old ranchos scattered thinly among the mountains, he found fifth- and sixth-generation Bajacalifornianos who grow avocadoes, papayas and mangos using Spanish-built acequías (small irrigational canals), and who raise cattle and goats to produce cheese and machaca (jerked beef). This ranch culture encompasses an earlier Spanish lifestyle that has all but disappeared elsewhere in Mexico.
From his fellow mountaineers he learned to make rustic furniture, hand-crafted sandals and shoes, and simple dung-fired ceramics. Today Mayrón divides his time between producing ranchcraft for local markets, introducing visitors to sierra life via mountain tours, and hosting local ceramic workshops.
With it's government-protected architecture, its artists and its artisans, Todos Santos can easily pass itself off as an extension of the old Baja California. This is what has attracted many of us to what is essentially little more than a farming and fishing community. The town seems protected from the kind of mass tourism seen in Cabo San Lucas or Cancun by the fortunate fact that the nearest beach is two miles away, and the surf there is too strong for swimming most of the year. It's the perfect anti-resort town - so far.
But there is another side to Todos Santos that tugs against our intended dream state, a shyster quality that persistently markets the town to real estate developers and tour bus operators. The real estate agencies - at last count there were at least four operating full time - make easy targets for such criticism. Yet most local real estate people share a vision of slow growth and cultural preservation. Unfortunately there are also those who seek to amass large profits through such practices as, for example, building illegal access roads to the beach. One local developer went so far as to build a road right through the federally protected dunes to the north of Todos Santos.
The tour buses from Cabo San Lucas sell another Todos Santos, one based on its two star attractions, the 'artists colony' and the Hotel California. One wonders how many package tourists leave town disappointed because they didn't see any artists at work. The artists, for their part, receive nothing from the bus invasion. Most who have paid $10 for their day tour of Todos Santos have no intention of plunking down $6000 for an oil painting by such talents as New York's Derek Buckner.
So they make do with lining up in front of the Hotel California with their point-and-shoot cameras. Here, their Mexican tour leaders faithfully intone, The Eagles once took up residence to write songs for their number-one hit album, Hotel California.
The fact that the hotel has been boarded up for nearly three years means there's no one inside who can refute the myth. But a myth it remains, as Don Henley sternly reminded me when I faxed him in 1996. According to Henley, no one in The Eagles has ever visited the Hotel California.
The tour buses stop coming in the spring and don't resurface till Thanksgiving. Meanwhile beneath the town's sleepy surface, behind the century-old brick and adobe facades, our year-round colony of artists, writers, surfers, builders and permanent drifters find Todos Santos the ideal place to follow their independent pursuits.
Buses or no, a palm-filled arroyo along the north side of town makes a convenient natural barrier behind which to hide from the tourist world, as very few visitors ever cross to el otro lado ('the other side', in local parlance), where most of the town's hundred or so expatriates live.
I'm sitting in a hotel room in smoggy, sweltering Bangkok as I write this. In my mind I imagine myself standing on the topmost floor of the whalewatching tower. A slightly saline Pacific breeze, mango-perfumed by the hundreds of fruit trees dotting the landscape between our house and the beach, brushes past me.