So the camping trip to Banderitas went well. We piled all our things into the pangas and I got stuffed in a panga with a cooler up against my knees, which led to a very uncomfortable boat ride. The camp site is maybe 30-50 minutes away by boat in an estuary. There´s a beach and then a small cliff (maybe 6 ft high) where we actually pitched our camp. There were a ton of burrs the size of my thumbnail. If you´ve never experienced burrs, I highly suggest you NOT. They got stuck on everything and hurt like hell when you tried to pull them out. Every now and then the point would lodge in my finger, so I´ve got about 5 sore spots on my fingers from them. The campsite itself is classified as desert, with lots of dry grasses and cacti and Dr. Seuss-like trees.
At one point yesterday we went on a hike through it with Gustavo stopping every now and then to point out interesting species. Some were these cacti that are endemic (native) to Baja, which looks like they´re a dead piece just laying on the ground, but are still alive. We also saw a huge cactus that looks kind of like a saguaro but isn´t, Gustavo said it takes 100 years for it to start branching, and this probably had 7 branches to it. There was also a caracara that was building a nest on it-some kind of black and white hawk or eagle, I´m not sure what it´s English name is. At one point Gustavo stopped and told us all to back up quickly because there was a massive rattlesnake across the path. We stopped a good distance away and looked at it for a while before it started moving towards us and we had to leave. Some people were saying they wanted to hear it rattle and were wondering why it hadn´t, but we´d stopped far enough away that it didn´t feel threatened. Eventually we got to a salt flat that fills with seawater at really high tides. It was really cool, part of the water was reddish from a combination of algae and excess minerals.
We also did turtle monitoring at night, where each cabin has a shift where they have to go out in the pangas and go through the nets we put out to look for turtles. My cabin had the shit shift of 12-4, where you can´t really fall asleep early, and only have like 2 hours of sleep before you have to get up again. On top of that, it was freezing and we didn´t find any turtles. But the other groups did, 1 Monday night and 5 last night. In the morning we all got up early to measure them, mostly measurements of their shell length and width. If they had never been caught before, we also named them, tagged them, and took a skin sample. Sea turtles are really cool, their flippers are a lot less armored than I expected. Their skin really just felt like a lizard. And they´re pretty large-probably the size of my torso. And although no one got bitten, apparently they can, and do, bite really hard.
The last cool thing we did was snorkel through a rhodolith bed. Rhodoliths look like this http://vis-pc.plantbio.ohiou.edu/algaeimage/jpegs/ball.jpg and are coraline algae. They´re fairly round and depending on the area are either scattered along a sand bed or densely packed together. We saw a bunch of sealife including a couple of pufferfish, sea bass and a stingray.
As for camping in general, I think my life would be a lot happier if I could sleep better. My one roommate kind of spreads out in her sleep and she kept rolling onto my sleeping pad, which isn´t very large to begin with. It´s also not horribly comfortable. And I was too nervous about oversleeping for both turtle monitoring and measuring to put in earplugs. The burrs also really really sucked, they were everywhere and there was a constant chorus of "effing burrs!" around the campsite. We had to check our gear carefully before returning so we didn´t bring any back to the school. Overall, it felt really natural to just hang around outside a lot and not shower, and go to the bathroom behind cacti. Actually, I could do without the sharp object part, but whatever. But it was a pretty nice way to spend three days, and Gustavo said it´s the worst campsite of the semester, so things only get better.
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