Puerto Penasco, or as it is better known, Rocky Point is just a two hour drive south of Ajo, Arizona or can also be reached by a new road from Yuma. It is also referred to as Phoenix’s beach since it is only 4 hours from that 4 million plus city. Puerto Penasco is in the Sonora desert at the northern apex of one of the most fertile bodies of water anywhere: the Sea of Cortez also known as the Gulf of California.

We first drove through Rocky Point some 20 years ago and only remember a feast of local shrimp and lobster in a noisy bar perched atop a rocky outcropping and a crowded RV park across the road. Not much else. This time around we were guests of our friends who rented a luxury apartment for a discount price at a sprawling upscale development called Sandy Beach west of the original town and harbour. Up to sixteen stories high, several of those condo developments clustered along the shallow beach, guarded on all sides by security check points with guard shacks and guards armed with walky-talkies and clad in snazzy khaki uniforms. Hundreds of these high end condos built in the past 20 years sprawl along the sandy beach, all equipped with gourmet kitchens, rain showers and flat screen TV’s with several heated pools (replete with pool bars) and hundreds of lounge chairs spread throughout the manicured compounds, surrounded by golf course and dune buggy tracks. Very deluxe and very much affluent Americana and nothing to do with Mexico apart from the soil they are built on. Some of the buildings were abandoned in the 2008 crash waiting patiently for a developer from up north to finish them. I spent most of my week reclining on a lounge chair under an umbrella behind a rope separating the haves from the have-nots, watching the endless parade of local peddlers go by trying to sell anything from a song to a massage, from mangos to jewellery, from hammocks to hats.

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