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Who can resist Baja, California, named for Calafia, queen of the Amazons.
A popular Spanish novel, published in 1500, romanticized this mythical race of giant warrior women. Their sun-baked island home was called California. Here, on what he thought was a desert island, conquistador Hernán Cortés first tried to land soldiers in 1530. The fierce Californians he encountered were Indian warriors, whose paintings of giants had already decorated the mountains for thousands of years. Here, Cortés met his match. He could not conquer the harsh land these Californians had mastered, and Spanish soldiers would not return until 167 years later, when Jesuit padres founded California's first mission, to "save" the natives at the point of a sword. This is the California not only of Amazons, Indians and Spaniards, but also of pirates from England and Holland, invaders, settlers, explorers and exploiters from France, Germany, the United States, Japan and elsewhere, and tourists from all over the globe. Baja California is isolated on the west by the Pacific Ocean, and on the east by the Sea of Cortez, whose blue waters fill the deep chasm between Baja and the rest of Mexico. Officially named Golfo de California by the Mexican government, those who live on its shores still call the "sea" by the name of the conquistador who "discovered" it. The Sea of Cortez holds the most biologically productive (and some of the deepest) ocean on the planet, containing more endemic species than any other body of water. Its warm currents sweep down the east side of the peninsula, and collide with the open Pacific's cooler flow where Baja's bony fingertip pokes into the northern tropics. Carretera Peninsular Benito Juárez is the highway's official name. It serves as Main Street for most of the settlements strung along its route. It is also known simply as Highway 1, an appropriate number for the road that brought the modern world to Baja. When the highway was finished in 1973, North American tourists could, for the first time, drive cars and RV's the whole length of the peninsula. Just ten months later, Baja California Sur, the peninsula's remote southern half, became the newest Mexican state. Today, it booms with tourist dollars. The highway is unnervingly narrow, in many places barely wide enough for two trucks to pass, if they both pull way over, slow almost to a halt, and suck in their side mirrors. But, trucks and buses must and do travel the road day and night, to haul provisions and people to the human habitations scattered along its shoulders, where it has shoulders. Often lacking not only shoulders, but also guardrails and bridges, striping and roadsigns, and frequently littered with hazards, blocked by livestock or pockmarked by treacherous potholes, the highway can be as dangerous as it is beautiful. Baja's isolation and geology protect ecosystems that harbor hundreds of plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth. There are more kinds of cactus here than anywhere else in the world, and most of them are found no place else. The challenges offered by the highway's unpredictable asphalt, the surprising communities carved from the harsh land by its hardy inhabitants, the spectacular scenery and the unique roadside vegetation make this a drive like no othe