Hwy 5 is in pretty good shape, no holes ,which is good, but the very first thing we noticed was the huge amount of garbage, mostly all plastic bags, lining the roadside.    At first i wanted to stop to pick it up, but these plastic bags went on for close to 300 km, there is no garbage pickup, which brings me to the huge problem of plastics.

In school, in Holland,in grade 8, we had a biology lesson, talking about nature and the impact of plastics.   At that time there weren’t any plastic bags just yet, but Tupperware had shown up and everyone was so exited about this product.    My biology teacher told us, “remember, this will never go away, you cannot destroy plastics, it will always be here”     now, 50 years later, the world is saturated with plastics, the oceans are full of it, and the bags are lining hwy 5 , in the Baja ,Mexico.      But, i need to say too, once we were back home, driving towards Sidney on West Saanich road, part of the this road was also lined with plastic bags, i wonder , is it up to the governments to put methods in place to recycle plastics??       Why does Sweden only put 3% of its garbage in the landfill??   The rest is all recycled, so is it a matter of money, of priorities????     I could go on and on, and i am sure most of you have your opinions about all this too.      The mountains , towards the West are all solid rock , in the most beautiful colors red, we saw some open pit mining, and looking into this online, there is gold mining here, there are huge exploration holes in the ground here, some well over 700′ deep, and there are 588 more holes in the Sierra la Laguna mountains.   They are estimating that there are 1.7 million ounces of gold imbedded here .

The gold deposits here are bound to arsenic, and once the gold is mined, the arsenic will seep into the ground waters.   there are aquifers just below the mountain regions here , that provide the drinking water for the Baja, and the arsenic is a huge threat to peoples health obviously!!

We saw all kinds of huge dust plumes, at first i thought they were dust devils, but then we realized that there are lots of dune buggies out there, it seems to be the main pass time of the folks here, Mexicans and Americans alike.    More about this later…….