The Things You Can’t Buy in La Ventana

It’s the first week of September. The wind starts filling in around the middle of October, which means the people coming for the season have stopped asking me which house and started asking me what to bring.

It’s a better question than it sounds, and almost everybody asks it the wrong way round. They send me a packing list and ask what to add. What I’d rather they asked is the only version of the question that actually matters here: what can’t I get once I’m there?

Because that’s the real constraint. La Ventana and El Sargento are two small towns strung along one bay at the end of one road. Anything you didn’t bring is either an hour’s drive to La Paz and an hour back, or it isn’t available at any distance. Neither of those is a disaster. Both are much easier to plan for in September than to discover in January.

What the town has, and what La Paz has

Let me be fair to my own town first, because the internet has a habit of describing places this size as though they were outposts.

You can eat well here. You can buy groceries, cold beer, tortillas, propane and most of the ordinary business of a day from the shops along the main road. If you run out of coffee on a Tuesday, you are fine. Nobody is rationing anything.

What the town doesn’t have is depth — one of a thing rather than twelve of a thing. The big supermarkets, the real hardware, the specialist anything: that’s La Paz, about an hour northwest, and most people staying the season end up making that run every week or two regardless.

So the honest map has three categories. Everyday things, here. Big or unusual things, a two-hour round trip. And then the third one, which is the only one that really needs to be in your bag: things that aren’t in either place, because they exist as a part number for the specific object you happen to own.

The spares nobody packs

This is the section I’d most like people to read, and it applies whether you’re here for two weeks or five months.

Kit breaks. Not dramatically — it wears. Over months of daily use in salt and sand, small things fail: a pump hose splits, a valve stops sealing, a screw backs out of a fin and disappears into the sand, a leash frays, a strap tears at the stitching. None of that ends a trip on its own. What costs you a week of it is that the replacement is brand-specific, weighs nothing, costs almost nothing, and is not sitting on a shelf anywhere near you.

Pack the things that are small, cheap and specific to the gear you own. Those are the ones that strand you — never the big expensive things, which you were never going to forget anyway.

For a long stay that means, concretely: a spare pump hose and the adapters that fit your valves, whatever repair kit your kites take, spare fin screws and the driver that turns them, a spare leash, a spare set of straps or pads, and the tape and glue you’d actually use to patch something. That is a bag the size of a lunchbox, and it is the difference between losing an afternoon and losing a fortnight.

The same logic applies well away from the water. Prescription medication for the whole stay with a margin on top, contact lenses, anything you take daily and would be unhappy improvising. The charger and the cable for the specific device, not a drawer’s worth of nearly-right ones. If you need a thing to work and it has a model number on it, bring the spare.

What I’m deliberately not doing here is telling you how many kites to bring. That argument belongs to the kiting field guide, which makes the case for a quiver rather than a single kite and gives the sizes, and which also covers what the winter water actually asks of a wetsuit. Read that one before you weigh your bags. This note is about everything it doesn’t cover.

The cold you didn’t pack for

Here is the one that catches people every single winter, and it catches them because the word “Baja” is doing something misleading in their heads.

This is a desert. Deserts give their heat back the moment the sun goes. The days through the winter are lovely — that is the whole reason to be here — and the midwinter nights get properly cool, and the evening after a windy day is cooler still, because you’ve spent four hours wet and in the wind.

People pack for the postcard and then spend January wearing everything they brought, all at once. What’s missing is almost always the same three things: one genuinely warm layer, something windproof to go over it, and socks. Not a winter coat — a fleece, a shell, and closed shoes for the evenings. You will use them far more than you expect, and you can’t conveniently buy them here, because nobody in a desert town is stocking cold-weather clothing.

How well a given house holds its heat is a separate question, and a fair one to put to me directly about the specific house you’re taking. These are buildings designed to throw shade, which is what the climate mostly demands. Some hold warmth better than others.

What the wind does to you and your things

Two consequences of the wind that nobody connects to the wind until it’s too late.

The sun stops feeling like sun. Moving air keeps you comfortable while you burn, and the water throws the light back up at you from underneath. The people who get hurt here aren’t the ones lying on a towel. They’re the ones who had a wonderful four-hour session and never once felt hot. Long sleeves in the water, zinc rather than lotion alone, lip balm with sun protection in it, and sunglasses on a strap that you don’t mind losing anyway. A wide-brimmed hat is decorative in twenty knots, which nobody considers until they watch theirs go.

Dust gets into everything. The roads off the main one are dirt, and the same wind that makes the season also moves the desert around. It finds laptops, camera bodies, zippers and anything with a fan in it. Bring a case for whatever has an electronic soul, a dry bag for the beach, and expect to clean things more often than you would at home. That isn’t a complaint about the town. It’s just what a windy desert is, and it’s much easier to arrive prepared for than annoyed by.

What not to bring

The list runs the other way too, and being told what to leave at home is worth as much as being told what to add.

Don’t bring bedding, towels or kitchen equipment. The houses I manage are set up to be lived in for months rather than staged for a photograph — real kitchen, real beds, plates and pans. You should be arriving with luggage, not with a van.

Don’t bring the second board you ride twice a year. That’s a baggage fee on the way in and a corner of someone’s house for five months. Bring the quiver; skip the maybe.

And don’t bring a month of groceries. Whatever you’re quietly worried you won’t find — sunscreen, coffee, snacks for the plane home — is a much thinner worry than the spare hose for your pump.

The bottom line

Packing for a season in La Ventana isn’t about volume. It’s about sorting each thing into one of three boxes: available in town, available in La Paz, or available nowhere — and only the third box has to travel with you.

The things that actually go wrong for guests here are never the big ones. It’s the pump hose, the fin screw, the fleece nobody packed, and the sunburn from a day that didn’t feel hot. All four are solved in September, in a bag you’ll barely notice.

If you’re taking one of the houses this winter and you want to know what that particular one already has — kite storage, an outdoor shower, how it handles a cold night — just ask me. Casa Eva keeps a corner for the kite bag. La Brisa de los Cuatro Vientos has storage and an outdoor shower, which after a month of salt stops being a luxury. That’s a one-line answer from me and it beats any general list, including this one.

— Diana