Fossil Hunting

I originally thought that we had a fairly quiet week and a half, but once I started this I realized that we have been busy! Our first "adventure" which we may actually do again was a "hike from hell". The neighbours put us on to the idea & we figured if they could do it so could we.  We walked uphill, steep uphill, for an hour & a half to the towers on top of the hill/mountain up from our campground. We are quite close to the ocean & the towers are quite a ways inland. The views were amazing, the pictures don't really do it justice. The trail was sand & rock, again, very steep and then we had to make our way down - another hour. All this with moderate humidity levels, hot sun & mid 20's. We must have strong hearts because I felt like I might have a coronary. Needless to say we spent the rest of the day resting!

We spent a day strolling around San Jose del Cabo, bought two books - Birds of Mexico and a 50 Hikes in the Cape region, bought ice cream from a wheeled cart with bells and checked out some very cool, very expensive lamps ($3500)!

New Years was quiet, sitting around a campfire then watching the fireworks. We barbecued 10 lobster tails (just over 1 lb.) for ourselves for New Year's Day.

We took the kayak out to Lands End,the Cabo arch and Lovers beach, took only half an hour to paddle but the boat traffic was scary - everything from small boats to fishing charter boats to booze cruises to cruise ships so lots of waves. The swells were pretty big, filling the kayak a few times, luckily we have a sit on top kayak so there are several holes in it to drain. We kayaked around Lands End into the Pacific Ocean, this is where the Sea of Cortez meets the Pacific. We had a lovely picnic with the crowds on Lovers Beach & did a bit of snorkelling before heading back to the main beach. Still lots of families here for the holiday, crazy busy!

We drove out to Todos Santos, about 1 hour north for a day. We went on a hike from the book we bought, was hopefully going to find sea lions & iguanas, but just saw one sea lion. Nice walk from the hiway out to the ocean along a dry river bed. We stopped at Playa Las Palmas (Palm beach) where the sand was smooth & flat for a long ways, uncrowded & we watched Mexican fisherman fishing from high up on the rocky cliff edge. They were throwing their hand held line out into the rocky surf & hauling in fish. A couple of beaches in that area are popular with surfers & we got to watch for a while. We had lunch in a palapa roofed open air building with a dirt floor, good food and enough for supper later.

Days that we don't go out we are trying to identify all the birds that come to our feeders - cardinals, cactus wrens, orioles, scrub jays, hummingbirds & gila woodpeckers so far. The woodpecker & the wrens have figured out how to drink out of the hummingbird feeder!

Our latest adventure was a day of "treasure hunting". The area north of where we are was under a huge sea millions of years ago, so there are whale bones, sharks teeth & beds of seashell fossils to be found. We had no real idea where to go so we drove about 50 km. north then left the hiway & proceeded on mainly sand & dirt roads. At our first stop at a dry riverbed Robin pulled out his metal detector & low & behold, he found an old Mexican centavo coin. After Googling it we know that it is made of bronze & minted between 1943 & 1955. It's in fairly rough shape, worn down, but still a great find! We put on quite a few miles driving, always hoping we would remember just which road to take to get out of there. We met up with two Mexican fellows looking for a ride back to town who showed us the huge sharks teeth fossils that they had found & they indicated which direction to head to find more. I got a picture of their find as we were not so lucky. We did score by finding a couple places where there was a seam of sea shell fossils in the banks of a dry riverbed. Amazing find- shells caught in sand or mud & turned to stone. Some had the original shell still intact, others the shell had crumbled away leaving the stone shape. We brought back a few "souvenirs" including a fairly big rock full of shell fragments & an intact shell attached to it. Cool to think that these are millions of years old. Maybe on our next trip out fossil hunting we will stumble across some whale bones!

We are due for a beach day tomorrow, then who knows.
Merry Ukrainian Christmas and good night. Still living the dream & having fun!