Slow Baja - Travel Talk With Slow Baja Pacific Overlander Delivers World-Class Travel Experiences

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

On today's Travel Talk we sit down with Mason Schreck and Gabe Erivez from Pacific Overlander Expedition Vehicles. Pacific Overlander offers fly-and-drive adventures made accessible through turn-key, camp-ready vehicle rentals. Informed by years of backcountry travel and a passion for adventure, Pacific Overlander’s rentals, tours, and vehicle builds are the highest quality. Their fully-outfitted vehicles, 24/7 support, and team of dedicated professionals provide all the resources necessary to enjoy your time on the trail in both safety and comfort. Pacific Overlander is headquartered in Las Vegas and can accommodate one-way itineraries to or from many US cities.  Check out their all-inclusive Baja guided tour here. Follow Pacific Overlander on Instagram Follow Pacific Overlander on Facebook

Hey, welcome to Travel Talk with Slow Baja. I'm very excited this week to bring you a show with Pacific Overlander. You're going to get to hear from Mason, the founder, and Gabe, he's the guide that is running a 10-day guide trip, fully outfitted guiding trip from San Diego down to Cabo San Lucas. And Pacific Overlander has some great vehicles. So I've been listening to the Slow Baja show and you want to get off and do some stuff in the dirt and you don't have the right vehicle for it. Pacific Overlander may be the solution for you. They've got vehicles for rent in Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and you can get off into the great national parks here in the States, or if you're adventurous, you want to get down to

Baja, well, you can get down there with Gabe and a 10-day guided tour, and you're going to hear all about it in today's show. Mindful travel, Slow Baja style travel, slow Baja-approved travel. So check it out. And also, if you've been enjoying the show, please, please, give me a review over on iTunes. If you're an iTunes listener, Spotify, your reviewing opportunities coming up. They're launching that system. So please, when it comes out, do hit it. Give me a five-star review over there, and I appreciate that. And, well, it's almost sold out to the bare cupboards, but Slowbaha.com, if you need some Slowbaha merch. And new show coming next week, look forward to bringing in a lot of fun stuff in the new year.

So thanks for listening. 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, I want to tell you about your new must-have accessory for your next Baja trip.

Benchmark Maps has released a beautiful, beautiful Baja California Road and Recreation Atlas. It's a 72-page large format book of detailed maps and recreation guides that makes the perfect planning tool for exploring Baja, pick yours up at Benchmarkmaps.com. All right. Mason, Gabe, it's delighted to finally have this thing rolling, and here we are. I've got kind of a crazy delay in my own head as I talk to you. So this will be interesting. Let's get into a second of Pacific Overlander and Gabe as a guide and how.

how that whole world happened. Yeah, totally. Hey, Mason, want you to say hello. Introduce yourself. Okay, yeah. Well, Mason Trek here, and I am now an Orange County resident. Used to live close to Michael up in San Francisco,

but I live down in South California now have been operating Pacific Overlander for about five years now after founding it in San Francisco in 2016, which sounds like a big number. It's amazing. We're in the 20-20 yachts. Yeah, and so give me a second on what Pacific Overlander is. You rent great vehicles for great adventures. Yeah, well, thank you. Yeah, I mean, basically came to the realization that we live in a super adventurous area without the same sort of adventure vehicles that other adventurous global destinations had, like South Africa, for example, or Australia.

So tested the market by creating a few different rental options. Like we had a Land Rover Defender initially and Toyota Tacoma Land Cruiser 200 and put roof tents on them and saw, you know, some immediate interest in people renting these vehicles from San Francisco and the rest is sort of history. It's, you know, just been slowly growing a fleet of vehicles that now we operate out of Las Vegas with. Essentially, the vehicles are turnkey camp rentals. They come with all of the needed camping equipment. So that's rooftop tent, fridge freezer, dual burner stove, plating and cooking wares, table chairs, etc. Making, you know, outdoor camping and national park visits, national forests, camping, etc. us super accessible for fly and drive adventures.

And then more recently, in the past couple years, we've been developing a foreign and domestic guided tour program. The domestic offerings being Grand Canyon and Death Valley, and the foreign offering being trips through Baja, California. Enter Gabe. Hey, Gabe. the machine. Here we are. How's it going, guys? Miguel, how are you? Well, thanks for having me. Huge fan. Well, good to see your face and have you here on my computer.

So, Gabe, is it true that you got a guiding job with Pacific Overlander by basically trolling Mason? Basically. That's kind of how it's kind of how to end it out. Fortuitously, is it a fortuitous event? No, I mean, it was, I guess in today's day and age, you know, a lot of opportunities do come up via, you know, the social media and various online platforms. But yeah, it was a post, I remember this, it was a post about, I don't know, something in the Viad of Loserios outside of Catavini and I saw, you know, the cactus and the Bujum trees. And the, like, a couple days previous to this, I was kind of down the wormhole of actually looking at permitting and those kind of specifics for operating in national, naturally protected areas in Baja. And so it was just off the top of my head, I was like, wow, this guy looks really legit.

I wonder if he does have like all the permitting. So I just kind of shot that out there. And then, yeah, here we are today. Mason reached out. And we actually hit it off very well. And yeah, that's kind of it, basically. So let me jump in and make a couple of assessments off the shooting from the hip here. Mason, your equipment's top notch.

You don't fool around. That's really, you're really offering great stuff for rent. And it appears to me that you decided if you're going to have a guy, you might as well have a guy who's really top notch as well. Am I right? Yeah, 100%. I mean, you know, in building Pacific Overlander, the idea was always that if you're going to bring a product like this to market, you want it to be as good as it possibly can be. And that's not just like a brand decision.

That's like a safety, you know, an experience level decision. And so, you know, we give vehicles to people that they, you know, within two hours or, you know, deep in Death Valley with one of our vehicles and by themselves. And so there's really no middle ground there. You either do it to the best of your abilities or you don't do it at all. And so that sort of rationale applies, you know, to vehicles as much as it does to our staff and partners. And so, you know, when looking at Baja, California and thinking, you know, who are the best people to run our operation down the peninsula, the obvious choice was somebody who had a ton of dedication, passion, and, you know, no fear about speaking up to protect the area, right, which, you know, led me directly to Gabe, you know. It's a great story and I love telling it that, you know, that essentially I found Gabe via social media. You know, and at first you're going, well, who's this guy who's asking about our permits and Baja?

And then you go, you know what? That's exactly the person you want to work with. It's somebody who cares enough to put their voice out in a public space and protect, you know, an area that, you know, of Gabe and my understanding is some of the best natural history and eco-regions in North America. I mean, the Viadello Cirios is incredible, and Gabe knows it intimately and, you know, has committed a lot of his time and attention to the peninsula. So it was a natural evolution to, you know, see if there was a partnership to work. between us. So on that front, a lot of people think there aren't any rules in Baja, but there are. Gabe, can you talk about that a little bit? Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, it's interesting because

I think this subject, its roots are really attached to, you know, almost this kind of this culture, not a culture, but the, you know, the roots in Baja go back to as far as how it's, used how the land is used and it and it really points back to like western resource exploitation essentially and you know that goes back to the era of you know scammons lagoon and the whaling um you know to mining to the fur trading you know off the central region um the central viscaino region with the coastal islands these las cedros um particularly with the fur trade during the mid-1800s. But yeah, you know, Baja and, you know, the whole state of Mexico,

all of Latin America, you know, they do have a system of naturally protected areas, which are on par with our own national park systems here in the U.S. And so they do have rules and regulations and permits. It's just that, you know, in a lot of these regions, like the Vyde Los Zedios or the Viscayino Biosphere Reserve, you know, it looks like wide open expanses of just nothingness, or not nothingness isn't, there's no nature, but of course, you know, no infrastructure. There are no, you know, national,

there's no rangers, really, in most of these regions. There are rangers, but you don't see them, you don't see the vehicles, you don't see the buildings, etc. But they are, in fact, federally protected under Mexican law. So you should approach those with a sense of respect and vigilance, of course, when you are recreating outdoors. But yeah,

it's all protected. Yeah, violos, go for it. So, Gabe, how do you describe Baja to people? Because you just touched on several regions. You've got the Gulf, you've got the Pacific, you've got the mountains, you've got a history of extractive

tourism or extractive development, not tourism, extractive development, which is how the whole world was kind of settled. But how do you describe Baja today? Baja today, I think when I speak of contemporary Baja, California, it brings me a lot of excitement. You know, I do have a lot of peers in Baja academics, photographers, wildlife biologists, ecologists. And, you know, there is this new wave, with the younger generation, more oriented towards conserving and protecting nature in Baja California specifically.

But also there's been a lot of work done specifically with groups like Therapan Sular, and they've done a lot of work around San Quentin and the Vaya Tranquilo around the Elrosario region. But they are really kind of revamping, it seems to me at least, a lot of these protected regions and like San Pedro Martyr as well. There's a lot of conservation work being done up there regarding the forestry and the wildlife. So I would describe the state of Baja, California today,

is there's kind of an energy in the air regarding like this new wave of, not a new wave of tourism, but a new wave of tourism that's more informed, I think, at least regarding the different outfitters and stakeholders regarding protecting the ecological and cultural heritage. I think that's like at the pinnacle right now of Baja, really, to me. Mason, tell me why you would ever want to rent your beautiful vehicles to people to drive in a place that's just open, desolate. you know they're going to get dirty and there's not going to be AAA to come pull them out one call away. So what would ever make you decide you to do that, decide for you to do that?

Yeah, totally. Yeah, it seems a bit of a crazy business model, right? Take this truck and don't lose it to the incoming tide. Yeah, so it's sort of the same in the US, right, like in Death Valley or the Southwest or anytime you bring something of value that humans build into a natural and chaotic system, there's risks involved. My thinking is people don't feel truly alive until they go there. So, you know, I don't, I didn't want to really, So my background is as a psychotherapist. I was trained in counseling and spent a lot of time thinking about spiritual experiences and transformative experience, you know, how people evolve in their lives and as people.

And my pivot from that to the, to do a business kind of went against. some of my core operating beliefs, which was that, you know, I should really be out there trying to help people and not build something that is essentially a business. That belief has a lot of flaws in it. And, you know, now I see that you can have a business that also helps people. And I believe that getting people out into wild places and increasing access is transformative. And for me, it has been. My first, you know, my first fantasy of being post, you know, postgrad out of college

was let's build this Tacoma, me and a buddy, and, you know, throw stuff in rubber made bins and, you know, try and figure out if we could find an air compressor at a hardware store and and let's, you know, spend, we want to travel the Bahá Peninsula, we want to go into mainland Mexico, we want to explore. It was just, you know, a natural progression for my friend group and I to want to spend time in these areas. And it, you know, it's clear to me that I'm not an outlier that a lot of people want these types of experiences. And seeing our guests come back from these experiences, saying things like trip of a lifetime or or even, I'm never going to do that again because that was super hard, but super rewarding. And then, you know, a year later, they're like, I want to do that again.

With friends this time. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you just see, you just see the transformative nature of being able to be self-sufficient in a wilderness. wilderness, not really a wilderness environment, it has a road, but as close to wilderness as you can get with a vehicle and, you know, enough, you know, safety built into your outdoor experience, which we help with. That's really interesting to me because I went through a similar sort of a transformation exiting, a very fun but very tiring, stressful, 85 hours. R-We tech, desk, classic car, crazy drive, job. And the first thing I did after I exited was the Baja XL rally. And that's 3,000 miles on dirt in 10 days in a 50-year-old truck with a bunch of other

crazy people who are doing the same thing in newer vehicles. But it made me realize like getting outdoors, even with a bunch of other people. Now, I didn't see them because I was going slow, so I would run into them here or there, what have you. But it was truly transformational to like just getting that deep, inky, black Baja night and see those stars and smell that campfire and smell that campfire smoke on you when you wake up in the morning. And it was just one of those things that just made me say, like, this is, this is what I need to do. I need to have this in my life much, much more often. I need this capital A adventure. And one of the things that made me really stop and take a look at the two of you and what you're doing,

Gabe has Be Here Now in his philosophy, which is very similar to my Be where you are when you're there. And Mason, your vehicles allow people to sort of slow down and get out and be where they are if they're capable. And now you bring the whole psychotherapy to it, which surprises me that that's actually in your background because it's brilliant. So expand on mindful travel if you care to. But let's take a quick break so I can pay the bills with my friends at Baja Bound. If you're going to Baja for mindful travel, pick up your insurance from Jeff Hill at Baja Baja

We'll be right back. Pady, wish you had joined us on the Nora 500. Well, here is your chance. It's double the mileage, double the fun, double the parties, double the dirt. It is the Nora Mexican 1000. We're going to drive by day. We're going to party by night. I'm pouring Fortaleez of tequila.

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The website's fast and easy to use. Check them out at BajaBound.com. That's Bajabound.com, serving Mexico travelers since 1994. We're back with Mason and Gabe. We're talking about mindful travel, being where you are when you're there, whether you're in a Toyota Tacoma or a Jeep. You had to eliminate the land rovers. We're not taking any swipes at land rover drivers.

I love them. They look so cool on Instagram. Yeah, we just didn't want people to be there now. longer than they want it to be, you know. Oh, okay. So mindful travel, take a swipe at that. Yeah, I'll give just a little anecdote, a personal anecdote, and then, you know,

toss it over to Gabe, because I know Gabe has, you know, definitely an idea about how he'd like to discuss that as well. But, you know, for me, I think there's one story where, you know, I loved Big Sur and would head down there all the time. It was sort of like a mini Baja in some ways in that at the time I knew Big Sur, not too many people knew about it. And you could drive down there and drive up into the hills and camp in a dispersed camp nature along the coast. and for me that was, you know, my little, or not my little secret, but our little secret, our community didn't really talk much about it. And it was magical and recharging, right?

And, you know, I drove down the highway one day to make it to that campsite, and the road, Highway 1 collapsed in front of me pretty much, right? there was a slide and I couldn't get any further down the highway. And then I, you know, turned around and said, well, I'm probably driving back to Santa Cruz, which is where I lived at that time. But why don't I just go check out this little road and just make the most of it and go shoot up this road. I've never driven.

So I went up the road and came to the end of it, which was sort of a trailhead for hikes. into the Santa Lucia's. And then when I got there, I realized that my CV boot had blown on my car. So I was like, oh, man, this is a real adventure. And so I climbed to the car and wrapping tape around the thing. And I'm just like, man, what a wash. And I just, and then I walked, you know, out to go look down into the valley

and all the redwoods kind of post-rain fog coming up. and I heard like a distant bird call. And it had this way of traveling out of the wilderness and hitting me where I realized that everything I left the house to experience just happened to me in that instance. And I didn't need to go any further. I didn't need to camp there that night. And I drove home full. And so what is mindful travel, I think it's accepting your relationship to a world that is out of your control, new and full of richness and embracing what arrives as opposed to constructing that reality in a way that dominates the experience.

So, you know, I think that's sort of a core of overland travel, if, you know, insofar as its thesis is, you know, self-reliant, you know, vehicle-dependent travel, where the experience is primary, right, where it's the destination is secondary. And, you know, I think that is a crystallation of perhaps the best way to live. I don't know. Maybe that's grandiose. But, but at me- Slow Baja agrees. Yeah, right. So, you know, that's one part of mindful travel.

There's, you know, there's a lot of other more kind of practical and immediate ways to appreciate what you're encountering. Part of it is having knowledge, history, awareness, you know. Let's let Gabe jump in here and just talk a little bit about Pacific Overlander and Gabe, how you strive to connect the travelers that are with you to local culture, locals. And turning around from that epic surf break, to see the local family right there and how their relationship to land is. You know, you've got a great picture on your Insta to bring Insta into the conversation. You've got a great picture on your Insta of a handmade pizza oven.

And having just returned from the Baja 1000, the real financial beneficiary of the Baja 1000 in my mind seems to be Costco. because people load up and they're traveling too fast to stop and explore local culture. But to turn around and get that pozzoli from the lady in San Ignacio or to get 10 machaca burritos wrapped up and tossed in a bag to go and eat them hot, eat them cold, eat them on the dashboard, reheated with your defroster, it's a beautiful thing. My next bumper sticker is I break for Machaka. So explain that a little bit, how you connect your folks to what's maybe they're not seeing immediately. Sure. So just briefly, I'll kind of just touch on my background, which is,

you know, made the foundation for this ethos within the way that I like to travel within Baja. So my early 20s, I lived in Patagonia and Iceland, Guyine as well. And of course, those are two regions that are heavily impacted by mass tourism. And during that period of the Instagram boom via adventure travel, there was a term that was coined over tourism. And, you know, that was basically the result of places losing their value due to the fact that they are swamped with tourists and not a lot of infrastructure. structure to support that tourism and through that the environment and local cultures suffered.

People were there to just collect moments and not necessarily understand what created this place and how that place affected the cultures around it. I mean, there's a duality to it. And the same thing in Baja. You know, the locals in Baja and, you know, the cultures in Baja all the way back to the indigenous cultures of the peninsula, they manipulate. their own localized environments, but at the same time, they were also crafted by these environments as well. So you can't have one without the other, essentially.

So through my time in those places, I kind of saw how valuable it is for people to have more immersive experiences. I think that tourists and travelers, they can take much more away from these trips when they actually develop these connections with humans and the land without, you know, just being stuck behind a camera, essentially for most of the trip. Especially in Iceland, that was a huge thing. It was like tourists were just getting, you know, shuffled from one location to the next, snap a photo, move along. So, yeah.

In Baja, I think I've just really seen the value of collaborating with locals. A, because it's just nice to give back. to a region that you're traveling in. But B, it helps you really just understand this landscape. And I think that beyond the natural wonders of Baja, to me, the most beautiful thing about Baja is the people. It's the cultures. And it's not even the whole, you know, this this patronizing idea of, oh, you know, the resourceful, you know, fishermen or mechanic in Baja that can, you know, fix your carburetor with floss and a piece of bubble gum. I mean, it's much deeper than that.

You know, it's about these generational ranchers in the mountains who have, you know, made aqueducts out of palm trees that have been cut in half. I mean, it's just, it's so deep and so rich, rich that I think it's really worth sharing with the world. So, yeah. All right, but I am going to tell you, back in the old day, son, when my travel Baja buddy, Ted Donovan, the Baja visitor, softly rolled his land cruiser and the rancher who saw it and drove up and literally fixed his distributor with some electrical tape and a bottle cap

because the distributor had been smashed by the battery because the battery mount broke. So he got the battery back in place and put the smash distributor cap back together with with electrical tape and smash a bottle cap. So that is true story and fricking resourceful. Amazing. Mason, not very resourceful. And just get on to your offerings for Cabo this winter, what you're up to with Gabe. And then let's look at 2022 and talk about where you are in the states and where you are. and Baja. Yeah. Well, you know, I think it in so in December the end of this month,

we send a tour under Gabe's guidance down the peninsula. So that's San Diego to Los Cabos. That's a 10-day tour. And then we have vehicles in Los Cabos for the winter months and bring them back up on another 10-day tour at the end of February. And, you know, that tour down and then back up the peninsula is, you know, essentially our favorite event. It's, you know, provides Gabe's insights and vision of the peninsula to our guests, which adds a ton of richness, folks are able to have that local experience with folks who are running, you know, locally built and managed ecotourism businesses or just providing fish they caught that day

for beachside campout cookouts and, you know, stay at eco-camps on Iskirtu-Santis. Gislaus Spiritu Santos off the coast of La Paz. And then so folks have a chance to snorkel and swim with whale sharks and then northbound trips get to stay at San Ignacio Lagoon and interact with nursing gray whales in the wild, which is pretty impressive. Let me just jump in for a second. Since I've done both of those things this year, whale sharks just just last month and the whales in January, February, both of those things are

semi-life changing. I mean, it's just the, the caffing whales and how they interact with the people in the pungas is shocking. And then the whole craziness of just snorkeling with something that's 40 feet long that's slowly feeding on plankton and doesn't give her a rat's. ass about that they're looking at it while it's slowly mouth agape, just filtering that plankton. I mean, it's really something. Yeah, I think, you know, the comparisons between Baja and South Africa are palpable.

I mean, one of the major, you know, things that bums me out personally when I travel around the Western U.S. is that that, you know, a lot of the, you know, a lot of the, large animals are gone, right? But you come here and their ecosystems are in good shape. The local communities are, you know, working cooperatively to replenish, you know, fish and wildlife stocks. You know, ecotourism is valued. It's a really special place and it gives people those experiences.

So that's one of the reasons why we saw it as a good tour destination. and, you know, we'll advance our offerings here. You know, there's this winter's offerings, but in the future we plan on increasing access to tours and rentals from Los Cabos. And your 10-day that Gabe's involved with is catered as well. You've got a chef traveling with you. Am I right on that? Yeah, that's correct.

Yeah, our tours are all-inclusive. So basically we meet you in San Diego and you spend 10 days getting completely taken care of on an adventure down the peninsula. Hey, Mason, tell me more about your 10-day trip that runs from San Diego to Cabo and then at the end of the season comes back up. That's a pretty amazing offering. And you've got Gabe going both ways and you've got a chef. It's all inclusive. Dive into that. Yeah, well, we see it as our favorite event to run in the company

simply because of the range of experiences people get to have. There's a whale shark swim and off the paws, folks camp on offshore islands in the Sea of Cortez, and get to come face to face with nursing gray whales at San Ignacio. These experiences are world-class, and we, you know, there's no better way to experience the peninsula than by driving the length of it. You get beyond the tourist centers of Cabo San Lucas or the border towns and get to see, you know, a real, a real, honest and complete vision as much as you can in 10 days of what the Bahá Peninsula is. And you know, our guide Gabe adds a ton of context and expertise on the way down and our

chef tries their best to take care of everyone's needs, you know, the entire time. So. And I'm assuming your chef is provisioning locally, fresh-caught fish, what have you, shellfish of the day. Yeah, so we work with, you know, both bringing, you know, menu items down that may not be available while we're remote and then working with the local communities and connections that Gabe has on the peninsula to open up, you know, experiences of exactly what they've caught that day and, you know, or what they're eating. Yeah. Gabe, can you dive in for a minute? and just discuss the richness of the food and fresh vegetables,

locally produced beer, wine, etc., that's happening in Baja right now. I'm not sure everybody really knows about that. Yeah. Well, I will have to touch on, you know, my expertise is more south of Ensenada and the Valle, the wine region. But, you know, regarding central and south central. Bahá, you know, you have a lot of amazing seafood that's being produced. Obviously, everyone knows about the fish tacos, et cetera, you know, tacos the pulpo, shrimp, all that. But as well,

you know, when you have a whole yellow tail that's being smoked on the beach, you know, over a hardwood fire, with veggies placed over it, nice and steamed with some shrimp mixed in there. I mean, that's a pretty world-class culinary experience. And, you know, my favorite part of these experiences is actually watching the people prepare the food because that in and of itself is an R form. It's a craft. It's a trade, right? You know, with just, you know, a couple knives and, you know, a sheet of foil, open flame. I mean, you can do, they can prepare something that you'd find at a five-star restaurant globally beyond that even, you know, because it's prepared right there on the beach, you know, you can smell the smoke, you feel the sand, get that coastal breeze coming in. It's truly

an experience again where you feel planted and feel grounded, like be here now experience. That's beautiful. Let's summarize there. Yes, you're camping, but you're not suffering. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. The equipment's comfortable. The equipment's reliable.

The guide is knowledgeable. The weather's going to be spectacular because it's Baja and winter. And the food and everything else is world class. Sounds good. When do I sign up? Absolutely. Pacificoverlander.com, Pacific Overlander on Instagram, Pacific Overlander on the Facebook. And Mason and Gabe have been super responsive to my inquiries. So I'm sure there'll be inquiries responsive to yours as well.

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