San Jose del Cabo

 Sunday, December 10, 2023

San Jose del Cabo

 Today was a town and humpbacks.  There are two towns in the very south of Baja California, San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas, and this morning we anchored off of San Jose del Cabo and took Zodiacs into town.  As always, there were choices of what to do, including birding at an estuary which runs just east of the town; I chose the walk with the photographer, which was fun. 

The town has a large central plaza, at one end of which is the church: 




Being Sunday, there was a service just starting at the church, and the priest was greeting parishioners at the front door.



The angles and the light at the side door made for an interesting photo:


 The streets are decorated for upcoming Christmas, and we practiced taking photos of the decorations in multiple ways, using telephoto to compress the space and shooting into the sun and the sky.  Interestingly, everyone’s iPhones did a better job of a photo with the sun in it than the real cameras (including mine and including some big and expensive ones):

 



This shop had a unicorn sign in front, and we played with shooting it in multiple ways.


We returned to the plaza at the end of our walk, and there was a balloon man selling to the families.  He was gracious and posed for us:

 


All in all, it’s a charming town, and it was fun walking it with a professional photographer.  We went back to the ship for lunch, and after lunch cruised the Gorda Banks looking for sea mammals.  We found humpbacks; photographing them is not easy!  Here’s the best I did today: 


 We had two lectures this afternoon, the first: “Tech and Whales: Innovative ways of Studying Large Marine Mammals” which included some new non-invasive ways of sampling whale secretions and excretions.  The “snot-bot” was really unusual.  It turns out that when a whale blows, there’s lots of mucus which fills the air above it in the moisture which comes out.  They’ve invented a drone which hovers over the whale and collects the snot, and they’ve developed remarkable ways of gathering biologic information from that mucus.  The second lecture was on citizen science and how it has influenced conservation science.

 This evening we will have a curated mezcal tasting.  This group is plenty raucous on cocktails and wine, so I’m not sure what to expect.  I’ll report tomorrow.

Comments

  1. Rwa442December 10, 2023 at 7:13 PM

    It's great to see the bright colors and sunshine. Quite a contrast to our wintery grey.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ralph P. LockeDecember 12, 2023 at 4:09 AM

    Wow, your photos of the strung-together decorations, the mule sign, etc., confirm the point I made in my Comment to the previous post that a photo can be purposefully mysterious instead of completely "readable." Or maybe mysterious at first, and then the viewer can puzzle it out. I'm not surprised that the iPhones handled the sun's glare well. I'm amazed at what my iPhone can do. But, if anything, it cuts sun glare too well--I've never gotten a photo of a sunset with it that looks at all impressive.--I should add that the town looks like it's utterly flat and free of hills. Is this true of all the towns there--do they flatten the land in order to build on it, or do they choose a flat region? To me, hills are one of the great things about a city or town, creating changing vistas, even if the streets are straight. (Maybe this comes from growing up in the Boston area and then living in Rochester--some of the hills on Monroe Ave. become quite treacherous on icy days....)

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