El Pingüino
Surfing at sunrise The instructions to the secret beach were simple. Too simple, considering the beach was three thousand miles away in another country. Four brief scribbles with some approximate distances attached. The worrying part was a tiny building and the instructions to ask Raul, the supposed resident of said shack, where to find El Pingüino. These were not exactly details that our parents wanted to hear when they were told that we were going surfing in Baja for a month, so we conveniently didn’t tell them. Anyway, we trusted our surf guru, so with a napkin scribble, we set off from Montana on New Years Day, Baja bound. Four days and one international border after leaving home, we were hurtling down Baja’s Highway 1. The lanes were awkwardly narrow and full of truck-eating potholes. The shoulder of the road consisted of about three inches of crumbling asphalt and a steep ditch filled with blooming cacti. Semi trucks rigged up like Mad Max were racing northwards around blind t