Surfing Mags Reporting Tale of Robbery, Carjacking in Baja
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 09.11.07 | 3:00 PM ET
For surfers, Baja California has long had a mystique as a Wild West playground where crime is rampant but, if you’re savvy or lucky or both, you can find a dusty point break with perfect curling waves that you can carve up all by yourself. Having grown up surfing in Southern California and made countless Baja surf trips over the years, I know the legend well. Stories that confirm surfers’ wildest wave fantasies or worst crime fears take on lives of their own, quickly spreading on the coconut telegraph and, now, the Web. At the moment, SurferMag.com and Surfline.com are reporting three surfers’ accounts of being robbed and carjacked on a trip to northern Baja.
According to their account, the veteran Baja travelers crossed the border into Tijuana at about 4:30 a.m. Aug. 31 and were nearing the toll road that leads to Ensenada when one of their two trucks was pulled over by what they thought were police. What followed, they say, was a life-threatening ordeal in which one was held at gunpoint and another was forced to crawl part way down a cliff.
The robbers made off with the trucks and surfing gear. Whether the robbers were federal police or merely impersonating police isn’t clear.
The three victims have not revealed their last names.
One of the them, Roger, told Surfer magazine: “I’ll never drive into Mexico again. I’ve been surfing in northern Baja for over 20 years and I’ll never go back. There is nobody that cares about you. Nobody. You are all alone and the bad guys are the good guys and the good guys…well there aren’t any.”
San Diego news organization KPBS reports that one Baja law enforcement officials is “sure his agents will find the cars because most likely, he says, the thieves will get caught using them to commit another crime.”
These particular surfers may never visit Baja again, but plenty of other surfers will. And they’ll recount these guys’ story around the campfire, ensuring Baja’s outlaw surfing mystique lives on.
Related on World Hum:
* Rick Steves, It’s Time for a Tijuana-Off!
* Smackdown in Tijuana
Photo by Alejandro the Great via Flickr, (Creative Commons).
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
momma 01.30.08 | 2:37 PM ET
wow, You sometimes have to learn the hard way that Mexico is no playground for foreighners. And u never drive through Tejauna in the middle of the knight. Its like taking a drive through a land mind field, and hope u dont triger one.