San Carlos
I only had 21 days left on my Mexican visa. I planned to go from Hermosillo to Tijuana and then head south until making it to Guatemala. When confronted with a challenge, I tend to make things even more challenging to motivate myself. It is why I decided to add a destination to my itinerary. I wanted to visit San Carlos, located a couple of hours south of Hermosillo, before heading north to Tijuana. However, since there was no direct transportation to San Carlos, I needed to make it to Guaymas first.
On February 28th, 2021, I took an Uber to the small TAP terminal in Hermosillo to find a bus ride to Guaymas. There were no other travelers around on site. I saw a lady doing some cleaning. I asked her if I could purchase a ticket to Guaymas. She happened to be the person selling the tickets as well. There were absolutely no other travelers at the terminal. I wasn’t sure about making out of Hermosillo on that day until I saw with my own eyes the bus entering the terminal.
Guaymas
I’ve made it quite fast and comfortably to Guaymas. There was only one cab waiting in front of the terminal. I asked the driver if he could give me a ride to San Carlos. After agreeing on the price, I hopped into the vehicle with my belongings. The surroundings were in parts mountainous. The cab driver wasn’t very talkative, but he warned me that Guaymas was a pretty dangerous place. He told me I shouldn’t be taking any Uber nor a cab from the streets. It’s difficult to gauge the real danger in these types of situations. I always listen to what the locals have to say as far as safety is concerned, but at the same time, a cab driver has a conflict of interest. He is not going to advise me to ride on Ubers.
The scenery during the little trip from Guaymas to San Carlos was pretty surreal. I could see the desert with sharp-edged mountains on one side, and on the other side, there was the ocean.
Since I did not have a cellphone plan nor the cab driver, we had a pretty hard time finding my rental apartment. Lucky I still had access to all the voice messages from the landlord on WhatsApp. After listening to the recordings several times with the driver, we finally gathered all the small details to find our way to our destination. The room I was renting was way above my expectations. The comfort level was close to a four-star hotel room. It had two King size beds. Everything inside the apartment was spotless.
A Place Out of a Novel
I left all my belongings and got ready as fast as I could. I wanted to take advantage of every minute of sunlight left to explore this surreal-looking place. The first minutes of discovering a new site give me the most enjoyable high during this nomadic journey I started in 2018. On this occasion, the fascination was off the roof of San Carlos being a place out of a novel. Route 124 was traversing the city. On one side, one could admire the mountains and the Gulf of California on the other side. The mountainous scenery reminded the desert of Utah to the only difference that those mountains in San Carlos were located next to the ocean.
As I was walking along the 124, I saw a band playing covers in English on the terrace of a bar. Patrons seemed to be, for the most part, US ex-pats and tourists. They did not look like North American tourists in other touristic destinations like Puerto Vallarta or Cancun. Although similar in some ways the ones here had something about them that made me think that they were perhaps from the US midwest. Some of them had cowboy boots and hats. In front of the club, there were several Harley-Davidsons and trucks parked.
I had never seen a place like San Carlos before. Each time I have the opportunity to experience a vibe or scenery I haven’t experienced before, it makes me, for some reason, the happiest human being. It feels as if my brain is expanding while experiencing something new.
I was only going to stay a couple of nights in San Carlos. Besides playing my guitar and working, all I did was spend time near the water. There weren’t many people around, the sun was shining, and the water was still, crystal clear. Moments like these make me so grateful to be on this planet and have a nomadic life. I feel particularly proud when I am discovering beautiful places on my own. I don’t like to visit sites with tourists and pay a cover. Even if it is a must-see spot, being with tourists kills the romantic and adventurous component of my trip.
The next day after my arrival, I saw a cab parked in the apartment complex’s parking lot. The driver looked like a legit cab driver. So I asked him if he could give me a ride back to Guaymas the next day. We agreed on the price and the pick-up time.
The following day around 10 AM, the cab driver came to pick me up. Through our conversation, I found out that he happened to be the boyfriend of a cleaning lady working at the complex. He already seemed trustworthy; now that I knew that somehow he was related to people working at the complex, my ride felt that much safer. At the terminal in Guaymas, I was hoping to find a bus to Hermosillo or directly to Tijuana.
The cab driver asked me how much time I had before my bus was leaving for Tijuana. He told me that he could show me some hidden beaches along the way. Although I trusted the guy and discovering more hidden treasures of San Carlos sounded appealing, I thought it wasn’t a good idea to go to some isolated place with all my belongings with a stranger. Officially there was only one bus a day going to Tijuana from Guaymas, at 5 PM. I had plenty of time, but I was hoping they would arrange a combination of rides at the terminal so I wouldn’t have to wait hours in Guaymas. My genuine concern wasn’t the wait. I wanted to travel fewer hours possible during nighttime. I knew that the road to Tijuana was going to be full of checkpoints. Besides all the narco-related checks, there could be immigration checks as well.
I had already traveled on that road a couple of months earlier. On one of the checkpoints, the military had taken me apart with a couple of other suspicious-looking guys to interrogate us. I did not want to go through a similar situation in the middle of the night.
Once at the terminal, I told the clerks working for TAP that I wanted to go to Tijuana. After checking all possible options, they advise me to wait for the 5 PM bus. I had six hours to kill. I didn’t feel like walking around with all my belongings. So what I did was play my guitar for hours inside the little waiting area. Once in a while, I would go outside and take the sun.
The bus got to the terminal one hour late. On those seven hours of wait, I must have played for at least five hours. The advantage of traveling with a guitar allows me to feel like I am not wasting my time during those dead moments, but being in random places where everyday life is happening inspires me to develop new ideas. The downside of all this wait was that I would do most of the traveling by nighttime and probably hit most of the checkpoints in the middle of the night.
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