"into a desert place"

One of the reasons I like public libraries is that, to some extent, their holdings remain sheltered from the fads of the day. I mean, unlike a book store, they hold books that are out of print and perhaps not very noteworthy, while at a book store you're more likely to find 10,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code. Anyway, I'm a small-time fan of the oddball travelogue: stories on travel-library.com, books like The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia, say, or even Blue Highways; but not any cursory, condescending tripe by Bill Bryson. These tales are a small does of armchair adventure, but, more than that, I think I like them for the odd treasure they provide, the references, possibly quite oblique, to odd things out in the desert that I can then go in search of. It's a sort of archaeology amongst the verbage.

I just read this book Into a Desert Place by some British guy, who, with almost hilarious levels of foolhardyness, decides to walk the coast of Baja California. In true British style he sets out heavily laden with all kinds of extraneous camping equipment, yet with deep naivite; he writes of his SPF 10 as if it were formiddable stuff indeed, he drinks coca cola as he hikes, he casts his garbage into the sea. It seems that every paragraph is how he falls down on some rocks or is struck at by a rattlesnake. But pretty quickly he figures things out, in a very My Side Of the Mountain-esque manner, and so he does it: he walks around Baja, eating rattlesnakes and mussels, distilling water from the sun, and with the unending hospitality of the sporadic fish camps.

Anyway, this story was useful to me. I found three references to hot springs — I knew only of Cañon de Guadalupe and am searching for others. But the single most noteworthy reference to an oddball geographical phenomenon that I absolutely must search out is this:

( Malarrimo )