I’d had a dinner of chicken and rice, played a dice game and chatted with a couple from New York. It felt like 1am and time to head for my tent, but in fact it was not even eight o’clock.

“Out here, we call 8pm ‘Baja midnight’,” said Bernado, our guide, in a matter-of-fact way. “Most people are in bed by 7.30.”

“Baja” is Baja California, the long, dangly bit on Mexico’s west coast. Towards the southern tip, a half hour’s boat ride from the city of La Paz, Isla Espiritu Santo and Isla Partida are two islands perfect for sea-kayaking around, and I was spending a week doing just that with 11 others.

In the Sea of Cortez that laps the eastern side of the peninsula, the waters are warm, calm and filled with all sorts of fascinating creatures, from tuna and turtles to manta rays and whales, the beaches are the stuff of chocolate-advert dreams, and there’s starkly barren scenery that would make a spaghetti-western director weep. Tall, muddy-red volcanic cliffs and hills are strewn with boulders and dappled with forests of nine-metre-high cacti. Hundreds of pelicans laze on rocks or cruise on air currents, every so often dive-bombing fish that venture too close to the surface.

La Paz, a two-hour flight south from Los Angeles, makes a pleasant introduction to Mexico. In the evenings, families and courting couples promenade on the five-kilometre (three-mile) Malecón, the city’s seafront. In the centre of town, people sit on benches and watch the world go by in Plaza Constitución, by the Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Paz, while stalls selling cheap snacks do a roaring trade as thermometers nudge 30C.

After just one night there, though, I was being delivered on to a beach on Espiritu Santo. I’d been told my group might be full of singles so who knew? A future partner could just be a paddle away. However, the others who assembled for our introductory safety briefing were not a posse of potential blind dates but instead a friendly, diverse group of Americans, ranging in age from 11 to mid-60s.

Most were couples, though there were also father-son and mother-daughter bonders. And a fellow Brit — Angela Simms, 34, an IT manager from Herefordshire. “I wanted to kayak in a unique environment and to see this part of the world,” she said. Although most people had canoed previously there were no gung-ho professionals among us. Even for those such as Angela who hadn’t ever been in a kayak before, the boats were light and manoeuvrable, and the paddling technique easy to pick up and not too tiring.

The key to the success of any such trip lies in the guiding and we were lucky that as well as the extremely affable and knowledgeable 28-year-old biologist Bernado Cruz Montfort from Mexico City, we also had Francisco Riquelme, 37, with us. After dabbling in law and reading the news on television in his native Chile, he had walked 2,600 miles from Mexico to Canada, hunted alligators in the Amazon, worked with horses in Mississippi and was something of a ladies’ man (he said).

Completing the team was Alvaro the rotund, jocular, permanently sunglassed chef, always cooking and smiling, who only ever got upset if you didn’t go back for thirds. Despite having only a trestle table and a couple of gas rings, Alvaro cooked up dishes such as tamales, quesadillas, chilaquiles, tacos, fish and an array of salads that would put many a restaurant to shame.

The pattern of days was to rise with the sun around 6.30am, have breakfast, pack up our tents and campsite (heavier items went in the motorboat driven by Alvaro) and paddle for the morning, stopping every so often for a cooling dip. There was a mixture of single and double kayaks, each quite stable despite an occasional swell away from protected inlets and beaches. We’d generally stick close to shore under the pink-tinged volcanic cliffs but sometimes went out across wide bays, keeping fairly well together as a group under the watchful eyes of Bernado and Francisco, who kayaked alongside.