San Ignacio (or “safe”)

The next stop in my itinerary (it feels funny to have one, it's way too formal), was the San Ignacio lagoon. During the hot months, the fabulous gray wale lives in this lagoon and doesn’t surrender to the man-made threatens, it withstands wounds and attacks, as well as hunting and outrages,  and everything just for enjoying the benefits of the Sea of Cortez.

It takes 5 hours from Loreto to get to the San Ignacio lagoon. For the sake of following the path of the gray whale I decided to take that route. The highway is a path in the middle of the desert and the sea; from the distance you could not tell if the tiny wooden houses are a mere optical illusion or not - as they are in the middle of nothing but sand. Also in the middle of nowhere there was a desalinization plant, built as a monument in the middle of a dashing nothing.

When I discovered that the gray whales have already started their way back I couldn’t help to feel nothing but sadness and tears (sniff, sniff).

The air is cold and the sunlight falls as if it would always be noon, a perfect balance of forces. This weather is what you can enjoy the most. There were a few tourists –because the lagoon is not so well-known- , and the local people is concerned with how to get rid of the tons of wastes produced by tourism and of the automobile scrap pilled up at the shore of San Ignacio.  

“The truth is that you arrived in the best season of the year” told me the man who sales beer, because, as there weren’t so many people or whales, the sea could be all mine... “Although, watching whales is something really nice”, he kept on saying while a “what a consolation” ran through my mind. At least, and unlike in Japan or Norway, here the Mexicans keep an emphatic “no” to the hunting of these animals. That would be way too much cruelty, I feel, to hunt these visitors who come to this calm sea to give birth and mate.