Trod Bogs Sadly – Oddstray's Blog

Today we drove south, probably the longest drive of this trip – about 220 miles – all the way to Guerrero Negro. This is in Baja California Sur, just south of the 28th parallel, and the smallest state in Mexico. We’re about halfway down the peninsular.

The roads on the way varied from pretty darn good to absolutely terrible and bone-shaking. But we had left the traffic behind and pretty much had the road to ourselves.

By the time we’d been to the bank to get some cash, to the ‘SuperMercado’ to get some beer and cookies, and to the Pemex to get some fuel, we checked in at the actually very nice and modern Hotel Terrasal (only 600 pesos per night, just over $30!). A bit road-weary, we just chilled, then ate at the hotel restaurant (OK but not stellar), watched CNN for a bit and went to bed.

It turns out that Guerrero Negro is full of tourist visitors here to see the grey whales at the terminus of their huge migration at the Ojo de Liebre lagoon, also known as Scammon’s lagoon. Many years ago, we took a boat out among the whales, and it was a fantastic experience that we will remember forever.

Today, we went on a tour of the  World’s Largest Salt Facility  Read the article, it’s very short.

We have some pictures from the trip:

This is one of the evaporation lagoons. For some reason, it turns pink(ish) as the salt gets more concentrated.

These are the monsters that carry all the salt from the ponds to the washer. You can get in idea  of scale by the size of the driver!

Here’s one of these monsters filling the hopper, and below you can see the salt being ‘washed’.

After it’s washed, the salt ‘falls’ onto an extremely long conveyor belt, and is either loaded onto a ship, or added to the salt mountain

The salt mountain is inset. What is most interesting is that little blob on top of the gantry is, in fact, an eagle’s (late edit) osprey’s nest.