I needed to go south, I needed to come here to Baja, because I needed to get away from my hometown in the Northern California, which had become a bit too touristy and superficial and wet and dreary for me.

I''d heard people say that Baja is primitive and poverty-stricken. In their whispers, I heard an excitement. There was danger in Baja. It was on the other side of the border and it was wild. Since Baja is easily accessible by car and only a few days'' journey down Interstate 5, I decided to take a trip there.

Past the border is San Felipe, a large mountain range covered with steep columns of greenery mixed with desolate spots of nakedness and dead treetops. Vacant patches revealed a thick, enduring, auburn soil. Ambling down a mountain road was quite a feat for my dilapidated, rusty 1984 Datsun pickup.

Buses, trucks and cars repeatedly threatened us as they whisked by at swift speeds, not at all minding the lane markers (such as they were). I spotted lots of automotive debris along the highway, and knew that this was indeed a dangerous road. And I was thankful some time later when I safely reached my destination.

I arrived in San Felipe in the middle of the night as bright stars pierced the ebony sky in patterns that could only have been woven by the hand of a most meticulous artist. The air spritzed traces of sea salt on my face and neck at the same time as the unfinished moon lit a path to the darkness. We rolled into a vacant lot and went to sleep. Just a couple of hours later, a loud thump on the window startled us awake. There were four flashlights shining in my eyes.

"Hola," a man said through a 2-inch opening in the window.

"Are you OK?" another man asked.

"Do you have any guns or drugs?" yet another asked, in a more authoritative voice.

"No sir," I replied as I fished through my sleeping bag looking for my pants. "We don''t have guns or drugs."

With that, the lights retreated and the men in sandy-brown military garb found their way back to the boats they had left on the shore. I felt my heart racing. But soon, I went back to sleep.

When the morning light came, I saw that the truck was just a few feet from the sea. It was the first water I''d seen since I left home.

After a bit, we decided to head off to San Felipe. The northern entrance to the small town welcomes all who visit with a grand sign etched in weathered paint. A dusty dirt road connects the front road with the back roads and the side roads and the middle roads like a giant, deformed hand. The main vein lies in what natives call the Malecon, which is sandwiched between the Sea of Cortez on the east, and the bars and restaurants on the west. Facing the sea and rotating slightly to the north lies a shrine erected to the Virgin de Guadalupe atop a hundred feet of steep, rocky terrain only the most professional of climbers would dare attempt.

The shrine connects the townspeople to ideas and practices of Christianity that Cortez introduced in 1539, although 1746 remains the date that Padre Fernando Consag landed and formally christened the place San Felipe de Jesus. The natives tell stories of peoples who enjoyed the beauty of the area long before the Europeans arrived.

At the southernmost entrance lies a gringo camp for tourists encircled by an 8-foot high chain-link fence topped by a spiral of barbed wire. This border creeps around their village within a village and eventually cuts in to the shore. Newly planted palm trees shade the tourists'' RVs and small cabins in the winter and though they offer some of the only shade in town, they sit alone in the heat of the desert summer.

I parted from the Malecon on to Calzada Chetumal and to the Mar de Cortez, where I saw the heart of the shopping district. Makeshift awnings of blankets and shelves of earthenware pottery glazed in fantastic red and yellows strangle the sidewalk. Strings of rope hang from brick overhangs displaying beaded barrettes and turquoise belt buckles. Tables line the storefronts, offering sunglasses, silver jewelry, tennis sneakers both slightly used and overly used, sunhats, sunblock, cassette players, dresses, shirts, sandstone pipes of all shapes and sizes, and flags from all over the world. Portable aluminum arbors frame and disrupt the stores'' views to hang T-shirts, wool sweaters and tapestries. Women and children squat between stores, peddling their hand-painted gourd turtle whistles and decorative fish ornaments.

I bought a hand-painted ashtray from a young boy for $2 and hurried off to a restaurant to meet an American friend. I scrambled inside the restaurant and joined my friend at a turquoise booth. The waitress brought warm tortilla chips and a collection of salsa of different potencies: red hot, medium-green and pink-mild. She placed it all down on an immaculate, plastic, floral tablecloth that barely covered the table.

After we placed our orders, a man wearing an exhausted black blanket with an image of a howling coyote walked into the restaurant and uttered a few words to the waitress. Then he walked over to us.

"Hello, can I sit?" said the man as he hovered over our table. He seemed to be about 50 years old, but when I asked him his age he said he didn''t know. He grew up an orphan in Mexicali and there were no records of his birth. His fingernails were unevenly cut away by his teeth and the sallow tips revealed mounds of grease and dirt. He balanced his body on hands and knuckles that were dry and scaly, and each time he made a fist, a brighter shade of white appeared. We invited him to sit.

"Thank you," he said. "Name''s Pelon. Buy me a beer and I''ll give you a tour around San Felipe. Start tonight around the corner. You from the USA?"

He sipped his beer and, as he took off his straw hat, we could see that the top of his head, the sides and the back were all tattooed. These were not trendy tattoos that people in the States have -- these were prison tattoos. In fact, a 3-inch etching on the back of his head read PRISON, followed below that by the numbers 107666.

The outline of a woman with large breasts, a tiny waist and long, wispy hair spread her legs around the art and extended herself to the top of his head. Her high heels pointed down his neck to a bottle of beer name "Lolita" that sat above a rose pierced by a syringe.

Pelon was a great tour guide -- if getting drunk was the goal. We drank at least one beer in each of the five bars he most enjoyed. Of course, the beers were on us. Club Miramar, a bar that extended to touch both the Malecon and the back street, played Jimmy Buffet''s "Margaritaville" five times in the hour we were there.

Men dressed as women collected tickets from the bartended for each drink someone bought for them that they didn''t drink. Several of these "women" wore skirts and makeup better than I could ever dream of and fooled me almost every time. Some pouted as though they felt the pains of PMS, while others obsessively replenished the many coats of lipstick already caked on their hairless lips. The bar off the strip with no name on the door (or anywhere on the front of the building) offered jukebox music from the 1960s. The beers and the interesting surroundings has me singing along.

As the night wore on, we were joined by others -- Felipe and Carlos, Evita and Selina -- all of whom we followed down alleys and across streets and past shacks to meet more people and find more amusement.

We went to the home of Evita''s cousin, Juan, who had a nice fire going in a barrel out in front. I sat peacefully by the fire outside when a guy name Gusano walked up to me.

"Hey, wha''s up? Who you?" he asked, looking at me.

"Hola. Estoy Susana," I replied, finally feeling comfortable enough to use my Spanish. He seemed satisfied with my answer and proceeded to tell us about a party he had just come from. He said he and his friends were going back to it, and invited us to join him.

We stayed at the party for two hours and by daybreak we tried to locate a spot in which to set up a tent. As we left, we heard Evita and Carlos yelling at Gusano in sober tones.

"Porque" is the only word I knew. It means "why."

After jumping in the truck and briefly discussing an entertaining first day and night in San Felipe, we drove to the beach and found a spot to camp. The sun had already risen and my eyes itched and swelled, so I reached for my sunglasses. My friend decided to change into cooler clothes because the sand acted as a magnet and pulled the morning sun fiercely to the Earth.

"Shit!" he screamed from behind the truck. "Someone stole our shit! Stole it right out from the back of the truck. Broke the padlock and stole our shit!"

I started to chuckle a little bit, not out of titillation but out of disbelief. I couldn''t believe that I didn''t pay attention to the warnings. I walked around to the tailgate where my friend sat looking at the emptiness.

"Shit! I don''t even remember how to get to that damn party. Do you? Do you remember how to get back there?"

"No, I don''t." I really didn''t, but I also didn''t care to try. I knew exactly who stole our stuff because the dawn had re-awoken my spirit from its drunkenness way before we left the party. Gusano stole our stuff. He stole it while we were in the party and that''s why Evita was shouting at him. But neither of us could do anything about it now.

"Gusano took it and it''s long gone. Maybe if we see Evita in town again, we''ll ask her, but it seems to me that they are a huge family and even though he wronged them, he is still family. Anyway, he didn''t take everything – just some clothes. We still have plenty."

My friend looked into the back of the truck and agreed with me. He originally thought we had brought too many clothes. Now he realized that we had the perfect amount.

Later that week, we found Evita shopping in the grocery store and we invited her to lunch at our favorite restaurant, El Cortez Barefoot Bar and Restaurant. She accepted and we ate exquisite Mexican food. We never mentioned that our things had been stolen. When we parted, she gave us a friendly piece of advice.

"Gusano means worm," she said. "Never trust a worm."