After a pretty challenging work week, Switch and I made a pact to get out to the beach this weekend. I voted for Balandra Bay, which I’ve heard much about but have never been able to visit. Saturday morning we checked the tides (necessary – I’ll explain why), threw towels/water in the car, and hit the road.

Balandra is a shallow bay to the south-east of La Paz, about 1.5 hour drive from our house. On the way we spotted desert plumeria in full bloom on either side of the highway. I’d heard that plumeria was native to the area, but certainly didn’t think it actually grew wild out there. It was strange to see the bright white clusters of flowers poking up among the dry expanse of palo verde and cardones.

We rolled up to the bay about 10:30am and found an already pretty populated beach. All the palapa “umbrellas” were taken, so we headed past them and set up with our ubiquitous Tommy Bahama umbrella. You can almost tell the umbrella’s age by the color and style – Costco only stocks one color/pattern at a time.

It was already warm (the temps are much less temperate on the other side of the Baja peninsula), so we touched up our sunscreen and hit the water. At low tide the water really only comes up to your ankles, but we were solidly at high tide so as we walked toward the other side, we were about waist deep. The sand is bright white and fine and the water about 80 degrees – pretty perfect on a day that was working it’s way up to 95. The bottom is mostly sand, but we did see schools of fish. One of these schools was getting dive bombed by a flock of magnificent Frigatebirds a couple hundred yards away. They didn’t seem to care about the swimmers wading around them – the meal was more important.

Switch retreated to the shade of the umbrella to read and I sat in the shallow water close to shore playing with the sand. Look at all the tiny shells! Eeeee!

Shortly thereafter, we retreated to the other side of the peninsula to avoid burning to a crisp and vowed to time it better on our next visit so we could spend more time in this lovely place.