10 Things to Love About Ajo

1. The underground food scene. Ajo doesn’t have many restaurants and only has one grocery store. But we’re discovering that if you know where to look, you can find a taco service that will text you the specials each Thursday and deliver on Fridays, and a guy who makes regular trips to Mexico and brings back fresh shrimp, and a lady who roasts her own green chiles, and another who sells tamales out of her house. None of this is advertised anywhere; word of mouth reigns supreme here.

2. Walking Beau in the plaza. The Plaza is one of the loveliest things about Ajo, and it’s a three minute walk from our house. Hawks and doves nest overhead in the palm trees, and when you stand in front of the old Tucson, Cornelia, & Gila Bend train depot (now the Visitor Center) and look west towards the Curley School, you can take the whole town center in all at once. Starting or ending our day with a walk there is becoming a ritual.

3. Not driving. After putting 27,500 miles on the car in six months, our gas tank has been on half-full for ten days.

4. 99 cent serve soft-serve. There may not be an ice cream parlor in Ajo (sweet Jesus, Toscanini’s, I miss you!), but there’s 99 cent self-serve soft-serve at the Chevron Station (say THAT ten times fast). Which also makes pretty good burritos, which are called burros here. If you ask the owner nicely, he’ll give you some of his off-menu, homemade salsa to put on it (see #1).

5. The weather. I’m sure when it gets up to 110 degrees and the sticky, heavy air creeps up with the monsoons from Mexico, it’s rough. But right now it’s in the 70s and 80s every day, breezy, sunny, with zero humidity.

6. So many events, so little time. For a small town, there seems to be an endless number of parties, potlucks, concerts and classes. This week alone, there was a dance at the Chu Chu Club featuring the Javelina Combo; two potlucks; a lecture about the Sonoran Desert (which we missed); and a dinner date with those Atlantic journalists (they’re back!). This Saturday, there’s the Ajo Regional Food Festival, and then ISDA’s big Community Arts Gathering begins; the latter corresponds with the launch of the Conference Center. For the next week Ajo will be full of artists and musicians and filmmakers, all leading a nonstop string of workshops and demonstrations and performances. We’ll be swamped running the Conference Center (all 16 of our rooms will be full, housing the visiting artists), but we’re excited to sneak out to some of the workshops, the special meals (there’s a local SONORAN HOT DOG truck that sometimes comes out for events like this!), and the nightly bonfires around town.

7. The Scenic Loop. This beautiful 10-mile road loops around Ajo and is the perfect place to dive into the desert without actually leaving town. Some new friends took me here for a walk two weeks ago, and the other night Stuart and I went to a little get-together up on “The Slab”, a hill-top concrete platform where Ajo-ites go to party and get closer to the stars. We heard a rumor people sleep out there sometimes; my fear of being attacked by some vicious combination of snakes, scorpions and spiders will keep me from trying THAT, but maybe I’ll go catch the sunrise some day soon?

8. The symphony of sounds. Forget your fantasies of desert serenity. This can be a very noisy place. Every night there is a chorus of coyotes and neighborhood dogs; every morning, the hooting of mourning doves and squawking roosters wakes us up early. I haven’t heard the javelinas snorting in our neighbor’s yard yet, but apparently they do. Nature feels very close by.

9. Proximity to other places. I’ve heard from more than one resident that one way to love Ajo is actually to leave Ajo, fairly regularly. I imagine it can feel a little claustrophobic, as any small town can – we’ve only been here a month and we’ve already felt that at times. Thankfully, there’s an abundance of interesting stuff within a two hour drive: the incredible desert landscape at Organ Pipe National Monument (which we FINALLY visited last weekend!), the beaches in Puerto Penasco, city life in Phoenix and Tucson. A little further is Sedona or San Diego, both long weekend trips. People keep telling us Bisbee is neat, and that Kartchner Caverns is unmissable.

10. Night of the Lepus. We haven’t watched it yet, but this ’70s cult classic about killer bunnies was filmed here in Ajo. The trailer is amazing, and there’s a great mural in town honoring this cinematic gem. And perhaps in homage to the movie, there are in fact hundreds of rabbits bouncing all over town.

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I wrote this post from the brand-new office of the Sonoran Desert Conference Center, where guests are starting to arrive and this former elementary school, empty for more than two decades, is suddenly coming back to life. Wish us luck: our stint as Volunteer Innkeepers has officially begun!