Vegas reimagined at the beach (but what a beach)!
Cabo St Lucas, Baja de California Mexico Summer 2011
Our hotel might be a bit tired and there’s the small matter of a large crane between us and our ocean view, but it’s spectacularly lovely here, and as we enjoy the vista with our backs to the wall of temptation which is Cabo town, on the almost deserted Playa El Médano with its bath tub warm Pacific ocean waters, framed at either end by unearthly beautiful rock formations, we can’t think of a finer sunrise or sunset canvas.
After an early dinner of wickedly strong Margaritas and irresistibly moreish seafood tacos, we have bought a six pack of Tecate beer from the hotel’s mini mart and are working our way through these cold ones perched on the sea wall. Am I dreaming, or did those beers really only cost 70 US cents? Clearly, the burn-out I’m suffering after several weeks of travelling backwards and forwards on red eye flights across the US from our home in LA, is doing funny things to my brain.
Just two hours from LAX, Cabo which is on the far southern tip of the Baja de California, has long been LA’s favourite beach away from beach, and for as long as we’ve lived here a curious temptation which we’d never quite succumbed to, as Hawaii’s archipelago, America’s National Parks and farther flung parts of Mexico like the Yucatán have have claimed our free time and attention. That is until in my weakened state I fell victim to that classic timeshare marketing lure: “Stay for a week in this lovely two diamond resort for only (enter staggeringly small sum of money). Just attend a 90 minute no obligation timeshare presentation and receive a $100 dining credit and boat trip excursion!”.
It’s not so terrible being on a construction site at the weekend, but come Monday the blingy transformation of our plucky little battler of a two diamond property has noisily resumed and soon it will be indistinguishable from its neighbours in its cookie cutter massiveness. Seeking relief from the jackhammers and the noisy gyrations of our neighbour the crane, we venture into town running the gauntlet of waterfront hawkers pushing scuba & sports fishing excursions, ‘authentic American Pharmacy’, casino visits and tequila and mezcal tastings (although George Clooney and Rande Gerber’s Casamigos brand, named after the ‘Land’s End’ clifftop commune they share with Rande’s partner Cindy Crawford, is conspicuously absent from these tours), before taking shelter in the air conditioned cool of a monstrously large red carpeted shopping mall, which is full to the brim with cruise ship excursioners.
Turns out that the sound of the ocean, which is further amplified by the beach’s noisily vicious undertow is the only reliable escape from all this cacophony. Lesson learned we move our pool towels onto the sand, punctuating long siestas with walks to Land’s End, where the warm waters of the Pacific meet the Sea of Cortez. Taking cautious paddles in the raging surf, we watch nervously as local boys risk life and limb in the riptides on their surfboards, until the mercifully short construction site workday is over and we can retreat back to our resort.
Tired it may be and beset with frequent water and power outages (great for candlelit dinners and moonlight sessions of tic-tac-toe on balmy evenings), we can’t help but feel a sense of solidarity with the uniformly lovely staff at our hotel, many of whom will likely lose their jobs when the big upgrade finally takes place and new management is installed. Every day I am greeted like a member of the family as I drop by the hotel’s mini mart and snack bar for supplies for our daily beach outing and the wait staff at the hotel’s excellent restaurant are a fount of fascinating information about not only the catch of the day (Cabo’s seafood is justly famed) but local culture and lore. Those red bushes growing near the lower swimming pool “Mexican Viagra- lasts for three hours!”.
Fortified by strong coffee we brave the time share hard sell, emerging browbeaten but unbowed from the clutches of no less than five separate sales pitches and a ‘90 minutes’ that was closer to three hours. The ‘Playa’ where the meeting is being held would look completely at home on the Las Vegas strip and super salesmen Bradley and Kim try in vain to push the Restoration Hardware filled apartments in the ‘Grand Solmar’, into whose ravening maw our resort will eventually be subsumed. With no end in sight to this circle of hell, I slip the increasingly desperate Timeshare Excursion Agent 100 pesos and we finally make our escape, triumphantly clutching our dining credit and boat excursion vouchers.
All week long I have been thwarted by fast moving tides in my attempts to scale the limestone rocks to Cabo’s spectacular ‘El Arco’, but today I finally make it all the way round the point to Lover’s Beach, so named as it’s where the Pacific meets the Gulf of Mexico (or more romantically by the 18th century legend of a doomed affair between a Japanese sailor and a local woman). Adjacent Divorce Beach is another widow maker, with its dangerous rocks and riptides. The view from the water this afternoon, is even more dramatic.
Cabo town may be Latin American over tourism at its most raucous, but the food scene away from the burger chains and budget 1 to 4pm Happy Hours is a seafood lover’s delight and though we mainly ate our way up and down the restaurant menu in our hotel, we have enjoyed sushi of unsurpassed freshness and a seafood hotpot filled to the brim with the best dorado, black sea bass, skipjack, yellowfin and blue marlin you’ll find anywhere. Most memorable of all though, was the Seafood Ceviche we ate at a restaurant in the clifftop suburb of Pedregal, looking out over the Sea of Cortez as the breakers rolled in.
Seafood Ceviche: Serves Six
600g large shrimp, cut in half, cleaned and deveined
600g scallops, diced into 1cm cubes
600g white fish, diced into 1cm cubes
600g precooked octopus, diced into 1cm cubes
1 onion grilled over an open fire, charred skin removed and diced
3 tomatoes, diced
30g coriander, roughly chopped
Small bunch of basil, leaves only, roughly chopped
8 limes, juice only
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
Tortilla chips for serving
Add just enough lime juice to, shrimp, scallops and fish separately, let sit for 15 to 20 minutes or just until they turn opaque. Drain and discard the juice, add to a mixing bowl with the octopus, onion, coriander, basil and tomatoes. Dress with the rest of the lime juice and about 2 tablespoons of oil, toss together, season to taste and serve in individual bowls with tortilla chips.
Sleep. Eat. Beach. Repeat.
Not a bad cure for burn-out, as it happens.
Eat, sleep, beach, repeat.. I kinda like this mantra
So, Mexico is the next proposed destination for me and my fellow Yogis looking for adventure and relaxation. Retreats, not timeshares, hehe. But you make me look forward to some amazing food and beautiful coastlines 🤝😌
Funnily enough, I know one couple who have had a time share in Florida for years and somehow it’s always worked a charm for them 🤔 What’s their secret, I wonder?!