On a women-only kayaking trip in Baja, it's easy to shed your inhibitions. And your clothes.

By Victoria McKernan Special to The Washington Post April 29, 2001
view from tent door

It is a rare and wonderful thing to be in the middle of nowhere in a very small boat, to have no destination but the island ahead, no agenda but joy. When I rested my paddle across the cockpit of my kayak and looked over the side, I saw fish grazing on rocks through the clear water. Frigate birds sliced the sky above, sharp black silhouettes, all angles and attitude like bad boys at the prom. A string of pelicans soared low over the water, rising and falling in unison over invisible currents. There was no sight or sound of civilization anywhere.

And to think I almost didn't come. When a friend invited me to join an all-female kayaking trip in Baja, my first thoughts were: I don't do group travel, I don't do women's group stuff and I especially don't do guided tours, unless I am the guide. But my experience mostly had been on dive boats and expedition cruise ships. There was the minor fact that I knew nothing about sea kayaking.

What I did know, however, was the amount of work required to plan, organize, shop for and equip a week-long expedition for 14 people. I knew I did not want to do this. I did not want to make out menus and lists and shop and stow. I did not want to chart a course and pack a truckload of camping gear, especially when everything for the whole trip, including all the food and fresh water and the toilet, had to be packed into boats slightly bigger than lipstick tubes. But that's what outfitters are for, my pal Patty pointed out. And now that we were all semi-responsible adults earning semi-living wages, we could actually pay someone else to do all that. We could just show up, dab on a little sunscreen and paddle away.

This was a new concept for me, a veteran of the backpacking/hitchhiking/work-your-way-around-the-world sort of travel. It was also a suspicious concept. I had visions of some wretched guide shepherding us along like miserable ducklings. No, no, no, Patty insisted. The guides were cool, the structure minimal, the food fantastic, the last places going fast -- did I want to come? What was it like, I wondered, to be on the other side? The side where, after your daily rugged wilderness experience, you get to sit in the shade with a frosty drink until someone calls you for dinner? Except, this being the Mexican desert, the drinks would not be exactly frosty. But the rest of the deal, well, maybe I should give it a try.

But the women's group part . . . I still had my doubts. The only real reason for mucking about in the wilderness, after all, is to hang out with big, muscley half-naked men. I had visions of being stuck around the campfire discussing Oprah's Book Club selections and journeys to personal fulfillment. The couple of women on the trip I did know were great (and already fulfilled), but what about the others? The fact that they were game for a week without showers gave me some reassurance, but I have in fact gone on camping trips with women who brought along three pounds of cosmetics.

My fears began to ebb in the Los Angeles airport. Of 11 women, only two checked bags. One woman had brought a carry-on smaller than the average PBS tote bag. We had come from California and Belgium and all points in between, with a large Wisconsin contingent. We ranged in age from 27 to 49, with most of us hovering around 40.

It was a sporty group, I soon discovered, with plenty of campers and canoers, a marathon runner, a fly-fisherwoman and a rugby player. There were various boyfriends, husbands and children in the assorted pictures, but they were (sorry guys!) largely forgotten by the time we landed in Loreto, Mexico.

I was used to arriving in foreign countries alone, wading out into the turgid swarm of humanity and crowding onto a public bus to the low-rent side of town. But this time an air-conditioned coach was waiting to take us to the kind of hotel they stick on travel brochure covers, all bungalows and bougainvillea by the sea. Okay, this tour business was pretty good so far, but what about the guide part?

Remember that feeling of relief on the first day of school when you discovered that you had the really nice, pretty, fun teacher? That was the feeling when we assembled around the pool that evening for orientation. Marta, our lead guide, had the full-throttle personality of the rough-and-rowdy best friend to the sissy Debbie Reynolds character in one of those old pioneer movies. You know, the gal dancing on tables with the lumberjacks while Debbie is off singing somewhere, all moony-eyed. Ginny, Marta's sidekick, had such an easy good nature and sweet personality that it was hard to hate her for more than five minutes for her supermodel body, perfect tan and long blond hair. We also had Cecilia, a Mexican naturalist who was well-versed about every bird, plant and lizard in Baja, and was eager to share. It was like paddling through the Discovery Channel. Thank God she was weak on fish.

While Marta gave us a brief overview of the trip, Ginny handed each of us three waterproof bags for our clothes and personal gear. Cecilia spread out a giant satellite map of the area. The Parque Marino Nacional Bahia de Loreto protects almost 800 miles of shoreline and offshore islands. Two of these islands, Isla Carmen and Isla Danzante, were to be our home for the next five nights. On the map, they looked like barren rocks.

Early the next morning, a van took us to Puerto Escondido where our kayaks were waiting in a colorful row on the beach beside a mountain of gear. It seemed impossible that all of this would fit, but somehow, about an hour later, it was all in there. Sleeping bags and mats were jammed into the pointy ends, bags of water were tucked behind seats, buckets of produce rested between the steering pedals and snorkeling gear was strapped to the decks. The toilet was hoisted unceremoniously into the center hatch of the yellow boat.

We picked out life jackets and wiggled into spray skirts. There isn't a whole lot to sea kayaking in calm water. You sit. You paddle. The person in back has pedals for the rudder. Marta and Ginny zipped around in their solo kayaks checking posture and fine-tuning our strokes. Then we paddled out into the Sea of Cortez.
sea kayaking

It is called the Gulf of California now, the name wrested, as would be politically correct, from the taint of European conquerors. But once it was called the Sea of Cortez, and I agree with John Steinbeck that it is "a better-sounding and more exciting name."

The Gulf of California encompasses a body of water formed about 25 million years ago when two tectonic plates began separating, cracking the mountains and wrenching aside a chunk of western Mexico, leaving a long narrow sea in the middle of the desert. The Sea of Cortez, however, describes a magical place -- a world of harsh contrast and seductive beauty.

In the peculiar light of the latitudinal sun, the water has the laconic roll and metallic sheen of mercury. The land that had looked so barren on the map now proved to be rich in life and color. Fantastic twisted cactuses grew on the beaches and century plants shot their dagger blooms out of rocks. From morning to night, a thousand colors shifted across the sheer peaks of the Sierra de la Giganta; steely gray warming to rust, then ochre and chanterelle yellow, and in between, colors I would have to make up names for -- burtesh and sossrum, ruzz, tumdill, aldore.

We paddled about an hour the first day, then beached in a little cove for lunch and snorkeling. Here is where the reality of this trip actually sunk in. There was gear to be dealt with, food to be prepared, snorkeling equipment to be adjusted and drowning to be prevented, and I didn't have to do any of it!

Before I even got my wet suit on, Ginny and Cecilia had set up a table and were slicing avocados. Marta snorkeled around, helping to adjust masks, subtly checking out skills and diving down to bring up sea urchins and starfish for closer examination. In all my years of scuba and snorkeling, I have rarely been in the water without having to mind people. For a few strange moments, I actually didn't know what to do with myself.

The days fell into a comfortable rhythm. We woke to the smells of fresh coffee and breakfast cooking, then loaded up and paddled somewhere new, stopping to snorkel in isolated coves or along the rocky shore. We watched manta rays leap out of the sea and pelicans dive for fish. One day we swam with dolphins, another day we watched Cecilia autopsy a dead one that had washed ashore. We poked around in tide pools, accompanied by scrambling, scarlet Sally lightfoot crabs. We climbed the desert hills, where one woman found a beautiful skull of (we think) a crested caracara.

Outside of my acute jealousy over that skull, I found, to my surprise, that I really liked being exclusively with a bunch of women. Yes, there was a lot of girl talk, but there was political talk and science talk and quite a lot of "sailor" talk over bottles of tequila. There was no sense of competition, no one wanting to paddle faster, hike farther, drink harder, last longer.

Women, I realized, work together quite differently than men. Except for Marta or Ginny giving necessary instruction, there was almost no one "directing" anybody. When we beached for the night, the boats simply got carried up and unloaded, the sun shelter erected, the washing buckets filled. We all worked together, our various strengths and weaknesses easily accommodated. Of course, not having all that much work to do may have had something to do with it. (Though Marta said we pitched in a lot more than the average group.) If some of us were packed and ready to go while others were still dawdling, it wasn't a problem.

The other great thing about an all-female group was that modesty is totally unnecessary. Except for the occasional fishing boat in the distance, we saw no other humans for the entire week. By the second day, we had abandoned most clothing, and swimsuits, altogether.

There are no mosquitoes on the islands, no bothersome gnats. The company provided tents, but no one used them. It was good to sleep under the stars every night and wake to find your sleeping bag framed in the tracks of puzzled hermit crabs, to whom we were only obstacles, a sudden Stonehenge interrupting their nightly crawls.

I was strafed one morning by what I first thought was the world's most enormous bumblebee, until I saw it was a hummingbird. This was no dainty thing flitting about tropical flowers or swilling at the suburban feeder. It was as big as a rhinoceros and buzzing with attitude, nipping its nectar from a devil's bouquet. Yeah, I'm bad.

After dawdling on a glassy pond for a week, we finally had a taste of adventure on our last day, when a fog bank suddenly blew in, bringing stiff headwinds and choppy seas. Marta and Ginny bunched us all up within sight, and Marta led the way by compass.

Conditions were not exactly perilous. It was, after all, daylight, with the mainland somewhere in front of us and no large ships likely to mow us down. But we did have to paddle with some vigor, or at least not slack off entirely and space out on the scenery like we usually did. When we finally broke out of the fog and found ourselves dead on course to our final beach, we felt mildly triumphant.

We all thought that after a week without showers or any sort of creature comforts we would be eager to return to civilization at the end, but we lingered on that last beach, reluctant to give up this world we had experienced, this time out of time. Plus, it took a while to find our clothes again.

Victoria McKernan is a mystery book writer in Washington.