It seems at times that the entire world has been explored. The road connecting California to Baja California Norte y Sur is one of those places that thousands of surfers, offgriders, and road trippers have ventured to on a sort of desertic pilgrimage, allured by a promise of wild solitude. If you’re seeking wave solitude, a couple of wrong turns, or a flat tire, could leave you stranded for a few days. There are spots where it will just be you and other Baja Road Bums howling at the moon, parked by a beach, waiting for a rising NW swell. You’ll eat freshly picked clams off the beach, grill lobster from the local fishing co-op, buy octopus from a family of intertidal harvesters, or catch your own fish. The nearest town may have tamales and burritos. This is the level of solitude you may encounter.
Also, you will find plastic. Plastic everywhere. Sandals, fishing nets, bottle caps, swimming gear, and hundreds of different kinds of plastic casings for things you only used once. You will find other travelers who packed all their necessities and food with them, taking stories and memories with them, and left all the waste behind. Plastic waste will stay for 100s of years after these travelers are gone, never decomposing, just breaking down into smaller and smaller, and eventually almost invisible pieces of microplastics. Also invisible, are the CO2 travel related emissions that will linger around the atmosphere from 300 to 1000 years after the adventure is over with.
I recently did a surf road trip down the Pacific, on a move from the Bay Area to the tip of Baja California Sur. Curious about reducing my ownernship of stuff and creating less waste, I wrote to Unplastify about how to make my trip plastic free, and to SeaTrees about neutralizing my entire travel emissions. Unplastify is changing our relationship to plastic by encouraging lifestyle changes, educational experiences and lobbying for local political change. SeaTrees, from Sustainable Surf, plants mangrove trees and restores kelp forests to sequester CO2 emissions around the world (coastal ecosystems can sequester up to 20 times more carbon per acre than land forests). Changing our relationship with plastic, owning less “stuff”, and removing CO2 emissions from our atmosphere are crucial aspects for living in a planet in balance.
I spent a little over two weeks on the road, but I’m still living-in and exploring Baja Sur. Luckily, I began my road trip on a building NW swell so I could see the swell growing as I travelled south. I slept by the beach, next to little fishing co-ops, and only one time under a bridge. Baja is a dream landscape with true point breaks that can give you either knee-high 1-minute long rollers, head high pealing faces, or truly bomb waves. The road cuts Baja Norte and Sur in half, so you have to explore a bit to go surf. Crossing the desert by Guerrero Negro and seeing the giant Saguaros rise from the soil and sand is just short of a mystical experience. You could spend months, if not years, exploring Baja.
The easiest part of my trip was neutralizing my CO2 emissions — 2,500 miles of driving or 2,000 pounds of CO2 — that SeaTrees will neutralize through their Kelp reforestation and planting mangrove trees across the world (using SeaTrees tokens — 4 mangrove trees , and 1 foot of kelp forest restored in CA). The second easiest part was completely removing plastic from my trip, and for this, making a list was the most important part: bags, snacks, food, water, and tools (e.g., utensils, containers) — those groups pretty much covered my entire plastic consumption. I took cloth bags with me, a 20-liter water tank, water bottles (metal), all the tools I could make use of (knifes, containers, bamboo toothbrush, etc) and bought toilet paper from restaurants along the way. My only plastic waste was the toothpaste and sunblock I already owned (since then I’ve found non-plastic options for them). My other waste was all organic. Unplastify shared tips with me, and shared my trip with the over 15K people that follow them.
The community of people I met along the way helped me achieve my unplastified goals. Buying freshly harvested octopus and fish from intertidal harvesters, filling my water tank at community water centers, and business owners allowing me to use my own bags, utensils and containers along the way. As tourists, creating and supporting a local economy of sustainability is crucial for protecting the surf breaks, rivers and beaches that we love. With your support, and change in lifestyle, single use plastics could be completely banned by the time you go back to wherever it is where you had your last adventure.
As I arrived to Los Cabos I was daunted by the challenges of maintaining my new unplastified life. The supermarkets covered everything in plastic — apples, bananas, oranges, avocados — all covered in plastic. All containers made of plastic. It took me a couple of weeks to re-adjust — find the most appropriate place for shopping, chose the brands that reduce plastic pollution, find a local fisherman to buy fish from, say “porfa sin plastico” — “porfa sin popote” and create a new habit. I wanted to keep that feeling of traveling light while returning to the city, totally within my reach.
As many of you begin to plan your post-COVID travels I invite you to discover and experiment on a new era of adventuring — neutralize your emissions, don’t create waste, and start light printing your travel. We can’t afford to wait for politicians and policy groups to make up their minds, when we already have what we need to make a difference.
