Slow Baja - The 3000-Mile-No-Support Baja XL Rally with Andrew Szabo

Episode Date: May 10, 2020

Andrew Szabo created the zany Budapest-to-Bamako Rally and the 3000-mile-no-support-Baja XL Rally. In this podcast, we discuss adventure travel, Africa, Baja, off-roading, and how not to get shot when you steal a farmer's tractor to pull your car out of a silt bed! The 2019 Baja XL Rally featured some 300 entrants in 140 vehicles hailing from 30 different countries. In 2017, Szabo created The Baja 4000 -for the four thousand kilometers, the event covered from LA to Cabo and back to LA. In 2019, the Slow Baja team competed in the Adventure 4x4 Catagory in the renamed Baja XL Rally. Visit The BajaXL website here Follow on Instagram Follow on Facebook Budapest-Bamako channel on Youtube

Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning into the Slow Baja. This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza, handmade in small batches, and hands down, my favorite tequila. Hey, this week's interview is with Andrew Zabo from the Baja XL Rally. I hope you enjoy it.

Hey, man, nice to see you. Nice to see you, too. How are you? It's good. given the crazy times we're in. Keep your distance, six feet. Yeah, exactly. Socially distant, it's a hashtag.

It's a way to live. You know, I broke my quarantine for you. Actually, I'm quarantined here in my office and at home, but nobody's here in the building, so it's... Yeah, it's, uh, it looks somewhat apocalyptic out there. Nobody's here, or streets are easy. It was easy to drive down from downtown. There's no traffic at all. So, uh, thankful that you can make a lot of it.

some time for slow Baja and to talk about our mutual passion, Baja and specifically the Baja XL. Thank you for having me on the show. Yeah, Baja XL rally, I should say. Let's just jump into it. You're from Hungary, correct? Yes, I am. How did you think up this crazy rally? The Baja, it was the Baja XL, the Baja 4,000.

What was the first iteration of it? Well, it's pretty much a long story. It's a long story of how I fell into organizing these rallies and car races and motorsports events. You know, when I was a kid, I used to love watching the Dakar and East Africa rallies. I used to watch those broadcasts. And actually, you're not going to believe it, but the first time I saw the Dakar rally was in a movie theater newsreel back in the early 80s in Hungary. In communist Hungary, they still had newsreels at the time. and I said, wow, this is unbelievable.

One day I should do this when I grew up. And, you know, I just learned it recently that it's a midlife crisis phenomena, that you wanted to do the things that you dreamt about as a kid and never happened. So that's how I started getting more and more interested in the Dakar and off-road racing in my mid-30s. And it's sort of coincided with me selling one of my companies, one of my internet companies, and I had a lot of free time all of a sudden, and I said now is the time. I was 35. And I was also getting involved with the gold mining in the mining industry at the time. And somehow I ended up in Africa looking for mining deals. And that was my first time in Africa ever.

And it also coincided with an interesting story. I was supposed to take a plane from Guinea where I was looking for mining deals and go to Mali, where I was also looking for mining deals. and the airline that I was supposed to travel on had only one aircraft, and that aircraft crashed into a swamp on a Thursday, and my flight was on a Saturday. Of course it crashed. Why wouldn't it? So I quickly learned that in Africa, it's normal to go from Plan A to Plan B in a matter of days, and we came up with a plan, and we rented two cars with drivers, two rickety little SUVs.

It was sort of not slow Baja, but slow Africa for us, I think, in a Suzuki samurai from Kona Crete to Bamako. We'll love it. And I said, this is crazy, incredible. What an adventure. What an experience. And I would not have experienced this had my plane not crashed into the swamp. And I said, all right, I'm definitely doing the Dakar because it's a lot of fun to drive

in Africa. And we have time here, right? You can roll on for everybody. Okay, I'm giving you the long version. So I thought now is the time to do to Dakar. I love Africa. It's so much fun. We'll get a better car than the one that we're currently in.

And maybe we should get a GPS so we know where we are. We had no idea where we were going. We had no idea where we were. It was just madness and mayhem. And it was during the rainy season when you really shouldn't be traveling in Africa. And it was muddy. And there were bugs everywhere. And it was raining.

And we traveled for like 22 hours. it was just crazy. So I started looking into the Dakar and I started reading the rules and I started reading the requirements and pretty much I learned that the way the Dakar was set up was really just to accommodate the factory racing teams,

the well-funded racing teams and the amateurs guys like me would be the pawns in a big marketing game. And I said, fuck this. I'm not going to be a pawn. Can I use that word? Yeah, you can use any word you'd like. like it's a podcast so so yeah I'm not going to be a pawn in their marketing game and build a car

for a hundred grand and dream about it for a whole year just to be thrown out on day one in Portugal or Spain so uh so I said why don't I just go with a bunch of friends and we drive across Africa it sounds more fun to me than you know getting kicked out on day one and having my dream destroyed so so I started creating a plan I started looking at maps and I started working on a route. And the Budapest, Balmaco was born. My first rally. I said, let's go from Budapest to Balmaco. And that also coincided with the time that the Republic of Mali appointed me as their honorary consul in Hungary. So I sort of had this diplomatic mission to build a bridge between the two countries. So it sounded like a fun idea. And everybody was telling me that

it's crazy. It's not going to work. People will die in the Sahara. and there will be blood on your hands. And the whole thing just stimulated me. Like in all my businesses in my life, everybody was telling me that I was going to fail and the ones where people were the most skeptical, did the best. So I always have a little contrarian approach, I guess, to Enterprise.

And I'm driven by adventure. So I said, we're going to make it. Don't worry. You don't know what you're talking about because you've never been there. I've been there. And we'll make it. first year, we had 100 people. The following year, we had 200, then we had 400. And how does the

Baja come into this picture before? No, I'm going to stop you right there. And I just love the approach that you were building bridges through a banger rally. I mean, what diplomat thinks of that? Yeah, no, nobody is. My country's way over here. Somehow I've fooled you guys into thinking that I'm worthy of bestowing this diplomatic honor on. And, you know, know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get a bunch of folks and junky cars and drive from where I live to where you live and we're going to have a big party at the end. But let me tell you, nobody knew what Bamako was. Nobody knew that it was the capital of Mali. It's a capital of music. Now everybody in Budapest knows what Bamako is. I created brand recognition. We built that bridge and

there was no traffic between the two countries. Now people come and go and they know where Mali is. So that worked. And I think I've learned a lot of interesting lessons in diplomacy and international relations. And I loved every second of it. And as the Budapest, Bamako was getting more and more popular. And I've gained more and more confidence in putting on these events. And earlier childhood memory started coming back to me when I watched broadcasts of the Baja 1000. And that's when I fell in love with VW Beatles.

and how awesome when they're bouncing on dirt roads in Baja and you see the cacti and the beautiful landscapes. And Baja was always somewhere deep down in my subconscious, you know, through these childhood, you know, memories and video reels. And basically, I wanted to create a similar version of the Budapest Bama Coen Baja. And, you know, I kept thinking and thinking about it and creating plans. And I said, you know, it has to be much longer than the Baja 1000. It has to be at least a week.

which should be 10 days or two weeks, how should we do it? And then one year I drove down to Baja, we drove, I think, just to Bahia de Los Angeles, my daughter and I, and I said, this is crazy insane. Why have I been postponing this for all this time? And let's do it. And basically I was hoping that some of the guys

and some of the teams from the Budapest Bamako would come over to the U.S. and drive cars, rent cars, buy cars, and drive the distance. The plan was to go from L.A. to come. Cabo, then turn around and come back, go down on one side of the peninsula, come back on the other. And that was the plan. And then we had the Baja 4,000.

It was called Baja 4,000 initially because it was 4,000 kilometers roughly, maybe, you know, give or take a few hundred plus another few hundred for getting lost. And we had the first run in 2017. And it was a great success. We had like 150 people in the first run. Crazy. And it's a totally different format. It's a format that's different from everything else that has been done on the Baja or the way people have been organizing off-road races.

And that's something that's a philosophy and that's a system that I have polished over the years during the Budapest, Balmico. And, of course, on those long trips to Africa, you have plenty of time to think and you make plenty of mistakes over the years. And I think we have optimized and polished a pretty good system and a pretty good rally. The concept for those people who don't know what it is, it's not a speed race. It's not a timed event. I wanted to make a race where it doesn't matter if you have a $20,000 car or $100,000 car.

The victory will go to the team with the best driver, the best navigator, and the one who can solve problems along the way the most efficiently. Of course, you can't win the race with a $500 car. but, you know, an average-priced-street-legal car with a good driver and a good navigator should do. And a lot depends on endurance. A lot depends on how the two team members or three or four can get along with each other. And also a lot depends on navigation and navigational skills. And you have to be able to do well every single day for 10 days consistently.

So that's the racing category. And not break down and, you know, have a lot of luck. Exactly. Not get too lost. Have a lot of luck. Not break down. Correct. So it's not a timed race.

It's a navigational race. That means every day there's a starting point and there's a finish point. You have to complete the distance between the two points. You are free to plan your own route. We don't have orange flags and orange little stickers by the side of the road. There's no set course. You can go whichever way you want to go. but there are a certain number of navigational checkpoints that you have to get to

and certain navigational challenges that you need to solve. Like we would tell you, go to XYZ Village, find the well. Next to the well, there's a sign. How many turtles do you see on the sign? You know, so then you have to be able to find the village. You have to be able to find the well. Sometimes we don't give GPS coordinates. I really believe in getting to know the local cultures.

So one of my favorite navigational challenges is not giving GPS coordinates, just village names. So you actually have to get out of your car and speak to a local and find your way, which is the way adventure travel was 100 years ago, 200 years ago forever. It's the only way I've traveled. You know, get a map, get the locals. I call it HBS human positioning system. Exactly. So it is about adventure.

It is about navigation. and it is about, you know, being able to drive long distances because some days are really long and some days are really hard that way. So that's the racing category. People are interested or people want to have a competition that's part of our human spirit. We want to measure ourselves against others and people enjoy that aspect of motorsports and car racing. I would consider it a big board game or a big adventure game or a community. competition. And there are those who say, screw that, I don't need to compare my penis to somebody else's. I'm good. I'm confident. I just want to have fun. So these guys don't come in the

racing category. Oh, yeah, that's the Slow Baja team, actually. Yeah, so that's the adventure category. People who come for the personal challenge. I want to get there. I want to come back, and I want to have a good time. That's the adventure category. And then there's the spirit category, which we started like 10 years into the Budapest Bamako and the spirit category means that you keep the original founding spirit of the rally alive. You come in a junkie, crappy, unlikely vehicle, something that costs $500 or less and you complete the course or a two-wheel drive on an off-road track.

So that's the spirit category. So these are the categories. And I would say the, I like to say that the Baja Excel is, is a frame that we give and you paint your own painting in the frame that we have, whether you want to race, whether you want to have the adventure, whether you want to come in a crappy car that is not suitable for the terrain, you know, or ride a VESPA. A couple of Vespas, case in point, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so. Mom's Volvo station wagon. And really the fun thing about it is at night we meet. We have a big camp and everybody gets there and people cook together and hang out together and exchange stories and make a camp. fire. And that gives an incredible feeling and spirit to these events. And that's something I'm very proud of and that's something I'm always very keen on to find nice and beautiful campsites where people say, wow, this is school in the morning. And then they say, wow, is this where we slept

that night? This is incredible. So that's also part of the spirit and the principle of these rallies. So that's how the Baja and that's how the Budapest Bamako were born. I'm excited about the Baja Excel. I'm actually excited about both of them, but at different times, you know, every two years, we have the Baja XL, and in the intermediate years, we have the Budapest, Balmaco. So for our listeners, Andrew and I got to know each other because I was lucky enough to get my 1971 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40 into the 2019 Baja XL, and I convinced my good buddy, Ted Donovan, my Mexico Adventure buddy, I call him, to come with me. And we really didn't know a lot of what we were going to get into.

We had our 30-year-old paper, Baja Almanac paper maps, and, you know, we didn't go for the GPS. We were in the adventure category. We didn't feel like we needed to compete on speed or on GPS or on anything else. And we had my favorite tequila sponsor, Fortaleza tequila with us. So we were on a little bit different place. plan. But we, uh, we found our people and we found our speed and we had a lot of fun. And for the two of us who've been going to Baja for over 30 years together, um, we saw a lot of, uh, Baja that we had not seen before, which was very exciting to us to get into get down dirt roads, get into places and just not, you know,

get into spots that we just hadn't seen. And that, that's what, um, got us fired up. And on one of those roads, we met the guys who were actually mapping, the Mexican 1000 from Nora, which we've become friends with those folks and have signed up and we're doing the 1,000 here next month in April. So we have Baja off-roading. We're deep into it now, thanks to your event. Really? Thank you. I will have to say we had some similar, you and I had some similar feelings.

I was on a backpacking trip through Europe in 89 when the wall came down, and not exactly when the wall came down, after the wall came down. got to Budapest and saw the Formula One race there, which had the closest finish in history at that point. Tiri Bootson beat Ayrton Senna by 28-100s of a second. I happened to be posted up right at start finish there at the hunger ring, and I got so fired up to start racing with, of course, no money because I'm a college kid photographer, and I said, well, I'm going to get a motorcycle. So I bought a used BMW motorcycle, nice, slow old motorcycle, was putting around San Francisco on it,

And I said, you know, I need to start doing this adventure travel stuff. And I managed to sell my bike and pony up for a new, new in 1992, BMW Perry Dakar. So then I started researching the Perry Dakar like you thinking, oh, I'm going to do this race. And I found a book on a motorcycle. On a motorcycle. Yeah, yeah. And I found a book on it where a guy had privateered, very wealthy guy had privateered. He'd done a lot of racing.

He decided that he was going to do the Perry Dakar, got his girlfriend. and they trained for a year to do this thing. He had all the resources you needed. He built a Mercedes-Benz fort. He was doing yoga in the sauna and push-ups and this and that. Long story short, basically, through exhaustion, his girlfriend fell asleep as the navigator, and he fell asleep at the wheel and drove into a sandbank

and slept until the car ran out of gas and then woke up, like, however many hours later, one does in that state of exhaustion. I went, you know, Matt, I'm not tough enough for that. Maybe I'll just take my BMW Perry to Carr down. down to Baja and check that out. So I tick the, uh, the, the pari de car off my list and left that for the sponsored, uh, riders. And I took in Baja at a different pace. Yes. And it's also set to see what happened to the Perry Dakar recently. It's, it's really just a big, one big, long rally without really much of the adventure aspect of it once they moved out of Africa. And,

and people who have been there and people who have seen who understand motorsports, they say it's like just another event in the World Rally Championship or something like that. So, yeah, it has become a different animal and it has always been a different animal. To get back to your event, what I think is interesting about the Baja, your Baja XL Rally, is the pace that we traveled at, it was great. Right. You know, we really, I don't know what it would be like. It must be a great thrill.

And I won't knock the Baja 1000, score Baja 1,000, where you go, paring ass across Baja in a trophy truck, that must be great. And I would love to try it sometime. But the pace where you actually get to meet people, talk to people, make some photos, see some things, that's more realistic for the station I'm at in my life. And I'm very happy that you found the people that you were traveling, but that I'm also very happy that you found your crew and the people who were doing the same pace, because that's a very important aspect.

And that's a big fear in people. Like, oh my God, what if we're going to be alone? What if we don't meet anybody? it's the rule of these numbers. I guarantee you that you will find the people that you can click with. And some of the friendships that are formed on these rallies are lasting, long-lasting friendships and really incredible to see. I have seen people who have come together, like friends,

and they never spoken to each other, and they ended the friendships forever. And people who are total strangers at the start line are now, like lifelong friends, started businesses together. get together on a regular basis. It's really like a filter of who your real friends are and whom you can count on in time of trouble. It's like really interesting.

It could be a psychological study on its own. Absolutely. But yeah, I'm glad you found your friends. And that's what I tell everybody. In a couple of days, you'll meet the people that you click with. You will eventually meet people who travel at the same speed because you run into each other all the time. And then out of those people, you will meet the ones that,

you're cool and you can share things with and you have things in common with. And that's how it works. Let me tell you something. Most of these rallies, I've driven crappy cars. I have a passion for old cars. To me, a cool car starts, you know, 30 plus years. And I've driven, like, for example, this past Budapest, Bamako, I drove in a, in a 178 or 79, Porsche 924. I saw some pictures.

I thought, man, I love it. I drove the last Baja Excel in a Crown Victoria. I don't even know how old it was. But, yeah, it was a police vehicle. And it did really well. I lost a starter engine somewhere halfway on the Baja. But there was an auto parts store. Somebody gave me a ride.

We went to the auto parts store. Got a new starter engine. And these guys who also drove Crown VIX, fixed it for me. So there's always a lot of camaraderie, a lot of helping. each other that's in the spirit. And even in the rulebook, it says, you know, if somebody, let's say suffers or somebody's a victim of an accident, you are obligated to help. And if you lose points because of that, we will compensate you for the points lost. So, yeah, that's in the spirit of the Baja Excel and also in the Budapest, Bamako. Yeah, our longest night was that

drive where we were out past San Ignacio and then overlanding on the dirt track. to Lopez Mateos. And we came across the Vespa guys and Don was in the dirt fixing his Vespa, which was a, you know... In the middle of the night? In the middle of the night, two to three hour fix. And he had anticipated that this thing may break

of some belt or something drive belt. And he had fixed it watching YouTube videos in his living room at home just to say, you know, if I'm on the side of the road in Baja, I want to know what I'm doing. And I want to have fixed this. thing before, but then he was in Baja, and it happened to be really dark out in the really out the middle of nowhere.

And, you know, so we just sat there and idled for probably two hours with our high beams on, trying to provide some extra level of light and really maybe some level of care and camaraderie. I mean, we didn't break out the Fort Laezza because we still had several hours of driving to go. But, you know, we would hope that by just hanging out there with him, he knows he's not going to have to sleep there in the dirt, you know, by himself. At least we would have been there. And our vehicle provided some level of shelter to any vehicle that might have come on to the scene. But, you know, a number of competitors, we were shocked. We were so slow that we didn't think anybody would be behind us.

But competitors were behind us and each one of them stopped. How's it going? Can we offer any help? Anything? No, okay. Off you go. and we finally ended up. We had a hotel room.

We weren't camping with you folks that night. We had a hotel room in Lopez Mateos. And we ended up, I think, getting in close to 3 o'clock in the morning. And, you know, couldn't have, once we got back on the road, it couldn't have gone any smoother. We had gas with us. We had a gas station plotted in Lopez-Meteos. Of course, it was closed in the middle of the night. But we had cans, and we filled up, and we got to the town.

And, well, couldn't find our hotel. hotel room, but a police officer, you know, was kind enough to drive us out some dirt road to where our hotel was and wake up the, we thought it was the night watchman, but turned out to be the owner who was sleeping at his desk, waiting for our arrival, woke him up. He opened up our room, gave us the key. We had a couple of pops of Fortaleza, 7.30, you know, what, three, four hours later, that same hotel owner is making us breakfast. There were a couple other competitors staying there that we had told them about that hotel that had rooms. So the Israeli guys were there. And then Chris and Michael with the 924 were also there. C.M. Herald and Michael Zepresto out of Oregon in that beautiful 924. So we had a little reunion at 7.30 in the morning over breakfast, and we all got on our way. And the camaraderie of all that, again, we weren't camping with you folks that night. But it's just really cool to find folks along the way, you know, have those minutes, have those moments, make those photographs, make those connections.

and then on to the event, you know, at our own pace and our own way and on to running into folks the next day. Right. Yeah, it's interesting that I really never actually did any data mining on the competitors and who they are, where they coming from. I really didn't care much about that as long as they were there and they had a good time. But now we have a pretty sophisticated entry management system. And I see that the average.

age of the competitors or actually the median age of our competitors is early 50s so 50 to 55. There's a big spike. Me and my team. Right. And I realized that, you know, people at our age don't need to sleep that much. We can go on with like six hours or five hours. We're up early. Three hours of sleep.

Yeah. So yeah. So these long nights are not as dangerous or not as crazy as they once were. But anyway, kidding aside, yeah, so the main age group is the 50 to 55, people who have accomplished something with their lives or people who don't have to work as hard as they once had to or people who have more free time. And people also want to get out of the house and do something before they get really old. Right. So, yeah, it's interesting to see. And, yeah, as you were talking about, you know, people who appreciate nature, people who appreciate long nights, driving with friends, making new friends and laughing at each other.

and laughing at each other. Laughing at ourselves. And laughing at, exactly. So, yeah, no, I have a much clearer understanding of who they were. I initially thought we would attract people in their 20s, early 30s, but that was a mistake on my part. Well, you know, it's interesting having it. I find that to make a sweeping generalization,

younger folks who have grown up with all the answers in the world at their fingertips, they've got a device in their hand that can provide any answer to any question at any time, have a lot less comfort in, uh, what are we doing? Where are we going? What's the answer? What's, what's the route to, to, to be in an old land cruiser in pitch darkness, looking at a paper map with a headlamp, trying to figure out where we made. Without cell phone signal. No cell phone signal. Trying to figure out, we didn't, obviously we didn't pony up for the GPS. So, uh, we hardly even have an interior lighting in our vehicle. And we're sitting there thinking, where did we screw up? How do we backtrack? You know, we're going at six miles an hour.

I didn't pony up for a better lighting, which was a huge mistake because I said, well, I'm not going to be driving at night. I don't need to improve these lights. So you can't see shit. And we just backtracked and backtracked until we got to San Juanico and Baku. And then we figured out where we'd made the mistake. We asked a shop owner at 11 o'clock at night, you know, where we were. He maybe didn't know where we were going, but he knew how to get us out of his town. So we followed his directions, and then, you know, we're on the map. And then we're like, oh, here we go. And then we found the VESPA guys.

And we're like, well, at least we're not broken down on the dirt in the middle of nowhere. And we've got tequila with us. So what could go wrong? Right. And I think that young people have some, again, it may be a sweeping generalization, just have some discomfort with those unknowns. I don't like to generalize about young people and generalize. generations, you know, different generations. But I can tell you my kids who are in their teens

have like shutdowns and meltdowns if there's phone stop working and they need to get from A to B. Yeah. One time they were coming back from a rock concert in Santa Monica and there were just so many people at the concert that the reception was horrible for 4G and they couldn't use their GPS maps. And I just said, keep walking south and 10 blocks from where you are. meet you. Oh, which way is south? How do I know where south is? Do you see where the sun is? I said, where is the ocean? The ocean is on your, if the ocean is on your ride, then you're looking at south, you know, wow, okay. Like, just simple navigation skills and, and, and map literacy is frightening. I try to teach them, but they have no motivation to learn. Yeah. You know, but

to them, it might be as unique or as weird as, for example, for us. For example, for us, was using a sextant, you know, or something obscure. Yeah. Well, 25 years ago, I did take a voyage to the 50th anniversary of D-Day on a World War II Liberty ship, and those old merchant marine sailors pulled out their sextants and shot the sun, you know, twice a day just so they could, you know, prove it at 70-something years old that they still had it. So we had some modern, we had the World War II equipment.

We had the modern stuff that we'd gotten salvaged from some. you know, mothballed ship that allowed us modern GPS navigation. But those dudes did get their sexans out and pulled their sights.

And I thought it was cool. I know. I thought it was cool that they could do that old navigation stuff. Yeah, I can't, but they could.

But I can look at the sun and the sea and say, okay, if the sea's on my right-hand side, I know I'm heading south if I'm walking this direction. One time on one of the tracking missions

of the Baja XL, my friend and I got lost. We didn't really get lost, but we lost the road, that would be the correct way to say it. There was some kind of heavy storm, and the storm pushed way too many boulders in the river bed where we were supposed to drive, and we couldn't get from where we wanted to go to where we wanted to go, and there were mountains, and our GPS didn't show any of the roads.

We had, like, very limited GPS capabilities on that trip, and I took out the Baja Almanac map and we were using rulers and pencils and calculators and at one point we sent up a drone to take pictures and to look for the road from the sky and we thought we did find something. We saw something on the drone picture that it matched up with the paper map and we started driving then the conditions were just getting worse. Then we got to a ranch and the rancher said, listen, there is a road but you can't get through because of the rocks. You need to go back and you need to turn around.

me that's the worst feeling on any of these trips is when when you have to turn back and backtrack and go back to a village. That's that to me that's the ultimate disaster. Yeah, well, I'll say in our case, it wasn't your fault. It was just, we were reading a paper map at night when you can see six feet in front of the vehicle. And, you know, we got ourselves into it and we got ourselves out of it. And we had a laugh and helped some other competitors along the way. And I do remember my quote from the night, Jim, who I think was from Paradise, California, retired firefighter who had a property down in Los Burillas, and he had a great Polaris, and he rips up, and we're sitting there, you know, babysitting the guys in the

Vespas, and he's everything all right? Yeah, everything's just fine. You know, headlights aren't very good, can't see, you know, too far in front of us. We got a little loss, but we're all right now. He said, hey, let me tell you guys, everything's scarier, bigger and scarier night in Baja. You'll be fine when the sun comes up. And, you know, he was right. You know, we can only see down six, eight feet in front of us, and I should have gotten better headlights. And the reason that every vehicle in Baja, you know, every vehicle in these rallies has a bunch of lights on their vehicles is because you need them. It gets very dark. It gets very dark. I had another crazy story, I think it was two years ago, also on a track riding mission. My friend and I were

driving. The good thing, and this is what I have to say, like, the great thing about Baja as opposed to the Sahara or Africa is you're never too far away from a paved road. Like highway one is never more than like a 40-50 mile walk from wherever you might be. So there's there's the comfort of that unlike in many parts of Africa. So one time we were driving and we drove through a silt bed and we got stuck. We got seriously stuck on the middle of the car got stuck on something and we couldn't move forward, we couldn't move backward, we couldn't push it out, we couldn't dig it out, it got stuck, stuck, so I said to my friend, okay, there's a hill over there. I'm going to go up to the hill and see if I can see any human settlement or anything. And I was going up the hill, I heard a rooster. I said,

okay, that's a sign, but I couldn't see the rooster. I couldn't see a ranch. I couldn't see a farm. I couldn't see a shack, anything. And then really, I just started following the sound because I heard the rooster again. And I found this abandoned looking ranch. It looked abandoned. It looked like from a movie set. But why is there a rooster and why are there two dogs? Maybe the owner uses it periodically.

Maybe it's a weekend ranch or maybe it's a once a week thing. I don't know. So I started looking for a bigger shovel, looking for a rope, but couldn't find anybody. I was really hoping that there would be somebody with a car who could yank our car out. then I found a tractor, an old abandoned looking tractor, a tractor that seemed like a million years old and seemed like it hasn't been used. But there was a water container hooked up to it full of water. So I said, maybe there's a sign of life. And I had my friend walk back to the ranch with me, who was an engineer. And I asked him, listen, there must be a way you can figure

it out, like how to hot wire this tractor. And he actually hot wire the tractor. We disconnected the water container and we stole a tractor. And we found the rope. We found the shovel. It was like a crazy video game. Like level one, find the shovel, find the rope, steal a tractor. It was like Grand Theft Tractor 3. Level four.

The Baja edition. Return the tractor to the local who says, huh, these guys borrowed my tractor. All right. So wait, here's where the story gets crazy. So nobody's at the ranch. We steal a tractor. We drive the tractor back to the car. As soon as we turn the tractor off.

I hear gunshots and somebody screaming. And I said to my friend, shit, this is where it gets real. This is the part where we're going to get killed for stealing the tractor. So I'm like, what are we going to do? Quick, quick, quick. So these are the things where you need to have quick problem solving skills. I said, I've gathered all my limited Spanish vocabulary. And I said, listen, I have to talk to this guy.

I have to tell him the situation. I have to talk to him before he finds us. and kills both of us with his gun, and nobody will ever find our bodies here. So I said, I have to find him first before he finds us, and I have to tell him that we came in peace, and we mean well, and we are going to return the tractor and pay for the damage. Turns out it was a 72-year-old guy, and he was very angry with us. Sure.

Eventually, his heart melted, and he saw that we were in trouble, and he saw that we were genuine, and he saw that we were not out there to hurt him. And he actually drove his truck and pulled us out of the ditch and pulled us out of our pickle. And, you know, I paid him for the money. I paid him money for the water that he lost and, you know, gave him a little tip and thanked him. And he was just genuinely happy.

He said, yeah, guys, it happens here, you know. But please, next time, just let me know if you want to steal my tractor. And if you want to spend the night, you can spend the night here. And I guess probably had you decided that had you had enough signs that the rancho was actually occupied on a daily basis. Maybe you would have hung out and waited for him. But, you know, I heard a story. So I talked to some folks that I met on the Nora 500,

and these guys race vintage British motorcycle. So Hayden Roberts and Scott Tofer. And, you know, Hayden builds them. But these are old bikes, you know. And so they do these events. They did the 500. They just did the mid-400. And Hayden was telling me about when he did the Norfolk.

or 1,000, his bike broke down and, you know, out of cell phone range, team couldn't get to him, et cetera, et cetera. So he, you know, this is worst curious scenario. He had to sleep in the dirt next to his motorcycle. Woke up, somebody had come out in the middle of the night and put a blanket over him and left him a plate of food. So he eats the food and he figures, all right, well, there's civilization that he didn't see, you know, but they were kind enough to come in the middle of the night and put a blanket

and leave him plates of food. And so he figures out, you know, that there's a village and he gets to the village. Well, he's British, and he said, you know, it was a school day. And so they had him into the school, and they gave him, you know, carton of milk and breakfast. And he's talking about England. And he's giving a, you know, in-class demonstration, world class, one-room schoolhouse talking about England. And that's what his team found when they drove up. Right.

Yeah, these stories are really fascinating. And these are the stories that people who come on these rallies will experience. And these are the stories that you will remember for the rest of your life. I always tell people, like, you can buy stuff, you can have material things, you can buy the latest gadgets, you can keep up with the Joneses, but at the end, it will really not matter because you will not remember the things that you had. The only thing that will stay with you forever is the stories and the experiences that you accumulate in your life. And those are the real, you know, assets that a person has. Yeah, well, I fully agree with that. live life to to have experiences over material goods.

Let's click gears here, Andrew, because we're talking in a very bizarre time. I mean, colleges are shut down, travel is shut down, everything shut down with this coronavirus thing. And you and I are talking about travel to Mexico. You have a trip coming up in January, which is not quite a year away from now, nine months or so, right? I'm not doing the math rapidly, but nine months-ish from. now. You've got the Baja XL 2021. I know a lot of the folks that I met on the 2019 event have signed up and are eagerly waiting. I think there's going to be a lot of pent-up desire for adventure and travel. How can people find out about your event, the Baja XL? Where do they go? What can

you tell them? Obviously, you're full steam ahead to get it all planned and you've got a number of slots left. So tell people about how they can get in on it. Right. So if you're interested in learning more, there's our website, Bajaxl.org, where you find all the latest information updates and where you can enter and you can see the different categories and the entry fees. And we also have the Baja XL community and news group on Facebook. So if you do a search on that or if you go from our website, there's a direct link. You can talk to people who have done the race. You can talk to people who have been there who have experienced it. You can also see lots of pictures and video. and personal comments. We like to think of our events as communities where people can stick together and share and exchange video, stories, experiences with each other. So that's also very important.

And you can ask your questions if you have questions and you will get a variety of different answers from different angles. So BajaXcel.org and our Facebook group, Baja Excel community, and news. I think these are the best places to start. We have a YouTube channel. You can also find that. You can see videos and you can see a little short movies from the previous runs. So there's a lot of information on the internet that you can find. There's also our Instagram channel, which is, I think, Baja Sal rally. And let's just be clear, if these stories have appealed to you

in any manner, breaking down, stealing a farmer's tractor, talking your way out of getting shot, if these stories have appealed to you, dial now, operators are standing by, I would venture to say there's not a vehicle that wouldn't qualify in some manner to be in your event. Right. The motto of our events is anyone by anything,

by any means, so there are no exclusions. For Mexico, it doesn't even have to be street legal. We used to say that it has to be street legal, but if you manage to get your vehicle down to Mexico, where the rules are a little bit more relaxed. You don't even have to be street legal.

It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt to have windshield wipers or headlights at some point. And, yeah, Baja is an exciting place and an interesting place, both from a legal point of view and also, as you said, the windshield wipers. You're in the desert most of the time, but there were some pretty serious rainstorms in previous years. And one year we even had to cancel a day because there was so much rain and so many people were stuck in mud. So Baja has millions of surprises for you. And we really haven't

talked about Baja that much and what's so appealing about Baja and what's crazy about this peninsula. It's so close to the U.S., so incredibly close. You can get there from L.A. in two hours. San Diego half an hour. Right. And it's so fascinatingly beautiful, yet nobody goes there. Americans are generally afraid of going to Baja. Yeah, and after an hour south, once you've passed Ensenada, it really opens up and there are very few people. Very, very few people. And it's generally, I would say, fear.

People are afraid of what they don't know. And I'm always fascinated how nobody goes there. And that's the beauty of it and that's the magic of it that people are afraid. And I hope it will be kept that way and it will not turn into a giant resort. like Cabo has turned into. Sure. Yeah. And the other thing I love about Baja is there's a, the middle of the peninsula, there's a,

I would say a five, six hundred mile radius where there's no cell phone signal. There's no cell phone signal. There's no internet. You can just stay close to nature and, and travel like travel was intended to be. Yeah. And again, I think the prize for me and I think my buddy Ted, I think the prize is getting a chance to put your family demands, your work demands, put all that on hold for this amount of time, and have this adventure with some like-minded folks. But still, you know, it's Baja.

So if six people get together, there's going to be a seventh who walks up to sell you food. Right. You know, it's still, you know, we didn't bring the camping gear. We thought driving our old 71 land cruiser was enough punishment. So we were able to source hotels all the way along, except for the. the one night out at the mission San Borja where we did have to camp. But, you know, it seemed like there was something for everybody on your event where people had these phenomenal Earth-Romer, you know, their big trucks, you know, big rigs.

Yeah, expedition trucks. Overland expedition size, ready to drive from Baja to Mali, should you need to, vehicles to, you know, my 50-year-old truck. to very thoughtful overland, very thoughtful overland vehicles to, you know, as a couple folks in the spirit category, you know, and driving mom's Volvo wagon or your Crown Vic. So, again, I think there was a room for anyone. You've given the opportunity, you've given the location for people to find more information about it. again, I think Baja is going to be booming because they're going to be one of the few places that doesn't have this coronavirus.

So people are going to say, hey, you know what? Let's get out of here and go there and enjoy ourselves for a little bit while we're not working or what have you. I hope the coronavirus will be over by that time and it will be just a distant memory. But yeah, generally you're safer in places without other people and that really fits the description. That's Baja. The plan this year for 2021 is to go on the east coast of the peninsula, go south on the east, come north on the west, maybe have one spot where the two routes overlap or cross each other and try to avoid Cabo again as much as possible. I think we did a good job in 2019.

Cabo is a tourist factory and you can go there on your own if you wish. We felt we didn't need to go through it all. We went to Cabo Palmo from Toto Santos. Cabo Pumo is a fascinating place. Toto Santos is a great place also. If you are not familiar with these places, you can check them out. Cabo Pumo means the lung of Cabo. It's an underwater nature park or nature reserve.

I think it might even be a national park at this point. Really fascinating place. And Toto Santos is an artist community. Just like two hours north of Cabo Sanchez. Lucas. So these are great places and we hope that we can squeeze in some whale watching. Gray whales are migrating towards Baja and spending time off the coast of Baja around this time. There's just so much to see, you know, from a nature viewing perspective and whale watching and seals and great wildlife in Baja. Yeah. Again, you know, after 30 years of traveling to Baja,

You think you've seen it. To be on some of those dirt roads in the cactus forest was stupendous. I mean, the boojum and the cactus is just, it's just spectacular. And when you get out there, and, you know, just because of seemingly where we were in the event, when you get out there and there's 25 miles around you and there's nobody there, it's just you, it's something. I mean, it really is something. And it is so close to here.

and is, you know, I mean, I don't drive into the desert in California. I guess I could find that locally, but I don't. I'd much rather go to Baja and find it, and through your event, I found it, and I really, really enjoyed it. So, Slow Baja will be back in 2021, and I hope that folks listening will be quick to sign up, because I can't imagine there are that many spots available, but you'll find out through finding Andrew at BajaXL.org. Yeah, the open, the resists. reservations or the entries are still open at this point.

I don't know how many slots we have left, but these events usually close to summer or the spring before the event. Yeah, I was pretty excited when I rolled in last year or two years ago into Redondo Beach. It's what, 140 vehicles from around the world and about 300 people? Yeah, from different countries. We had like 30 different nationalities represented. So it's a good international crowd. We happen to meet the doctors on the border crossing at Tacoma. So it was nice to find that there were doctors on the trip, and they were traveling roughly at the same pace we were.

So that was an exciting news for us. I wasn't very happy about that, but that's another story. Maybe you have to get a raptor for them next time. No, they were really insisting on driving that Land Rover defender. But I have to tell your listeners that I'm very, very keen on having medical service and having medical assistance in old. these camps and making sure that the participants have, you know, full health care along the rally. And should anything go bad, you know, they're trained doctors who can take care of them. Right. Right. So rest assured, if anything happens while you're there and the doctors in their

beautiful Land Rover, if it's still running. Or whatever. No, that's being sold. No, I'm kidding. Don't come for the Land Rover. No, I'm kidding. And don't come for the medical service either. No, but it is reassuring, honestly, as you said, the median age being my age here, early 50s. It is reassuring that you've thought of that, and you've got super-capable doctors who are traveling with the event. Because also, in my opinion, the appealing part of your event is the level of non-organization might be putting it politely. I'm not offended. No, it's organized, but it's meant for. for you to figure it out on your own.

Right. We try to keep it as liberal as possible. I don't like rules in my personal life. I'm a really bad rule follower. I pretty much follow libertarian philosophies and policies. Live and let live. You know, create as few rules as possible and don't bother other people and you should have a good time.

So that's how I feel. I don't tell people where to go, where to spend the night. If you want to go to a hotel, go to a hotel. If you want to spend the night at the official camp, spend it at the official camp. If you're in the racing category, you can skip an entire stage. You miss the points for it, but you stay in the race. So that's how I feel. And I like to give that disorganized feel to the event as much as possible.

So people feel free and people don't feel locked in into anything. We tell people that we don't offer much, but we do offer medical service. There are nightly camps. You can meet other people. and we'll give you GPS coordinates and we'll tell you where the cool places are and you can meet like-minded people. So it's a very simple proposal,

but I think people who appreciate free roaming or free travel or being a free spirit, they enjoy. There's an old African proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far,

go with others. And I think that's a very fitting saying for our rallies and you can go far and you can go in a safe way there's the herd and there are the doctors and there's just whatever little planning there is will will help you and protect you to a certain extent of course if you're crazy and you do stupid things then you god help you have to uh the consequences yeah but but generally security is a key issue uh medical service is a key issue and having cool camps is a key issue for me uh security is more of an

issue in Africa where we go through some some territories where there might be evildoers or al-Qaeda was a constant threat for years in Mauritania and so we put a great deal of emphasis on security and medical service and I must tell you something all the all the horrible things that happened or the medical mishaps or most of them were because of human error on the side of our participants. For example, this year in Africa, some motorcycle rider got tired and then he asked his friend to drive his motorcycle for him. The guy had no idea on how to ride a motorcycle. He didn't have the right protective gear. He drove into a pothole, fell off, broke a bunch of his toes. And that was work for our medical team. He got taken care of and he had to go home because he had

10 broken toes. That's a tough way to go out, but I didn't notice. Again, we were kind of bringing up the rear on the Baja XL. I didn't notice any real mishaps, so to speak, of accidents or problems along those lines. So I think that you're dealing with a very different level of risk. People can still have a car accident. You can still hit a cow in the middle of the night. Bad things can still happen in Baja.

It's not totally safe. It's not a trip to Disneyland, but again, from my vantage point, bringing up the rear on a daily basis, there was no mayhem at all. And I had previously, Ted and I previously competed in the La Carrera Panamericana, which is a very fast, grueling, high-speed road race that goes from the bottom of Mexico mainland to the top. And where we were in the very back of the pack, you didn't even need the navigations because you could follow the skid marks on the road and know which Harry. returns were coming up because somebody ahead of you had approached them at 140 and needed to get down to 30 miles an hour rapidly. So you could see the debris, you could see the skid marks, and we could navigate solely from that because we were slow guys in the back of that event as well. But this event, again, in my opinion, awfully fun. The takeaways were I've made friends

out of this event that I'm still in touch with. In fact, was texting with last night. and it is an event where you will find your speed and your people and your place. So if you want to camp and get your overland gear out and, you know, be that guy and make Instagram pictures of you in these remote locations, there's ample opportunities for that. Ted and I thought we were roughing enough and found hotels every night. And there are hotels within a pretty close proximity to where the rest of the group was camping. and we found food and provisions every day without any trouble. So it was an adventure, but it was for us, it was, you know, easy to go.

I don't want to say easy. For us, it was easy to provision ourselves along the way. I hope to see you this year, next year, January. We're making some plans. I told Ted to put it on his calendar. We talked about it this morning on my drive down to see you. So what do you have, Andrew, to wrap this up? I don't want to bore people too long.

What do you have any? And if you're going to lay any fears, if you've got any last bit of advice? Last bit of advice is really just, if you are thinking about doing something like this, now is the time to do it. The Baja XL is the place to do it. If you're planning on doing a bigger race, maybe it's a good entry-level experience. But if you're in the mood for adventure, if you want to get out of the house and see Baja and experience Mexico, like most people will never get to experience it in a safe.

and secure environment, the Baja Excel is the way to go. Check out our videos, check out our website, Bajaxel.org. And we really hope to see you on Los Angeles in January. Andrew, thanks a lot for making some time for me. All right, cheers. Thanks. Bye-bye. Hey, you guys know what to do.

Please help us by subscribing, sharing, rating, all that stuff. And if you missed anything, you can find the links in the show notes at slowbaha.com. I'll be back before you. know it and if you want to receive notices on new episodes, please follow Slow Baja on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for you old folks.