San Evaristo is an interesting little bay on the baja coast about 50 miles north of La Paz. The guide book says that about 20 families live here year-round. There are cattle here (free range?), we walked along with a bunch of them from the village over a small hill to the nearby salt ponds where they have a watering station and lots of room to lay about. There are goats and chickens and burros.
The main activity in the village is the water desalination plant and ice house, which supplies fishermen and also communities nearby.
While at anchor one afternoon we observed two pangas (the locals’ popular watercraft) coming into the bay with unusual cargo. The boats approached the shore and about nine burros were offloaded and placed in a pen on the beach. (Sorry the photos are so weak, my lens is just not long enough.) Over the next day or two a truck came into the village and carted them off. We heard from some other boaters who watched Mexican cowboys round up the burros at the next port to the north, Nopolo. They were branded, roped/hobbled, loaded onto the boats, and delivered to San Evaristo (where there is a road for the truck to collect them.)
There is one very modest market that had some decent fresh produce (no refrigeration, no cold products of any kind), and a small palapa on the beach where we joined Don and Kathy from Wild Rose for dinner. We were the only customers that night (the chef/proprietor is a mother of four whose priority was getting dinner together for her kids first). We were served a lovely feast of lightly battered jurel (yellowtail) that was more than we could finish, a nice green salad, beautiful fresh salsa, beans, rice, and tortillas. We brought our own wine and our check was a whopping 320 pesos (about $6.50 a person!) for our peaceful, private dining on the bay. A couple of the kids (including a young pet goat) visited with us as we were finishing our meal.
