Our first site of the camp we would call home for the next few days came from the water (obviously). As you can see, it looks fairly impermanent. It perches on the desert and rocks at the edge of the laguna, apparently content to be a temporary visitor.
We quickly learned that the camp was designed to be as low impact as possible. I won't give you details about the toilets except to say that although they were "flush" toilets, they required a little more work than your throne at home.
Whatever else can be said about the camp and it's lack of certain conveniences (it's comfortable, but no resort), no one (even an unapologetic camping hater like me) can deny that it is a beautiful setting. It took only one sunset to convince me of that fact.
The watching
Now if any of you have been on the typical commercial whale watching ship in Hawaii, the northwest, California or wherever, keep that experience in mind while I describe how we went about watching whales in the Laguna San Ignacio.
Our first whale watching "cruise" took place shortly after we arrived at Punta Peidra. After finding our tents and tossing our bags into them, we returned to the shoreline and reboarded the pangas. Realize that these boats sit low in the water and there are no more than nine people in them. Now realize that in general the California gray whale finds these boats and their occupants quite interesting. Now look at the picture to the right. Yes that's a 40-foot long gray whale approaching that boat.
Our first day out, no whale got closer than shown in this picture, but even this close is pretty awesome. We spent a lot of time looking at whales closer than we've ever seen them. The guides kept telling us we were lucky this day and not to expect every cruise to be like this. We all felt lucky enough and didn't think much more about it.
