Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air...

Baja California, that finger of desert reaching starkly down from its better-known cousin in the states. Our fantasies are filled with its turquoise waters.

But the hard-faced girl behind the counter breaks the news like an egg over our heads. It will cost two weeks´ sleeps-worth of hard-earned pesos to get the ferry there.

Disappointment drips viscously.

We go to the beach to think. The journey is short and takes us through sandy marshes crawling with oily-looking pelicans. A short walk from the bus stop and we are blinded by our first sight of the sea. I´ve been longing for this moment ever since I left Cornwall, over two months ago.

The calm folds over us like a wave.

We fall silent and pass the afternoon bathing in its ripples. The sandy hours sift through our fingers. We twirl in a hoopy heaven and languish thickly on the wind-blown shore. I wash the confusion of the last few weeks away in the sea.

A dead dolphin is heaped on the sand. My approach lifts a cloud of vultures into the sky.

I breathe through my mouth and stare at the dry skeleton lying in a pile of leathery skin, like an elaborate costume, discarded.

We watch the sun bleed a melodramatic death from the back of a pick-up truck. The wind whips our hair and smacks us with exhileration. We are dropped in the centre of the quiet town, to seafood scents and a decision to be made.

I am, as ever, paralysed by indecisiveness.

I flip a coin.

Thus I find myself that evening not on a ferry but a coach, going south. Mazatlán. Home of launderettes (to wash a backpack´s worth of clothes worn consistently, all at once, for the last two weeks) and doctors (who after two visits and several hundred pesos spectacularly fail to cure me.)

Our hotel room has bars on the windows. A scum-marked toilet and shuddering shower almost directly above the bowl. And a half-dead cockroach on the floor that Eva forces me to kill with a shoe.

85 pesos a night each and use of the kitchen paint glossily over it all. We are extremely content and complacently lazy, the excuse placed comfortably on the shoulders of my illness.

It is in Mazatlán that I am told of the death of Israel´s puppy. That little dog didn´t leave my side the whole of my time in Real de Catorce.

The news makes me uneasy. Uneasy because all that time, although he was completely healthy, I somehow knew he was going to die. I kept finding myself trying to protect him in my helpless human way. I even wrote about it.

I decide not to dwell on it and lose myself in the sights and smells of the city.

Our five days there are largely transactional. We stock up on vegetables. Visit the beach daily. Have minor altercations with the patroness. She begins to ration matches, withhold crockery.

We leave when she starts to ignore our daily cries of Buenos Dias and head south down the coast, from bus to bus, following the advice of the locals.

Time to cast the guide book aside.