Baja California is the 1,300-kilometre peninsula that hangs south from the US border between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California. It is mostly rugged, arid, and sparsely populated — a spine of mountains running through desert, with the sea on both sides. For travelers willing to make the drive, it is one of the most dramatic landscapes in North America.
The northern border at Tijuana is the busiest land crossing in the world. Beyond the border city, the Transpeninsular Highway runs the full length of the peninsula through increasingly empty country. The Pacific coast is wild and windswept; the Gulf side is calmer, warmer, and fringed with islands.
Ensenada, about 100 kilometres south of Tijuana, is a busy port city and wine region — the Valle de Guadalupe nearby has become one of Mexico's most interesting wine-producing areas. Hussong's Cantina on Avenida Ruiz in Ensenada is the oldest bar in Baja, and one of the claimants to the invention of the margarita. Further south, the central desert opens up: the Desierto Central is stark, beautiful, and home to some of the tallest cacti in the world, the cardón.
Inland, Tecate is the quiet border crossing and a brewing town, and Mexicali, the state capital, sits below sea level in the Colorado delta and has the best Chinese food in Mexico — a legacy of the labourers brought in to dig the irrigation canals a century ago.
On the Gulf side, San Felipe is a fishing and shrimping town on a shallow sea with enormous tides. Far offshore in the Pacific, Isla Guadalupe was the clearest great white shark diving in the world until Mexico suspended the permits; the island is now closed to tourism and the forests the goats stripped are growing back.
The state ends at the 28th parallel. Everything south of it — La Paz, Los Cabos, the grey whale lagoons at Guerrero Negro and San Ignacio — is Baja California Sur, a separate state and a day's drive further.
