You need four things to spend 39 days adventuring through Baja California:

1.  The AAA Map for Baja California

This map showed all of the small places that a lot of other maps didn’t.  The scale is perfect for scouting your route, discussing potential campsites with people you meet along the way, and navigating your way south.

2.  Traveler’s Guide to Mexican Camping and/or Traveler’s Guide to Camping Mexico’s Baja by Mike and Terri Church

This is the go-to guide for anybody we’ve met travelling.  There has been a consensus that both are about 80% accurate.  The last 20% are RV parks that have gone out of business since publishing.  We only ran into a couple of places that didn’t exist, but make sure to give yourself plenty of time to track down a campsite before the sun sets 🙂  We hear they also update their website regularly if you do research ahead of time.

3.  Insurance

Baja Bound has all of the information you need to get through the border.  You can buy your insurance online here as well!

4. $1386

We really didn’t know what to expect when we crossed the border, but we found desolate mountains and deserts, warm white sand beaches, delicious fish tacos.  Grab a map, your car or truck, a pocketful of cash and point south.

 

BUDGET SUMMARY

Food = $675.73 ($17.33/day)

This includes groceries, eating out, bar tabs, tequila and beer.

Fuel = $353.53 ($9.06/day)

We filled up with 92 Octane whenever possible and paid $1.00/L on average.

Accommodation = $212.13 ($5.44/day)

We camped each of our 39 nights in the Baja.  Eleven of those nights were free camping (bonus!).

Misc = $145.11 ($3.72/day)

Our miscellaneous items were tourist cards, oil/filter for the truck, propane tank and propane for the stove, tolls for the toll road, and batteries for the GPS. Note:  We didn’t include the ferry fees in this summary as they’ll be added to the Mainland Mexico summary.  

Total = $1386.50 ($35.55/day)

Pie Chart

Here is the general route we took and a list of places we camped.  We omitted a couple of campsites that were mediocre and just listed the ones worth visiting.  BajaMap