Day 1 of Camping

So I kept a mini-journal of our camping trip because we've done a ton and I wanted to make sure I remember everything.

So on Day 1, we left early in the morning and drove four hours to La Paz. We stopped at CIBNOR, which is the main research facility for Baja California Sur. There are various CIB centers throughout Mexico, each specialized on area-specific subjects. We toured the facilities and saw agriculture experiments on desert farming, aquaculture experiments which looked at conditions for raising different types of fish and crayfish (which are blue in warm waters!), massive pools set into the bay for shrimp aquacultures, and typical labs that look at water quality, tissue studies, etc. We also looked through some of their specimens, which included a talk with a spider/insect expert (some people held a tarantula) and their stuffed bird collection. We also saw their Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) which science nerds will know is a really cool piece of equipment. Instead of using light as an energy source, they shoot electrons at things and can see very tiny images-like the hairs on a fly's body. That was awesome, and equally cool was I understood the guy's Spanish pretty well. In general, CIBNOR has a really pretty campus-lots of white buildings. They offer MS & PhD programs, and that's where Vero got her PhD, so she knew just about everyone.

We camped at a beach on La Paz, best part was the most awesome bright red sunset which my camera didn't even begin to capture.