It didn’t look that deep! Huge sinkholes often appear suddenly as chunks of road just drop away when it rains!
“Dry arroyos” suddenly become hazardous waterways of mud when it starts to pour.
There’s normally a bridge there! Check out how green the surrounding hills have become after a few weeks of rain in the thirsty desert!
It doesn’t take much for flooding in many Baja towns and cities. This was just after a few hours in downtorwn La Paz. The “heavy rain” had not even started falling yet! Folks shopping in the windows are stranded for awhile.
Happy cows! Getting fat on real GRASS growing along the sides of roads. Grass is an unusual sight in Baja! Note that the cows are properly observing the “cow crossing” sign.
“POST- CHUBASCO BLUES…and GREENS”
Originally Published the Week of October 24, 2012 in Western Outdoor News
I watched them clean up the street in front of our restaurant..again. I’m losing count.
The army of street sweepers are out. I don’t mean the big machines with the twirly-brushes like in the U.S. I mean, the “army of sweepers.” Literally. The city pays hundreds of workers to walk out en masse and sweep the street with a hand brooms. Labor is cheap and they really do a good job.
There sure is a lot of dust…clouds of it. Kicked up by the sweepers and then by the cars that go up and down the road.
When it rains…which is rare…all the gunk that has accumulated in the streets and the drains gets sluiced out. Maybe the better word is “flushed” out, if you get my drift, and can imagine some of the accumulation in drains that don’t see rain for years!
Well, all that stuff turns to mud. After the storms, that mud dries up and turns to…dust! That dust all gets kicked up into the air.
We do our best not to breathe dust or to stay out’ve the dustier zones. People get all kinds of nasty allergies to the stuff in the dust.
Whatever is not being wisked away by the sweepers, they bring out bulldozers and backhoes and just scoop it up onto the beach or the nastier stuff into trucks. Again, a dusty business.
The road repair boys are also in full swing. There’s little and big rock and mud slides. Bridges get damaged or even swept away, especially across dry arroyos that turn into raging rivers during the storms.
During rainstorms, huge potholes open up in the road. Some of them are large enough to be classified as sinkholes. Chunks of road just drop away.
Some of the roads that looked great a few days ago before the storms now look like the cratered surface of the moon. They require the deft driving hand of a NASCAR driver to navigate through them swerving left and right trying to avoid them.
It’s an exercise in failure. Your teeth and kidneys get jolted and you cringe along with your car’s groaning suspension with each whack and thump as you hit another deep pothole. Some are the size of a basketball. Others large enough to drop a tire sideways into it. If you’re a tourist in a taxi that has no suspension…you just have to laugh as your head gets bounced on the inside roof of the taxi!
Others are like gaping maws waiting to swallow vehicles. Standing water can be deceiving. Some cars going through standing water don’t realize that under that muddy water is a big sinkhole or two or a trench lying in wait.
Un-suspecting vehicles go plowing through the water and CLANG! It’s like watching a clown car blow up. It rips through a front axle or, in some cases, the whole front end just disappears into the watery hole…trunk butt up in the air!
Rain is so rare down here that the Mexican infrastructure just wasn’t built for handling too much! After it’s over, we repair things as best as we can and life goes on. We may not see rain again for a long time so we don’t worry about it again until then! Es la vida!
I think I’ve lost count of all the rainstorms we’ve had this year. But, I was just informed that Baja has had more rain in the last month than in the last 5 years combined. I know here in La Paz, we had one 16-hour period several weeks ago where 12 inches of rain fell on us and flooded the town.
I was once told that despite the arid nature of the state of Southern Baja, we actually get more rain in a “normal year” than say…Los Angeles. We get about 17 inches of precipitation a year. The only problem is that it can all fall in one day!
Hurricanes aside…dangerous and deadly…mostly what we get are thundershowers. We call them “toritos” (little bulls) that can rise up in the afternoons and unleash the fury of the heavens for an hour or even minutes.
Huge dark storm clouds with thunder and lightning rear up from otherwise balmy afternoons and send boats scrambling for shore and folks ducking under palapas and headed indoors as the rain often comes down in warm sheets of water.
If you’re indoors or out of the rain, it’s a great show. The thunder and lightning can be spectacular and watching the desert turn into rivers or the streets into Venetian waterways are incredible.
Then, as quickly as it starts. It stops. And the sun comes. And the waters recede quickly and the heat literally steams up the standing water. Life in the tropics. It stops just like that.
It’s just that this year, it stops then it starts again the next day.
On the upside…
The brown countryside has been transformed into an incredible carpet of green. Emerald green! Grass is growing. Flower are blooming. Normally barren trees are covered with foliage. In fact, the desert has been turned into a jungle. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it so verdant.
If you’re out fishing and look back towards the land, you could easily be convinced that you’re in Hawaii or Central America. The forrest is THAT thick!
Oh..and the fish are still biting! It’s a nice time to be down here.
I just wish they’d get done sweeping away the dust.
That’s our story
Jonathan and Jilly Roldan
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Jonathan Roldan has been writing the Baja Column in Western Outdoor News since 2004. Along with his wife, Jill, they own and run the Tailhunter International Fishing Fleet in La Paz, Baja, Mexico www.tailhunter-international.com. They also run their Tailhunter Restaurant Bar on the famous La Paz malecon waterfront. If you’d like to contact him directly, his e-mail is riplipboy@tailhunter-international.com or drop by the restaurant to say hi!
Jonathan Roldan’s
Tailhunter International
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That's My Story 
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