The hidden stretch of Mexico where Californians say life feels better now

It's one of those blue-sky days that probably won't have a single cloud in it, and I'm by a beach in California with a spicy margarita in my hand. This is not, however, the American California we all know. "This," jipiteca (Mexican hippie) Johnny B says as he waves his right arm in little circles at the ocean, "is the California I want to live in. It's the California I used to live in."

Johnny B ("we don't tend to do them around here," he explains when I ask for a last name) has lived in Baja California since 1972, "... or was it '73", he wonders. There are entire communities of people like Johnny B across the far southern part of the Baja Peninsula; expat Americans living in an amalgamation of Mexico and a long-gone America. I'm in Todos Santos, an hour's drive north of the popular tourist town Cabo San Lucas which makes this part of Baja California famous to many Americans. And it's 20 hours' drive south of the part of Baja California, close to the US border, which makes Baja California infamous to many Australians. That's where Australian surfing brothers Callum and Jake Robinson were murdered in 2024 for a set of used four-wheel-drive tyres.

"It's [the far-southern region of Baja California] peacefully far from the US," former expat Joe Cummings explains in the LA Times. "Yet similarly distant from Mexico, as if I'd discovered a parallel universe that was neither one, nor the other."

"If you don't want to pay $US20 ($30) for them," Johnny B offers his own simpler explanation as he points his bony fingers at the margarita I'm drinking, "and you want to come somewhere Trump can't touch you, this is the California you got to be in."

It only takes two hours and 30 minutes to fly to the region of Los Cabos, popularly known as Cabo, from LAX, in the other California, but these are very different worlds. They just look awfully similar. I arrive into Cabo's international airport and the Sierra de la Laguna mountains which dominate the view from the runway could be Los Angeles's San Gabriel or Santa Monica Mountains. The sea has that same magical sheen of blue, and when I deplane I immediately recognise the same dry desert heat you feel in southern California: the kind where even when it's 35 degrees, you barely sweat.

I have less interest in the part of Cabo which attracts millions of Americans each year, almost all of them arriving in the northern winter - that's Cabo San Lucas, the main town of the southern Baja peninsula, dominated by all-inclusive resorts and late-night bars.

I've opted to stay near San Jose del Cabo; while it's actually closer to the airport (13 kilometres), most tourists drive right past it on their way to San Lucas, 32 kilometres further along the peninsula's southern coastline. It's evening by the time I drop my bags off at my hotel on a marina 10 minutes' drive away, and circle back to town.

The sun's setting on the town's main square; narrow cobbled streets feed off it, among centuries-old Spanish colonial buildings. Local musicians are playing on the streets or in the patios of small bars and restaurants. Vendors sell food from street stalls - tacos, tamales, churros - and there are rooftop bars among rows of palm trees.

It looks like a movie version of Mexico - safe and clean, but still undeniably Mexican. It's instantly likeable; there's no need for it to grow on me. After a mandatory margarita at a bar where I sit outside, beneath bougainvillea and coconut trees, I stroll through an art district where artists, wood carvers and potters work outside in the twilight without spruiking for sales.

San Jose is at the heart of Baja California's renowned farm-to-table movement, and I take a seat at what I'm told is the best example of it in San Jose: Agave Restaurant. On a patio lit by party lights, I eat beef and octopus cooked in a traditional stone oven. It's delicious, and I'm satisfied - but a diner beside me tells me there are better options just beyond town.

He's from Malibu - LA's fanciest neighbourhood - but tells me these restaurants hidden at the end of dirt roads put anything in his California to shame.

You sure don't have to travel far out of San Jose to feel like you're in the deep, dark depths of rural Mexico. I'm in an Uber next day driving along a dusty, bumpy road barely five kilometres from town. My driver tells me he's never been here before. Then we round a corner and discover Flora Farms.

Set among sunflowers, cactus and palm trees within 10 hectares of farmland, Flora Farms looks like a designer version of a Californian commune. There's a bar, spa and grocery store, and an open-air restaurant set in a barn where a guitarist strums famous Californian songs. Set up by a couple from San Francisco who came to San Jose in 1991 to watch a solar eclipse and never went home, you'd call it rustic if the diners weren't so damned good looking. I decide over lunch, with a view out to the mountains and the sun on my table dappled by palm trees, that this is my happy place.

You'd think Flora Farms might've prepared me for Acre Restaurant, but in this neighbourhood of rough roads and creaky billboards spruiking real estate deals (Acre is a few hundred metres down the same dirt road), nothing can. I'm deposited in a carpark and told to walk through a forest of palm trees till I find the gap. I see it: a Michelin Green Star-rated open-air restaurant and cocktail bar fringed by palm fronds, lit by candles. Adventurous hipsters in calico-coloured linen have found it before me. There's a DJ playing, too. It's so Californian-chic it's easy to forget we're 2200 kilometres south of San Diego.

I take an Uber back to San Jose, but see a turn-off to a 19th-century farmhouse, set along a ridge. A battered sign reads: Los Tamarindos. This is actually Cabo's best farm-to-table restaurant - I'd been told that last night. It's owned and run by one of Mexico's most experimentative chefs, Enrique Silva. I'm shown to a table on a terrace overlooking a 12-hectare farm, illuminated by a big, bright three-quarter Mexican moon.

All these secrets are only just up the back roads of Cabo, and yet most travellers are here for the beaches. There are 20 of them in the 32-kilometre stretch between San Jose and San Lucas; long white sandy versions, split into pretty coves and bays. Thousands of humpback whales congregate here between December and April. The surf in this part of the Baja Peninsula is as reliably consistent as southern California's world-famous breaks, but here - unlike that California - the water's warm. It's 28 degrees on average here in summer, compared to the other California's 19 degrees. And in winter it won't drop below 22.

I find a right-hand point break barely 10 minutes' drive from San Jose at a beach called Costa Azul. There are surf shops with hire boards and surf schools and dreamy little beach bars. I surf a head-high wave which breaks perfectly right-to-left, but what I like best are the whales frolicking only a few hundred metres beyond the breakers.

These though are Cabo's known beaches. There are plenty that aren't. On the East Cape, beyond San Jose where the roads are still mostly unpaved, you'll find some of Mexico's best secret beaches. And on the west coast, supreme beaches continue all the way to San Diego; 2000 kilometres-plus of white sand and blue sea.

This is the Pacific Coast; home to some of the best big-wave surfing on Earth, and my beach drive north from Cabo is an exercise in infinity. I pass beside green valleys and deep vados (stream beds) below the Sierra de la Laguna mountains and infinite bays of white-sand beaches. I take a quick turn down a deserted dirt road and end up in paradise. But this Pacific Coast can be a surge of riptides. So I resist the urge to dunk myself and wade out waist-deep, just to feel the might of the ocean.

A little further north, Todos Santos looks like a boho Disneyworld. It's all colonial buildings on cobbled streets, frequented by artistic types. There's an international film festival here and a music festival which attracts major international artists. The guitarist from REM even lives here. There's a Hotel California in its main street which is fabled to be the Hotel California - can it get more Californian than that?

But still, what I like best about town are the sunsets west of it at a beach called Playa Los Cerritos - it's safe for swimming; though not after the free-pour Californian margaritas they dish out at the Beach Club here. This is where I meet my new friend, Johnny B, and his cosmic partner, Rainbow (she insists I call her Rainy). She says she used to live in San Francisco, but found the summer of love existed somewhere else: Mexico.

I wish I could keep trekking deeper into the folds of this peninsula. But I've booked a day and night near tourist hotspot, San Lucas, before I leave. I stay in family-friendly, all-inclusive resort Grand Fiesta Americana, and spend hours at the swim-up bar of a huge infinity pool, just beside the ocean. It's busy, but fun: Americans ask even more questions about Australians when they're on holiday. Besides, most of them seem to be from California: openness runs in their DNA.

But at dawn - when there's no one else down here but me - it's so quiet I can hear the out-breath and in-breath of humpback whales passing by so close to the shore. I play golf later at Cabo del Sol, located conveniently close to the resort, and I get to watch more whales pass by from the big green fairways, high up here above the ocean. The life's-good-when you're-making-decent-money vibe of the place reminds me of golf and beach resorts I've frequented around Laguna Beach, and San Diego, and Santa Barbara. Johnny B and Rainbow would hate it here; but it's a taste of the other side of the other California I find satiating: if only for a little while.

There's sure a lot of American Californians in this other California: the Baja version. "Cheaper, warmer, better margaritas," one of them, Michael from LA's Manhattan Beach, surmises why he comes - and why they all come. "You know, like the song says: we're California Dreamin', on such a winter's day."

The writer travelled courtesy of Visit Los Cabos