A Sea of Cortez Getaway--Little Puerto Penasco

From the melancholy Arizona border town of Sonoita, Mexico’s Highway 8 ribbons southwest through the lonely reaches of the Sonora Desert. It looks like another road to nowhere, vanishing into a dusty haze stippled with cactuses.

Dark volcanic hills gang up like shadows against the plains. Vultures wheel in the hot blue sky. A roadside sign announcing “ Dunas --10km” (dunes--10 kilometers) catches the corner of your eye as you dodge a snake on the asphalt and drive on toward Puerto Penasco, one of the least-known getaways on the Sea of Cortez.

Visitors know it as Rocky Point, although Puerto Penasco actually means “Rock Port,” named after the crag on which the fishing town was founded. Other Sea of Cortez resorts such as Guaymas-San Carlos, Loreto and Cabo San Lucas have gone in for big-time tourism, but this unassuming coastal town of 40,000, with no commercial airport, barely exists in the minds of most travelers.

What’s here? Long white beaches and dunes, fine fishing and sailing, plump, juicy, shrimp, several good restaurants, a delightful frontier atmosphere and abundant peace of mind--during the week, at least.

Small Desert Universe

With its beaches and modest hotels, Puerto Penasco serves as the nucleus of a small desert universe surrounded by satellites, all worth a visit. Just south of town a rocky beach runs down to a swank, white-domed holiday development containing an ocean-and-desert research center with a whale skeleton out front, bleaching ash-white in the dry glare and salty breeze.

Offshore there’s an animated sea lion colony on Isla San Jorge, a good spot for diving. Way at the other end, 10 miles northwest of town, the down-home community of Cholla Bay features the area’s most popular beach.

Just north of Cholla Bay lies an estuary rich in crabs and containing miles of desolate, shell-strewn shoreline. The wide-open desert beyond, where tourists seldom stray, guards fantastic secret sands.

It’s just 65 miles from the Arizona border.

Arizona residents have known about Puerto Penasco for a long time, and have worked to make it their own. More than 15 years ago they began building summer homes at Cholla Bay, then a minuscule seaside suburb of Puerto Penasco.

Three-Shack Town

Gradually this three-shack town was transformed into a rustic, Southwest version of Martha’s Vineyard. Its only pub, the concrete-floored J. J.’s Cantina (home of the Cholla Bay Sportsmen’s Club), serves Margaritas in plastic cups to the barefoot crowd that gathers during winter and spring, when the desert temperatures drift down into the 70s.

But Margaritas are not the real attraction of Cholla Bay. Sun worshipers flock like sea gulls to nearby Sandy Beach, the only beach where camping is allowed. With thick, white sand, softly sloping dunes and gregarious waves ripe for windsurfing, Sandy Beach (not even Mexicans call it Playa Arenosa) may be the best sandbox on Mexico’s northwest coast. It costs $2 to enter.

That doesn’t stop the campers, cars and trucks with Arizona plates that pour out to the beach on weekends, bringing orange bubble tents, dirt bikes, bikinis, and coolers bulging with icy cerveza. The crowd is mostly young and footloose.

Suicide Hill

On a craggy dune-covered mountain hovering over the beach, sometimes called “Suicide Hill,” daredevils on all-terrain cycles (ATCs) plummet down steep slopes of sand at breakneck speeds, roaring and skidding out into the desert. Several times a year, dune buggy races also zigzag along the sandy tracks that crisscross the area.

Weekends draw droves of people from Arizona, as do holidays such as Christmas, New Year’s and Easter. If it’s solitude you’re after, go during the weekdays when Puerto Penasco returns to its quiet cocoon of obscurity.

At first glance the town may seem a little too restful. Low, sun-baked buildings amble along Boulevard Benito Juarez, the main drag. Desert sand strays into the side streets. Nary a soul appears. But when you come to a road called Armada Nacional (or Calle Tercera), follow it over the train tracks and continue for several blocks out to the Sea of Cortez.

At the foot of a circular seaside drive where battered Fords cruise, a spacious desert beach stretches to eternity, or so it seems. Playa Hermosa curves for about five miles along the blue-black sea, fading into Playa Bonita and finally into Sandy Beach, near Cholla Bay to the distant northwest.

Generous Beach

Cars and cycles zip along its hard-packed sand, although there are plans to prohibit vehicles on city beaches.

Meanwhile, this wide, generous beach opens its arms to all: the kite-flyers and sailboaters, the man trying to launch a rainbow-colored parachute from the back of his van, the shell-collecting senior citizens with their plastic buckets, and the swimmers who splash in the sparkling tide, shuffling their feet to scare away any stingrays hiding in the sand.

Beach lovers may want to stay at the nearby Motel Senorial (Calle Tercera 81), an inexpensive favorite (about $20 double) with a quasi-colonial air.

Puerto Penasco sprang up in 1928 on a rocky point, Cerro de Penasco, near today’s harbor. Off of this point two wandering fishermen, Victor and Benjamin Bustamante, discovered such untapped schools of beautiful shrimp that they immediately cast their nets and stayed.

Descendants of those “super shrimp” are sold out of cracked tile coolers at a lively fish market along the Old Town’s windy malecon (a walkway along the sea).

Fishermen in smudgy aprons and rubber boots shake the ice off bags of tender pink shrimp, fat brown ones and jumbo blues. All this nectar in a shell goes for $20 per five-pound bag, even less for the small shrimp. Oysters, clams, red snapper, squid and 25-pound flounders also pack the stalls.

To sample these fruits of the sea, stop in for lunch or dinner at the bustling Costa Brava restaurant (Boulevard Kino and Primero de Junio), one of several popular eating places in the Old Town.

American and Mexican families alike gather under the whirling ceiling fans to feast for $5 to $8 a person on exotic Hawaiian shrimp in pineapple sauce, flaming shrimp with brandy, fish fillet with nut sauce or the spicy seafood combination--octopus, shrimp, squid, clams and flounder drowning in a tomato stew.

Homesick for Hamburgers

An even less costly little restaurant in the same neighborhood, with Formica tables and a Latin jukebox, is La Cita on Primero de Junio. Several dollars will buy you anything from chicken in chile sauce to Mexican-style shrimp, a savory melange of green peppers, onions, tomatoes and fat, tender, butter-soaked shrimp.

If you get homesick for hamburgers or stuffed potato skins, try La Curva (Boulevard Kino and Comonfort), where senior citizens like to party. This simple eatery, which charges about $5 a meal, serves free nachos with dinner.

Despite its casual air, poshness is slowly creeping up on Puerto Penasco. Just across from the Costa Brava restaurant stands the ritzy new Hotel Vina del Mar (Primero de Junio and Malecon Kino), set on a seaside promontory where you can soak in a Jacuzzi or swing at a video-disco hewn from the rocks. Its attractive hacienda-style rooms run about $40 double.

South of the Old Town, a string of rocky beaches slides past trailer parks and budding condominiums to the chic holiday community of Las Conchas. Beyond the security gate, a kingdom of lovely beach chalets is mushrooming, with white domes and skylights and two-car garages, mostly owned by Americans.

It’s all a far cry from the carefree, tossed-together beach bungalows of Cholla Bay, where Rocky Point’s tourist days began. Nevertheless, this earthy village and the miles of primitive beaches around it still represent Puerto Penasco’s better half, the half with its most secret sands.

A Sandy Road

Remember that sign you saw on the way into town on Highway 8, about 18 miles north of Puerto Penasco: “Dunas--10 km.?” A sand road winds west from that sign to one of the most mysterious desert scapes in Mexico, Puerto Penasco’s massive inland dunes.

Little orange signs at first mark the route, then disappear as the road snakes its way deeper into the desert. Up ahead, a vision of ghostly amber mountains floats like the Sahara on the horizon, appearing close, yet really miles away. You still have to pass through a rambling black lava field on the fringes of the Parque del Gran Desierto del Pinacate.

Out of this national park (reachable via the distant town of Los Vidrios), a 4,000-foot extinct volcano--El Pinacate--rears its ancient head among the lunar-like craters and ash cones of an old lava flow 45 miles long and 30 miles wide. This is one of the places where American astronauts trained for their first moon mission.

When the dune road leaves the lava field for a meadow, the sand begins to deepen dangerously. Park and continue on foot.

The dunes rise slowly out of the sparse grass in voluptuous drifts, as smooth as snow except for a delicate tattoo of coyote tracks.

As you hike farther in, the silence grows absolutely pure: not a crunch nor a stir underfoot, not a whisper of air. Everything is so blindingly bright that you squint behind your sunglasses. As far as you can see, higher slopes always beckon over the next crest, like dreams just out of reach.

For further information, contact Mexican Government Tourist Office, 10100 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 224, Los Angeles 90067, phone (213) 203-8151.