The Cactus Trip Diaries

I proved my worth as a prophet when yesterday I wrote “Elsie behaved fine so that tomorrow we will be brave (foolish?) and attempt the drive via San Borja to Bahia de los Angeles.”

With the benefit of hindsight it was a foolish move, but all’s well that ends well. We got safely to the turning on to the track to San Borja. All was well and we made a nice stop (S2224) where we found Dudleya gatesii, as well as Cylindropuntia sp., Echinocereus maritimus, Ferocactus sp., Fouquieria columnaris, Mammillaria dioica, Pachycormus discolor, Stenocereus (Machaerocereus) gummosus, Yucca valida.

Soon after we got going again, my ipod, connected to Elsie’s in car stereo, stopped, in the middle of a Frank Zappa track. Not too big a disaster, but soon all the controls on the dashboard went to zero and warning lights started flashing. Then the engine cut out.

Yesterday’s attempt to look knowledgeable under the hood seemed to work. Wiggling similar wires did the trick again – but a few minutes later everything went dead again. This happened another half a dozen times, once even just because Eunice let the hood down a bit on the hard side. We had worked out that the cause was a dodgy wire from the car battery. Eunice had tape in her car’s first aid box and we managed to improve things by double taping the perceived dodgy wire. But the problems continued. Then we spotted that another wire, looking a bit more robust, was connected to a box labelled ‘Main 1’. Or was it? Intermittently? As soon as we had performed emergency taping to this wire, Elsie behaved until we reached Raquel & Larry’s where we had stayed in 2008. We were the only guests, so no problem with lack of space.

Eunice has a friend, Gary, in Verracruz, Mexico and he told her that he has a cousin, Kyle Nessen, who was working on an educational  Field Station project in Bahia de los Angeles. So Eunice had contacted Kyle and announced our intention to stay in Bahia de los Angeles. Kyle was keen to meet us and so we met for a chat and then for a meal in town – where we were joined by Jose Mercade, the Director of the project. We not only had a very interesting evening, but also very useful, in that they knew just the guy to take us out to Isla Esteban.

And so we had an early night as we had set the alarm clock for 5 a.m.