When Bad Roads Have a Nasty Effect on Your Trip: Custom Welding in Baja, Mexico

Nothing that a 100 pesos can't fix
The truth is I disrespected my speed the day we left Bahía Gonzaga. I tried to motor along at 50 MPH or better. The road is a wide washboard slice in the desert complete with dips, hills, and holes, and just when you're getting really tired of it you find Coco's Corner - nothing short of what you'd expect from a wild watering hole in nowhere Mexico. Campers on blocks and old fishing pangas repainted for the theme.

Yeah, I remember cresting some hills and feeling this tingling sensation in my loins as the truck lifted off the ground for a split second.  Yeah, I heard my daughter in the back seat say, "That tickles!" and let out a few giggles. Yeah, after the first one I told myself to slow down.  Then I'd get a little too comfortable and hit it again.  Everything has a yin and a yang.  On the good side, this obnoxious speed smoothed out the washboards.  On the bad side, it was much too fast to react appropriately when I'd notice a dip, hill or bad spot.  I must have hit one of them too hard.

But I didn't think anything about it until we pulled into Coco's Corner and I found my spare tire dangling by a thread:

Well. Whoops. That shouldn't be like that.
A broken weld on the tire carrier that's holding on for dear life.

Oops.  One more bump and I'd have left it lying in the road somewhere, along with the rear view camera. 'Twould've sucked, yes.

In Guerrero Negro, I found a shop to do some welding.  There was just one guy at the shop and he told me that the owner, who does the welding, was out for the moment.  I left, met up with my wife and brother at the internet cafe, told them the story, then went back to the shop.

I asked the guy, "¿Donde esta el maestro?" He laughed and whistled for him.

They all took a look at the carrier and didn't say a word except to one another.  Maestro worked fast, like he was in a race.  He pounded the piece into place, held out his hand and asked for his mask and welder. He zipped it up in about a minute.

And this is where he just killed me. When he finished, he stepped back from the truck with pride, flipped his mask back over his head, put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, kept a stern bandito-esque face and barked, "100 pesos."  That calculates to a little over eight bucks, American.