Apr 12, 2010
Where life is slow
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| Rancho Pescadero in Todos Santos offers Mexican flavour, Pacific solitude and desert vistas. – MCT photos |
Once upon a time, say about 1972, Cabo San Lucas was a sleepy little fishing town at the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico. Then came the paved highway, the international airport, the marina, the golf courses, the raucous bars and well-heeled retreats. At the newest and perhaps fanciest, Capella Pedregal, suites this spring start at US$675 (RM2,173) a night.
And then there’s Todos Santos, still small, still drowsy at most hours, wedged between the mountains and sea about 80km north of Cabo.
Its sugar mills, born amid a 19th century boom, died about 60 years ago. The paved highway didn’t arrive until the mid-1980s, about the time the first American expat artist, Charles Stewart, moved in.
With no airport, no marina, no golf and virtually no nightlife, downtown amounts to a few blocks of newish galleries, inns and shops in oldish buildings. Outside town, cardon cactuses stipple the hills, and miles of lonely beaches roar under assault by waves so wicked that surfers and swimmers must pick their spots carefully.
Todos Santos, whose population might be as high as 15,000, depending on how many surrounding hamlets you include, is not where you come for action. But if you’re after Mexican flavour, Pacific solitude, desert vistas, fresh food and a seriously slow spring break, this might be your place.
“We close down at Baja midnight, which is 9 o’clock,” says Lisa Harper, proprietor of the Rancho Pescadero hotel, about 9km south of town. “We’re not up partying until all hours. It’s a very calm, relaxed area. Lots of surfers, lots of expats. Lots of fantastic Mexican food, great galleries and artists.”
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Left: Make sure to take time out from beach-lazing to check out curio shops like this one offering painted plates in downtown Todos Santos.
Right: The San Pedrito Surf Hotel is a cheerfully cheap place to stay south of the city. |
Pat Cope, who arrived from Los Angeles to open a gallery with her husband, Michael, and infant son, Lane, remembers that “when we first moved here, all I heard was roosters.” Sixteen years later, Lane is contemplating colleges, and the roosters still greet each morning, Cope says, but “I don’t hear them.”
Todos Santos, says Paula Colombo, coowner of the Cafe Santa-Fe, “is real. Good and bad, it’s real.” Now that the recession has slowed the pace of coastal vacation-home building outside town, Colombo adds, “maybe we can settle down and do what we have to do to keep this place as magnificent as it could be ... an oasis in the desert.”
My first stop is at Harper’s Rancho Pescadero hotel (no warning given, full price paid). Rancho Pescadero, billed as a different kind of “dude” ranch (a place urbanites get to experience the country/cowboy life for a fee), has been busy since it opened in November with 12 rooms, a restaurant, a bar and a pool. If things keep going this well, Harper says, the hotel could add 15 units by year’s end.
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| This Hotel California isn’t the one in the famous song by the Eagles but it can be as festively compelling as its lyrical counterpart. |
To reach the 6ha site, you turn off the twolane Highway 19 at a petrol station, drive about 1.5km on a dirt/sand road and stop just past the green fields of basil. (The area sits on an aquifer that feeds many organic growing operations and keeps the place rich in chillies, mangoes, avocados and papayas.)
Once on the grounds, you can take refuge in your large room (the smallest is still more than 55sq m) or on your mostly private patio. Before long, you’ll be sipping your welcome drink, strolling past the fire pit, through the fledgling palm grove, to the dunes and the wide, lonely beach.
Don’t jump in. Staffers warn guests not to swim at the hotel-adjacent beach because the tide is treacherous. But you can flop onto one of the Rancho Pescadero day beds on the dunes. Or walk at water’s edge, especially near dawn or dusk, where you’ll get the full effect of the near-empty beach coastline: pelicans gliding above the swells, offshore breezes blowing feathered foam off the whitecaps.
The simple life
It’s a wonder I turned away long enough to spot the handwritten signs for the San Pedrito Surf Hotel, a few hundred yards north of Rancho Pescadero. Beginning four years ago, manager/co-owner Andy Keller and the other owners upgraded the beachfront site from a camping spot to a seven-unit hotel (rates are US$55-US$200, or RM177-RM644, with a kitchen in every room), but it remains rustic: tile floors, a few shelves of well-thumbed paperbacks, all at the end of another dirt road.
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| Rooms in Hotel California offer grand four-poster beds. |
“I’m into the classic look,” Keller said. “No red lights, no parking meters, no pavement.... You have the dirt roads, you have the dogs with no collars ... the proximity of the mountains just beyond us here, and the ocean just behind me. It’s the best of both worlds.”
Out on the water – that is, the San Pedrito surf break, known up and down the American West Coast – I spotted half a dozen euphoric young men carving waves with their short surfboards. If you can’t surf like these guys but want to get into the ocean, you drive a couple of miles south to Cerritos Beach, which has milder tides and beach gear for rent and the passable Cerritos Beach club restaurant.
This beach, long empty, has been busy with development in the last few years. Just south of the restaurant, workers have completed about 10 Cerritos Surf Colony bungalows, being sold as time-shares and rented at US$125 (RM402) nightly. About 60 more are planned.
On the cliff top just north, meanwhile, looms the immense yellow-orange Hacienda Cerritos, an almost 3,000sq m mansion that’s unfortunately visible for miles. Workers said it was built as a private home last year by American developer Roger Pollock. Pollock’s finances became complicated in the recession, so the hacienda has been recast as a hotel, renting 11 rooms for US$295 and up nightly (RM949).
My tour of the property befuddled me. Even with multiple infinity pools, a massive patio, handsome tiles and big ocean views, the place felt like a rental house and was costlier than any other hotel I saw.
Homestyle Mexican cuisine
Downtown Todos Santos is more affordable and easier to understand: the 18th century mission on the plaza, the galleries, shops and eateries on narrow streets, mostly unpaved. I looked at paintings in Galeria Logan and Galeria Indigo, chatted with sculptor Benito Ortega in his studio, checked out the 1930s mural at the Cultural Center. I picked up a book at El Tecolote bookshop on the main drag, Juarez, and sipped some cool gazpacho on the patio of Los Adobes de Todos Santos.
Toward the middle of the day, I drove out to Punta Lobos Beach, where you can buy fresh catch from the fishermen as they drag their boats ashore about 2.30pm each day.
This is no longer a town I can hold in the palm of my hand, which is what it seemed when I first visited in 1995. Todos Santos has probably doubled in population since.
In 2006, local boosters managed to win a “Pueblo Magico” designation from national tourism officials, even though the label is usually reserved for towns with older buildings and more of them, more elaborately restored. If the highway is improved as promised, the drive to Los Cabos airport could drop from one hour and 40 minutes to one hour.
But even so, there isn’t a lodging here with more than 14 rooms. And though some have WiFi and air-conditioning, most don’t bother with guest phones or TVs. I’m guessing that if you put two tourists in every guest bed, the population would grow by 500, tops.
Though Stewart, the first expat, has closed his gallery, there are a dozen others, including Michael and Pat Cope’s enduring Galeria de Todos Santos.
Cafe Santa-Fe, the smart, tasty Italian restaurant that Ezio and Paula Colombo started on the plaza in 1990, coexists with several other well-loved eateries, including the topnotch Asian fusion cuisine of Michael’s at the Gallery, now four years old.
I also got a fix of down-home Mexican cuisine at Miguel’s, where, since 2001, a family has been serving widely admired chilli rellenos (stuffed chillies) in a dining room with dirt floors, a palapa (reed) roof and walls of woven twigs.
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| Ahh, this is the life! Go enjoy Rancho Pescadero’s wonderful views and relaxed style before it adds more units and becomes that dreaded thing: a tourist attraction. |
‘You can never leave’
On the main drag, the Hotel California traded for years on the false idea that it had inspired the Eagles’ 1976 song of the same name. It got new owners in 2001, and when they reopened the place a year later, 11 rooms, pool patio and restaurant were full of vibrant colours and festive atmosphere. In otherwise muted Todos Santos, the Hotel California sounds a brassy note, but is a step up from the old days. And unlike other lodgings, it doesn’t ban children.
If you want grown-up gentility in the heart of town, go to the Todos Santos Inn, which has been open since 1997. It has eight rooms, a restaurant and a tiny pool at the converted residence of a 19th century sugar baron. Or you cast your gaze across the street to the brick walls of the 14-suite Guaycura Hotel, which should be open by now.
“We came for the first time in ‘96, and it was much sleepier than it is now,” Juerg Wiesendanger, formerly a Swiss financier, told me one morning. “We went to look for a place to stay on the beach. Nothing. And we said, ‘This has to change.’ “
He and his wife, Libusche, moved here and went to work. In 2002, they opened the eightroom Posada la Poza, which sits on the edge of a lagoon at the end of a long dirt road. It has a popular rooftop lounge, a restaurant (El Gusto) and some of the town’s quietest guest rooms, with glimpses of La Poza Beach. The walls display Libusche’s paintings.
On yet another dirt road that leads to the sea, London-born designer Jenny Armit opened the four-unit Hotelito in 2007. It sits about midway between town and La Cachora Beach, and its quartet of cottages (US$90- US$135 nightly – RM289-RM434) is done in minimalist-modern style.
It has a dining patio, bar and pool, palm fronds here, hammocks there, carefully raked pebbles in between. I liked the privacy, simplicity and quiet ... for a while.
But my night at the Hotelito was the wrong night. In the wee hours of the morning, a chorus of crowing roosters piped up. They never quite settled down, and neither did I.
When I meet Armit over coffee later, she brings up the roosters and tells me how the farmer across the street had brought in hundreds of the caged birds. She sighs and says she is confident that the problem would soon be solved, but she doesn’t yet know exactly how. If you run a business in Todos Santos, it seems, crises like these come and go.
“And if you haven’t got a sense of humour,” Armit says with a winning grin, “you shouldn’t live in Mexico.” – Los Angeles Times/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
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