If you’re looking to do a cycling trip through Baja California, we’ve pulled together an overview of our route, thoughts on accommodation and other (hopefully useful…) information from our experiences in February 2018 to help you plan. It is an AMAZING part of the world and we fully recommend exploring it by bike!

There are some fairly good blogs available about cycling the Baja – but we found it difficult to find resources that clearly laid out what people had done and how. We also came in through Tecate, and took a detour across the country to San Felipe, which didn’t seem to be the most-popular route. We’ve told the longer story of our trip in another part of our blog, which you can read here. 

The Route

To help with your planning, we’ve pulled together a map (including rough locations of where we wild camped and where we stayed) and table of our plan below:

This related into the following day-by-day cycle.

Available on Google Drive here for you to use as a basis for your planning – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q4cTRjn9brrAPOBXtG_YyjVy173rFcz7alC-kuwUyGA/edit?usp=sharing

There are 4 main route choices:

• Road/Off Road: It is possible to do the whole of the Baja off road – this is known as the Baja Divide. But, you need a mountain bike and lightweight equipment.
• Tijuana/Tecate: Tijuana is the bigger town and is closer to San Diego, and you can drop straight into the 1D down the coast. But, it is not known for being a particularly beautiful town or place to cycle. Tecate is smaller, the border very simple, and the roads from there are relatively quiet, but you add on a fair bit of distance. I’ve not read of anyone taking the Mexicali border cycling.
• Route 1 (the West Coast down from Ensenada) or Route 3 (Ensenada and across country to San Felipe and East Coast) in Baja California: Route 1 is the busier route as far as truck traffic is concerned, and we were told that it isn’t very nice cycling for about the first 150km out of the city, with no hard shoulder and not very pretty scenery. But, it keeps you all on road and is the most direct route. Route 3 (which we took), was really quiet across the country, and then the coastal road has beautiful hard shoulders. BUT, it is unpaved for the final 40km of the route (which we actually found very fun!), and possibly adds a bit of distance.
• The Cabo San Lucas Loop or not: We were a bit limited for time so ended out trip in La Paz. We read some blogs that said the final loop is really worth it (and some that were less bothered!).

Accommodation

We spent 10 days camping out of 25 in total. We found it very easy to find places to wild camp (rough locations of our wild camping spots are available on the map above). We generally cycled until we found a small path leading off into the cactuses and then we tried to exit the road when no one was driving past. We walked until we couldn’t be seen and set up camp. We had absolutely no problems and no interaction with people while we were wild camping. The only place we struggled was south of Ciudad Insurgentes towards La Paz, in the small town of Las Pocitas, where we ended up staying with the priest. We found out afterwards that there was a hotel in the town, but we couldn’t find it!

Camping in the cactuses

Beautiful remote camping spot

In the main towns we stayed in hotels which we generally found to be about 450 to 500 pesos (more than we were expecting from other blogs we had read!). They were all completely fine with us taking our bikes into the rooms, and we felt they were very secure. We never had to book and were just able to turn up (although on the weekends we did have to search a few places). It is probably possible to just stay in hotels, but you would have to do some very long days in places.

Road Safety

We read a lot of blogs saying the roads on the Baja were really dangerous because they don’t have a hard shoulder. To an extent this can be true, but it does depend a bit on the cycling conditions you are used to.

Generally we found:

• Mexican drivers are extremely courteous and give a lot of room while overtaking
• The lorry drivers everyone warns you about are some of the friendliest – they will always wave and they give you the most room when overtaking
• The US plated cars were some of the most scary drivers – passing way too close and way too fast
• The traffic was the worst:
  • Out of San Diego and towards the Tecate border
  • Into Ensenada and out of Ensenada
  • From Ciudad Constitution to La Paz (with the traffic into La Paz being particularly busy).

We have highlighted some notes about road conditions on the map above.

Other Resources

These are some of the blogs we used:

Bicycle Touring Baja California Guide

Cycling The Baja California Peninsula in Mexico