Day 2 of Camping

So Day 2 we drove from La Paz to Cabo Pulmo, but had a few stops along the way.

First we drove into La Paz. The original plan had been to look for whale sharks, but the day before we were told that the weather was going to be too bad, so we were going to a reptile house instead. But come Wednesday morning, the weather was beautiful, so we got on some glass-bottomed boats (not as cool as I expected) and drove out to the bay at La Paz. And we found one! It was huge, and swimming fairly slowly. We had to limit how many people were in the water at one time so we didn't stress it out and cause it to dive deep, so only five people went in at once. But we got to swim with it a couple of times each. It was a little scary, even though they only eat krill (tiny shrimp-like crustaceans), just because it was soo big. But it was awesome, just watching it swim. I stayed near its head the whole time and just watched it.

After that we had lunch in La Paz. My group found a restaurant with some really good tacos (which are basically the Mexican version of sandwiches-everyone eats them for lunch) and a trampoline! Expect trampoline pictures eventually.

Then we drove to UABCS (Universidad Autonoma de Baja California Sur) to have a lecture with someone from a Cabo Pulmo NGO. It was weird being on a college campus with kids our age, most of the people in San Carlos are either high schoolers or 30yr olds, or kinda sketchy. But it was funny, the classroom looked like it was straight out of Pitt's Cathedral of Learning (no, not the Nationality Rooms). Found out an interesting fact from Vero-La Paz is the highest educated city in all of Mexico, meaning it has the most PhDs per capita in the entire country, higher than Mexico City. It's a relatively small city and there's a ton of research centers that take advantage of some really cool ecological features of the area, like the bay, the Gulf of CA, and the deserts.

We then drove another two hours to Cabo Pulmo Marine Park and set up camp on this deserted beach. The road to Cabo Pulmo is a fairly long bumpy dirt road, so we were happy to get there.