Today we spent in Cabo San Lucas. This is a tiny town whose sole purpose in life is to suck money out of cruse ship passengers. It is at the tip of the Baja peninsula. I don't even think it has road access to elsewhere in Mexico. There isn't a pier large enough for our ship, so we dropped anchor in the harbor and had to take a tender to shore. The trip to shore was uneventful, but on the way back the tender crashed through an uncommonly large wave, sending a huge wall of water down through the open hatch in the ceiling. Robyn and I were sitting away from the blast zone, so we stayed dry, but we had an excellent view of our fellow passengers getting completely soaked. They weren't happy.
We had arranged a horseback riding excursion for today. Once on shore, we found the correct bus, and were relieved to find it air conditioned and driven by a sane man. The bus went to a stereotypical Mexican ranch. It had a couple of lazy dogs lying in the dust. It had an abandoned truck. It had a rooster crowing, and goats and hens wandering around. There was “cartoon cactus” all around (the same kind as you see in Road Runner cartoons). All us turistas were given the safety talk (“Don't walk behind the horse, they might kick; don't get off by yourself, you may get caught in the stirrup and stepped on.”), we were assigned our horses and in moments we were off. It was a nice tame single-file walk, and the horses knew exactly where to go, so it didn't matter if we could ride or not. Wade managed to convince his horse to stop and go on command, but the horse generally decided on the direction to ride in. It was an acceptable compromise.
As we rode along the beach, we saw a bunch (“school'?) of skates flying above the waves. I didn't know they did that, but apparently they do. We later found a postcard with a good picture of it, I'll try to remember to scan it and put the picture here before we mail the card. We also saw lots of birds, some most probably boobies. And we saw a couple of dogs, but they were the ones from the ranch that came with us for a walk.
After the horses, we had a couple of hours to walk around town, shopping. Robyn found a blanket that she liked, and was told $30. She said she liked it, but not that much. Shopkeeper asked how much she was willing to pay. She said $20. Shopkeeper suggested $27, then $25. We weren't interested. Shopkeeper tried to show us other blankets, we didn't like them. We left. As we were leaving the store, he said “OK, $20.”. Robyn wins.
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