The Cabo Cure : It’s still the soothing end of Baja, but now with sophistication added

Maybe somewhere there’s a destination forgotten by clock and calendar. But this stretch of coastline is the land that time remembered.

First, after millennia of starry nights, sunbaked days, scorpion tracks and peninsular calm, we Northerners joined with the Mexican tourism industry to rouse southernmost Baja California and heap it high with conveniences of 20th-Century North America. Paved roads, airports, time-shares--most of the comforts of home.

Now we seem to be bringing in the rest of the world, as well. Baguettes. Italian coffees. Half-acre lots for $750,000. Even if you saw Los Cabos just a couple of years ago, there may be a few surprises waiting for you.

The lounge chairs, swimming pools and beaches are still here, of course. But these days, a visitor can stroll by the marina in Cabo San Lucas, nip into a coffeehouse for a cappuccino, contemplate a payment plan on a new condo or play a round on a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. Then there might be lunch in an ocean-view restaurant, surrounded by Antonio-Gaudi-comes-to-Hearst-Castle architecture. Later that afternoon, that visitor can stroll down to the scales, watch the marlin boats haul in their catches, and reminisce about the old days--but soon the call will come to revel in this season’s nightspots of choice.

Later that night, the visitor retreats to the tropically lush sanctuary of the landmark Hotel Palmilla, or drowses between the swim-in bar and native desert cacti of the Hotel Twin Dolphin, or chooses among the many other hotels along Highway 1. But if a visitor comes looking for the sleepy Mexican fishing villages that first lured Americans here in the 1950s, the search could last a long, long time.

“Cabo is coming of age,” said Frank Maury, 48, who used to sell real estate in Orange County and now runs Francisco’s Cafes del Mundo near the marina. “A degree of sophistication is finally coming here.”

Of course, not everyone feels the way he does. One successful local restaurateur, disturbed by what Los Cabos has become, confided that he’s started investigating possibilities in Costa Rica.

But stagger into town from workaday Southern California, and this place has its charms. I visited several weeks ago, just before the winter crowds were due to descend on Los Cabos. (Just as a busy corridor of traffic and resort hotels is melding the towns of Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo, so has the tourist industry condensed their names into Los Cabos--”the capes.”) I drove the 1,000-mile peninsula to get here, and had the sense that Los Cabos’ history was flashing before my windshield: Days of cactus and rock and coastline and not much else. A village here and there. A fishing boat, not so different from those used 100 years ago. A fisherman’s hotel with adjacent airstrip, to recall the days in the 1940s when Bing Crosby and John Wayne starting flying south to cast their lines here. And then, whoosh!

Scene one: In the drinking-and-dancing tumult of Squid Roe, Cabo San Lucas’ most celebrated gringo bar, 61-year-old Rita Mella recounts for me her exploits in the same establishment the night before. One of the bar’s waiters had stepped up and started squirting sangria into her mouth with a fumigator’s spray gun. Mella surprised him by gulping and gulping and gulping, displaying a greater capacity for sangria, she says, than the waiter had ever seen.

“Next thing I knew,” says Mella, “I had a scarf around my neck and tequila down my throat, and I was being carried around the room.”

“She got a standing ovation,” affirms Mella’s daughter, seated at her side. “I was totally embarrassed. No. Actually, I was very proud of her.”

Scene two: At the busy scales of the Cabo San Lucas marina, soggy, smiling, 51-year-old Paul Barker of Auburn, Wash., approaches with his 13-year-old son, Joseph. On the hook between them hangs a 110-pound striped marlin.

“We kinda worked on it together,” says the senior Barker. “It was a team effort, believe me. It took about 55 minutes to bring it in. We’re gonna take a piece of it home--but not the whole thing.” Then they pose for pictures and fade into the crowd while the fish is dragged off for gutting.

Scene three: In a downtown San Jose del Cabo real estate office, a salesman in shorts and a paisley shirt pores over a local map with a young couple.

” . . . And probably by 1993 the roadwork will be done,” the salesman is saying. “And you’d be just over an hour from the airport.”

“Hmm,” says the man of the couple, who wears a USC shirt. “And what about this one over here, for $159,000?”

There’s life in Los Cabos for you: hell-raising, fish-catching and real estate speculation. And in between, snorkeling, sunbathing, shopping and sloth.

Los Cabos International Airport is neat, small, modern and not to be lingered in. Within their first steps, visitors face the carnival-barker baying of young men pushing time-share tours, hotel packages and the like. Presumably, most visitors have made their lodging plans already and can dash past that tiresome scene into the clean air, the desert landscape and the twin towns of Los Cabos.

First comes San Jose del Cabo, eight miles south of the airport. The town dates to 1730, its center a modest warren of streets congregated around a 1927 City Hall building. Estimates of the population vary from 7,000 (from the Automobile Club of Southern California) to 22,000 (from veteran Baja author Tom Miller), but all sides agree that most of these people weren’t around 10 years ago. Half a dozen hotels lie just outside town, and a succession of restaurants and tourist-oriented shops line Boulevard Mijares, Calle Zaragoza and the city plaza where those main streets meet. Still, San Jose del Cabo is quieter than Cabo San Lucas, and its business district includes more restaurants than raging nightspots.

At 2-year-old La Baguette bakery on Boulevard Mijares, baguettes run about 80 cents and are the establishment’s fastest-selling product. But another of the house specialties is el raton , a very tasty rodent-shaped concoction of raisins, nuts, chocolate and cherries. (The Mexican girl at the counter couldn’t understand why that amused me.)

As recently as 10 years ago, said Raul Borboa, an assistant at a business that sells long-distance phone calls, fax services and discount vitamins, San Jose del Cabo was unobtrusively drawing celebrities on the order of Mick Jagger.

“You’d see them in the streets, and no one would recognize them,” said Borboa. “Not any more.”

Now there’s talk of a 1,000-slip marina at San Jose del Cabo, a marketplace with hundreds of stalls and a new hospital--models for the projects are hopefully displayed at City Hall. Meanwhile, the crowds grow larger and more diverse each year, and some of the locals, dismayed that the new Americans aren’t quite as rich as the old ones, have taken to calling them “dollar tourists.”

From San Jose del Cabo, Highway 1 veers southwest toward the other, more famous, Cabo. Along the way lies The Corridor, a 21-mile stretch of hills, coastal views, resorts and rapidly dwindling open space. Rolling along the highway--which workers are widening from two to four lanes--drivers find the ocean panorama punctuated by a jumble of roadside resort pitches. Paradise Regained! Invest Here!

With the weak American economy lingering, it’s not always easy to tell the boom of rising projects from the echoes of those in arrested development. One example: Eclipse, a nightclub named to capitalize on the great astronomical event of 1991, has already closed its doors.

But other offerings continue to multiply. Around the Hotel Palmilla, four miles southwest of San Jose del Cabo, Orange County-based developer Donald M. Koll has crews at work on 27 holes of golf designed by Jack Nicklaus (18 of them opened for play this month), along with condominiums, houses and half-acre ocean-front residential lots. These are not modest plans. The Mexican government has agreed to reroute Highway 1 in order to accommodate them, and a sales representative says Koll’s asking prices on the half-acre lots start at $750,000.

I stayed one night at the Palmilla and another nine miles down the road, toward Cabo San Lucas, at the Hotel Twin Dolphin, and came away with a sort of lodger’s yin-yang experience.

The 36-year-old Palmilla, though it’s the elder of the two hotels, feels younger. Desert climate notwithstanding, the site has been transformed into a palm-crowded retreat on a rocky, waterfront point. Greenery on all sides. Whitewashed walls. Cool tile floors. Handsome furniture and an ever-vigilant staff. One strange thing: The Automobile Club of Southern California, which publishes a detailed Baja California guidebook that has served me well, inspected the Palmilla and declined to give it any of the club’s much-sought-after diamonds. As a matter of policy, the club declines to explain. Palmilla management offers no clarification, and I have no guesses to offer about the cause. At any rate, the Palmilla seemed to me a fine example of how to import tropical decadence to a fierce desert, and I had no complaints.

The Twin Dolphin, 15 years old and in the same general price range, takes an entirely different approach to its location: It yields to the desert. Owner David Halliburton has surrounded its 50 rooms with sand, cactus and the occasional lizard, and asks that guests turn on their water heaters 15 minutes before showering. Acknowledging the presence of beetles and other native insects, the staff supplies cans of Raid in bathrooms, next to the posh Caswell-Massey Almond Body Lotion, and offers a guide to the plants and animals of the area. At once rustic and indulgent, dominated by white, blocky buildings with simple furnishings, the place feels like a small college for the lazy but oceanographically inclined rich. On first impression, the place struck me as more harsh and dry than the Palmilla, but my point of view evolved. Really, the Twin Dolphin is a more natural adaptation to the desert peninsula environment, and if the Palmilla and the Twin Dolphin were the only two choices in Los Cabos, I’d probably choose the Twin Dolphin next time.

The hotels of Los Cabos, however, have not cornered the market on striking architecture in panoramic settings. Just a little farther along the highway toward Cabo San Lucas lies a restaurant that should be counted among the contemporary wonders of Los Cabos. To get there, you exit the highway at the Misiones del Cabo condo complex, pass a guard station, park, politely brush off a Century 21 real estate salesman (they stand duty all day long) and emerge onto a spectacular deck. Da Giorgio is the restaurant’s name, and the cuisine is Italian, but the food may be the most unremarkable of its attractions.

Forty feet overhead slants a thatched roof. Here and there, stone columns six feet around jut into the sky. Tile mosaics glitter underfoot, freshwater pools spill into one another, and just beneath the bluff top that supports all these features, Pacific surf seethes. Oh yes, and in the evening, stray kittens tumble among the footlights in the landscaping, throwing leonine shadows on surrounding boulders. The restaurant, designed by Mexican architect Marco Antonio Mulroy, opened in October, 1991, and serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. My advice to the frugal traveler: Go for coffee or dessert, and drink in the view.

If you’re still heading southwest on Highway 1, Cabo San Lucas proper will be leaping up around you any moment. The city is not so large--11,000 residents, by the Auto Club’s estimate; twice that, by some others--but it’s hyperactive. Here’s a town built by the idea of big fish and the promise of snaring one on a hook, yet now it offers so many side attractions that thousands of tourists these days never raise a pole. They ride horses, snorkel, soak up sun, perhaps have a drink or two or three, and marvel at the garish colors splashed on the walls of restaurants and bars up and down Marina Boulevard.

Many contribute to the evening din at local nightspots, including Squid Roe, the Giggling Marlin, the Rio Grill and Cabo Wabo, which is topped by a phallic tower and owned, employees say, by the rock band Van Halen. (I was too early for the Cabo Wabo Thanksgiving bikini contest. But the idea of it left me wondering how they celebrate Easter.) Fortunately for all concerned, these places are all within walking distance of each other.

By day, the place is quieter. Next to the landing in the Cabo San Lucas marina, between the boats and the souvenir peddlers in the artisans’ market, a dozen men stand waiting at lecterns. Each looks as if he will shortly deliver an address on a profound subject--but in fact, each is selling spots on the next day’s fishing expeditions. Nearby, others sell rides in glass-bottom boats. Above this scene hangs an apparition from the Hollywood Hills: on the rocky hillside, dozens of costly but precariously balanced homes.

In Plaza Bonita, a pinkish-mauvish three-story mall that stands on Lazaro Cardenas between the sea and downtown Cabo San Lucas, Frank Maury chats up the customers at Francisco’s. He came, he says, because he one day realized that “there’s never been a decent cup of coffee down here. Never.”

Last summer, Maury opened Francisco’s, offering cups of cappuccino for $3 each, unlocking the doors at 6 a.m. to catch the blinking gringos on their way to the fishing boats. When I found him, he was claiming to sell the only cappuccino in town. Maybe for a while he was--but if Los Cabos offers any lesson at all, it’s that times change fast. Just three blocks away, a sign at Molly’s American Bakery and Sandwich Shop advertises that same sought-after fuel.

GUIDEBOOK: Out and About in Los Cabos

Getting there: For those not interested in driving all the way down Mexico’s Highway 1, the standard route is by air. Alaska, Mexicana and Aero California airlines fly regularly to the San Jose del Cabo airport from Los Angeles and San Diego, and United has recently added some flights on the route. Restricted round-trip coach fares for most airlines start at $220 for travel after Jan. 6.

Getting around: Rental cars are readily available. For those who expect to spend more time lounging at a single resort than exploring, it may make more sense to take taxis. A cab ride between San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas costs about $18. Also, prepare for iffy phone service between locations in Baja; some places don’t have phones.

Where to stay: In addition to the two hotels I stayed at--the Twin Dolphin and the Palmilla--I looked at four others. Visitors should keep in mind that 10% tax is added to room charges, and a 10%-15% gratuity may be included in your bill.

The 56-unit Hotel Twin Dolphin (seven miles east of Cabo San Lucas on Highway 1; 213-386- 940) offers a hilltop location, desert landscaping, pool, nearby snorkeling and double-occupancy winter rates of $260-$410 Nov. 1-May 31. The hotel bar surrounds a massive stone fireplace; the restaurant serves fixed-price meals, lunch for $16, dinner for $30.

The 72-room Hotel Palmilla (five miles west of San Jose del Cabo on Highway 1; 800-637-2226) charges winter rates (Nov. 1-May 31) that begin at $185 a night on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays; $220 on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, double occupancy. A separate five-bedroom cottage fetches $900-1,500. The hotel this month opened an 18-hole golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. Nine more holes are scheduled to follow next fall. The hotel restaurant, La Paloma, offers entrees from $12 to $26.

For tighter budgets, there is the Tropicana Inn (Blvd. Mijares No. 30, San Jose del Cabo; 800- 94-6835 or 011-52-684-2-1580), a tidy tile-floored, two-story, 40-room hotel with a swim-in bar and a restaurant, in downtown San Jose del Cabo. It opened in mid-1991. Double-occupancy rates, which sank to $40 nightly during the low-demand days of October, run $65 through Dec. 19 and $75 Dec. 20-April 21.

Other options: At the 22-year-old, 100-room Hotel Finisterra Cabo San Lucas (built into a cliff above the beach; 800-347-2252), double rooms through April begin at $85 nightly, and the hotel’s newly completed Palapa Beach Club offers 87 more units starting at $120 nightly. At the 18-year-old Solmar Suites (beachfront in Cabo San Lucas; 800- 44-3349), a renovation was due to be completed by this month, expanding the number of units from 69 to 80. Double-occupancy winter rates begin at $130. The 3-year-old, 299-unit Melia Cabo Real (Kilometer 19.5 on Highway 1; 011-52-684- 3-0967) rents double rooms beginning at $145 nightly from January to April 11.

Where to eat: Los Cabos is filled with seafood restaurants and an increasing number of places offering other specialties.

Ivan’s (Blvd. Mijares No. 16, San Jose del Cabo; no phone) features a pan-European menu, from English pork chops to spaghetti bolognese , and a view of the old San Jose del Cabo City Hall across the street. Entrees run $9-$15.

Da Giorgio Restaurant (Kilometer 25 on Highway 1 between San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas, behind the Misiones del Cabo vacation condo development; 011-52-684-2-1988) has a spectacular view and setting, and, on the night I ate there, lackluster Italian food. Go for a drink, or dessert and coffee. Entrees run $10-$20. (Note: There’s another, older Da Giorgio Restaurant on a hilltop near the Hotel Palmilla.)

Damiana Restaurant (Blvd. Mijares No. 8, San Jose del Cabo; 011-52-684-2-0499), relatively venerable at 10 years of age, includes three levels, colorful textiles on the walls and a patio bordered by bougainvillea. Mexican. Entrees: $8-18.

Where to have sangria squirted into your mouth by a waiter with a fumigator’s spray gun: Squid Roe, at Marina Boulevard and Lazaro Cardenas in downtown Cabo San Lucas. It’s the longtime leading nightclub choice among Americans seeking loud music, dancing and drinking. (For a slightly less frenetic scene, there is the Rio Grill, about a block west.)

For more information: The 17-year-old Mexico West Travel Club (P.O. Box 1646, Bonita, Calif. 91908; 619-585-3033) offers discounts on insurance, accommodations and restaurants, and help in obtaining fishing and hunting permits. It also publishes a monthly newsletter and acts as a resource to members traveling in Baja California. Membership is $35 yearly for individuals or families. The year-old Discover Baja Travel Club (3065 Clairemont Drive, San Diego 92117; 800-727- 2252) offers a similar range of services. Memberships are $39 a year, or $29 for those who join before Jan. 1, 1993. Baja Explorer Magazine (11760 Sorrento Valley Road, Suite K, San Diego 92121; 619-793-1704), published six times yearly, covers sports and travel opportunities from Los Cabos north to Tijuana. A year’s subscription is $16.

Other sources are the Mexican Government Tourism Office (10100 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 224, Los Angeles 90067; 310-203-8191) and Baja California Tourism (800-522-1516).