Uncertain Road for Baja Plan

It’s the best road in Baja, as far as it goes. It unfurls for two miles and then quits in the middle of the peninsula, a long way from either of the two coasts it is supposed to bridge.

Is this, as Mexico’s tourism promoters say, a road to the future that will attract hoards of American visitors and launch sleepy, rural Baja California into the 21st century?

Or is the road destined to be a dead end here in the boojum forest, one more Baja development scheme as fantastic as these giant trees, which resemble upside-down carrots and got their name from Lewis Carroll’s whimsical poem, “The Hunting of the Snark”?

The road is a centerpiece of the Mexican government’s $1.9-billion project to establish a necklace of marinas around Baja, 20 airports, and dozens of hotels, condos and golf courses.

Backed by Mexican President Vicente Fox, the project would be the biggest tourist development since Mexico turned the isolated fishing village of Cancun into a strip of high-rise hotels and swim-up bars.

The concept behind Escalera Nautica, literally Nautical Ladder, is that yacht owners, mostly from California, could put ashore at any of the two dozen new or improved marinas to be spaced roughly 120 miles apart.

The promoters of the project figure the biggest obstacle is the sheer length of the peninsula which, at 820 miles, is longer than Italy.

That’s where the new road, or “land bridge,” comes in.

Boat owners would turn over their lovingly waxed and polished yachts and cabin cruisers to a local hauling service, which would load them onto flatbeds and trailer them across the desert through the boojum forest.

The idea is that the new belt of blacktop across Baja’s midriff would attract thousands of boaters from the Pacific delighted to find a shortcut to the Sea of Cortes and its 900 islands.

But Baja has a history of shattering the grand dreams it inspires.

The Sea of Cortes already has one largely empty port near Loreto built by the same government tourism agency now proposing to build or upgrade 23 more.

Baja’s main highway is littered with abandoned recreational vehicle parks, cafeterias and gas stations built a generation ago to attract U.S. tourists. Weeds and rusting hulks of junked cars fill the spots once slated for American RVs.

Conservationists worry about history repeating itself with the new string of ports: If Mexico builds it, they won’t come. Yacht owners seem less than eager for such an expansion of marinas, fueling questions about whether pristine coastline is being defaced for uncertain gain.

Homero Aridjis, one of Mexico’s leading environmentalists, fears that even if it succeeds, the Nautical Ladder will despoil Baja’s stark beauty and displace its rare wildlife. At worse, he says, the project will set off an orgy of land speculation, causing outbreaks of “chaotic development” all along the peninsula.

Baja owes much of its charm to its stubbornly primitive nature, rooted in makeshift fishing villages, empty wind-swept beaches and isolated desert ranchos.

Backward Baja has its aficionados. American and European tourists seem perfectly willing to endure kidney-jarring roads and basic accommodations to fish, surf and kayak in clean, clear waters; to rub the head of baby gray whales in deserted Pacific Coast bays; or just to unfold a beach chair on an empty stretch of sand and do nothing.

Now, as crews wrestle giant boulders to build the first new harbor and mow down rare boojum trees to make way for a road, the proposed mega-development is pitting one vision of Baja against another.

“We have a wonderful way to dramatically change the way of life in an entire region of Mexico,” said John McCarthy, director of FONATUR, Mexico’s tourist development agency.

According to FONATUR’s projections, the new amenities would entice about 76,000 yachts from the United States to make the passage every year, bringing with them 860,000 “nautical” tourists.

This surge in tourism would, in turn, create 50,000 direct and 200,000 indirect jobs.

Impressed by such figures, President Fox has embraced the project. It’s an appealing notion for a head of state who dreams of opening the border with the United States, but knows he must generate enough jobs at least to slow down the northward migration of Mexican workers.

Tourism now stands as Mexico’s third most important economic enterprise behind manufacturing and oil, and from Mexico City, Baja looks ideal for a new jobs program.

Despite urban sprawl in the Tijuana-Ensenada corridor and the enclave of resorts spreading out from Cabo San Lucas at land’s end, Baja contains less than 3% of Mexico’s population of nearly 100 million.

Much of this arid peninsula with 2,000 miles of coastline remains unspoiled--a testament to what bad roads and scant water can do for a place.

Now conservationists on both sides of the border are pushing to preserve Baja much as it is.

Two years ago, the fledgling Mexican conservation movement--with the help of U.S. environmentalists--halted the construction of an industrial salt plant in southern Baja next to a gray whale nursery in San Ignacio Lagoon.

Now these groups are challenging the Nautical Ladder as another ill-conceived mega-project. They fear it will ruin wetlands, beaches, spawning and feeding grounds for birds, fish, whales and sea turtles.

“We learned from San Ignacio we could be the huge rock in the shoe,” said Patricia Martinez, administrative director of Pro Estero, a wetlands protection group in Ensenada.

The Mexican conservation movement scored a victory earlier this year when it persuaded the government to conduct an environmental study on the Nautical Ladder project and, in particular, the road.

Mexico has rigorous environmental laws, which sometimes require more stringent ecological assessments than U.S. law, said Mark J. Spalding of UC San Diego’s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies.

“When it works, it’s great. It also is frequently shelved and ignored,” Spalding said.

That’s what happened when the government began to build the new road a year ago, clearing a wide swath through the Valley of the Boojums, or Valle de los Cirios, a nature reserve for the bizarre trees, which are found nowhere else on Earth.

The roadwork stopped--leaving the first, two-mile stretch isolated in the wilderness--after conservationists raised Cain.

“If you do anything in a protected area, you have to do a study,” said Adrian Aguirre, director of the protected valley. “They didn’t have the permit to do it.”

FONATUR’S McCarthy and his staff said every aspect of the project--as well as the concept as a whole--will face rigorous ecological analysis.

Meanwhile, construction is underway on the first new marina in the tiny Pacific Coast fishing village of Santa Rosalillita. FONATUR estimates that 140 boats a day will someday use the yet-to-be-built boat ramp to begin the road trip across the desert to Bahia de los Angeles on the Sea of Cortes.

New roads, marinas and golf courses also would be carved out of other wildlife reserves: the Upper Gulf Biosphere Reserve, the Loreto Bay National Park, the Sea of Cortes Islands Wildlife Refuge and the Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which was instrumental in stopping the saltworks project in San Ignacio Lagoon, is now gearing up to fight a breakwater for a new marina at Punta Abreojos just up the coast from the gray whale nursery.

The environmental group Surfrider also has joined the fight, partly because five of the proposed marinas could destroy top surf spots at Santa Rosalillita, Puerto Canoas, Punta Abreojos, Magdalena Bay and Bahia San Juanico, a place surfers all over the globe know as Scorpion Bay.

“It could be devastating,” said Ruben Andrews, who co-owns a surf camp at Scorpion Bay. Surfing tourism, he points out, is second only to fishing as a source of income for these villages.

McCarthy recognizes environmental opposition rising on both sides of the border. But he notes that Mexico is in desperate need of jobs and that tourism treads far more lightly on sensitive land than does agriculture or industrial development.

“We agree with them that this is a highly sensitive area of Mexico,” McCarthy said. “If we don’t do it right, we could destroy what we set out to protect.”

Many residents are skeptical of environmental and economic promises from Mexico City.

Fishermen aren’t eager to become servants of the tourist trade. The owners of small businesses worry about being marginalized by a new economy.

In Bahia de los Angeles, for instance, businessman Guillermo Galvan is concerned enough about the proposed 1,800-slip marina that he wrote to President Fox. He urged that the marina be built small and in town to benefit the locals, not displacing them by building a large marina-hotel complex on the outskirts.

If the government wants to help the town of 800 people, he wrote, how about building a sewage treatment plant, rather than a golf course or high-rise hotel?

“Electricity is on from 7 to 11 p.m. We only have water once a week,” Galvan said in an interview. “How the hell can we manage that fancy stuff?”

Moreover, town leaders join conservationists in worrying that this project will be built and then abandoned like the last time FONATUR came to central Baja, when it built the RV parks.

“The government should know better not to waste money in projects that don’t make sense,” said Antonio Resendiz, who uses part of an abandoned RV park in Bahia de los Angeles as a sea turtle research station.

The toughest sell may be to the people the project is supposed to attract.

Experienced Baja sailers already bemoan the tedium involved in checking into a Mexican port--finding the port captain, dealing with immigration, paying fees at a bank and then going back to the port captain so he can check the paperwork.

As a result, the goal of many boat owners is to avoid anchoring in any Mexican ports.

The idea of putting their boats in the hands of local truck drivers for a trip across the desert would be funny if it weren’t horrifying.

“Would I put my boat on a Mexican truck to go up and down a mountain to get to the other side? No way,” said Nancy Dillman, who just returned to San Diego from two years cruising Baja.

Boating experts say FONATUR has completely misread the market in its projections. For 76,000 recreational boats to sail to Baja would mean cleaning out every slip in every harbor from San Diego to Sausalito, said Richard Spindler, executive editor of Latitude 38, a California-based sailing magazine.

Most of these boat owners couldn’t, or shouldn’t, tackle the cold, windy seas that stretch two-thirds of the way down the Pacific side of the peninsula, Spindler said.

Boat captains have a nickname for these conditions: The Baja Bash.

Moreover, yacht owners worry the proposed development will ruin what now attracts them to the peninsula.

“There are so many terrific natural anchorages, nobody needs these marinas,” said Spindler, who has made an annual voyage with about 100 other boats to Cabo for the past 21 years.

“For selfish reasons, we want Baja pristine,” he added. “We don’t want hotels. We don’t want golf courses. We don’t want marinas.”