We sailed up to San Jose del Cabo from Cabo San Lucas on a beautiful, sunny day with about 10 kts of wind. Our guide books said it was about 30 miles, but our chart plotter had it at half the distance. So, we were on the lookout for the entrance to the harbor at Puerto Los Cabos pretty quickly.
We’d called ahead and found that Marina Puerto Los Cabos had guest slips available, so we were in! Although its much more adventurous (and cheaper!) to be at anchor, we knew it was going to be much easier to get the remaining boat projects done in a marina.
The marina here is great. It pretty much encompasses the entire harbor, which is not all that big as harbors go, but there are slips for a couple hundred boats. The marina has a bike/walking path that makes a horseshoe around the harbor (about a couple of miles long). It has a couple of paved sections, but is mostly dirt/sand.
The town of San Jose del Cabo with the hotels, restaurants, etc. is about two miles away. So, this was the perfect place for us to try out the Dahon Mariner folding bikes that we bought before we left. We knew we wanted some way to get around to explore new places further than we could do on foot and without taking taxis. When we found these folding bikes, we knew it would be perfect to take along with us!
Our first outing on the bikes was mainly around the marina trying to find the road into town on the day we arrived. We weren’t very successful in finding the main road before the sun went down, but we did discover a very interesting park around the other side of the marina that has sculptures throughout it. (I’ll have to bring my camera to get some snaps at the bizarre sculptures!) And, there is a center where you can swim with dolphins. (Side bar: It made me a bit sad that the poor dolphins are pinned up and don’t get to roam the ocean. I love seeing the dolphins swim with our boat out at sea.)
So, the next day we decided to head out after breakfast to go into town. Once we get outside of the marina complex, we have to take a narrow (one lane each way) bridge that is about a mile long. There isn’t any shoulder on the bridge, so we rode on the sidewalk.
Once in town we found the malecon and all of the resorts right on the water. We headed past the hotels on the lookout for the La Mega, which the marina told us was the best grocery. It is also where the “tourist map” we were given said we were to turn. The tourist map turned out to be the worst map we’ve ever seen! Besides not remotely resembling what we were seeing, there were no street signs which matched what was on the map!
We eventually turned and back tracked to find the La Mega. We were attempting to bike in sort of a loop to see the major stores we might need and check out San Jose Centro, which is the downtown, and then head back to the marina. After biking some more and finding the Walmart but not the turn to the downtown, we stopped at a nice taco shop on the side of the road.
After refueling, we headed off again in search of downtown. The road we were riding on (or next to) seemed to get rougher as we went, and half the time we were riding in a half inch of loose sand with cars zipping by us. I’m glad I had sunscreen on, because the sun was beating down on us. Finally (after riding for a what seemed like forever) we stopped to ask some one where exactly were these roads on our map! I swear then guy looked at us like we were the craziest people he had met, because he told us we were almost to the airport and downtown was “really far” back the way we came. Ugh!
So, we turned around and headed back. Eventually, we found the really cute downtown. We toured around for a few and decided to head back to the boat. When we got back we realized it was almost 5:00. We had been gone seven hours! I have no idea how many miles we rode, but I’m not real keen to bike back to the airport.
Because it was so late and we hadn’t defrosted any of the meat or fish in the freezer, we cleaned up and biked BACK into town for dinner. But, it was worth it, because we found the most delicious tacos ever! (Really, I wasn’t just starving after biking for seven hours, I promise.)
The next day we headed off again on the bikes, this time to the La Mega to do some grocery shopping. We have two satchel type backs that attach to the bikes that we brought, along with our Yeti soft sided cooler to bring everything back to the boat. We might have over estimated the capacity of our bags, because we had to play Tetris fitting everything into the bags. Mike also had to ride with a bag of chips from the handlebars and I had a carton of eggs bungeed to the back of my bike! Somehow we made it back without crushing everything. It took us a couple of hours to grocery shop there and back, so it is a bit more of a chore than driving to the Vons a block away back home.
Our next adventure on the bikes was when Mike was on a mission to find a bar that had the hockey playoffs on. Because it was dark and we have no lights on the bikes, I got the brilliant idea that I could wear a headlamp. Not really a brilliant idea. The headlamps only give you a few feet in front of you, so on a moving bike you can’t see the path ahead of you at all. So, of course I missed the grapefruit size stone in the middle of the path and went tumbling. No major damage – just some ugly bruises.
As they say though, you have to get back on the horse! So, I was back on the bike and on to the next adventure. Speaking of horses, we kept seeing hoof prints and horse droppings on the dirt path around the marina, but I never saw anyone riding horses. Well, we finally found them! We were on our way back after watching the Kings lose game 2 (boo!) about 11:30 at night and came up on two horses just roaming around the marina. Apparently people just let their horses roam around at night. The poor marina security guards were in a golf cart trying to shoo them away. Pretty funny.
But, the horses weren’t nearly as entertaining as last night headed back from watching the Kings lose game 4 to the Sharks (really, guys, get it together!) where we came upon a group of cows on the path at the marina. Mike was entertaining himself mooing at the cows until one of them started to chase us down the path! Seriously, those guys are big! But, we made our escape back to the boat safely.
Anyway, we are enjoying our time here and making a little progress on the projects, but hopefully we’ll get to explore a bit more too before we move on to the next beautiful spot.
~katie
