Hurricane John lashes Mexico's Cabo San Lucas

CABO SAN LUCAS, Mexico — Hurricane John bore down on the southern tip of Baja California on Friday, forcing tourists to shelter in luxury hotel ballrooms and poor Mexicans to huddle in vacant schoolhouses.

With top sustained winds of 110 mph, the Category 2 hurricane was advancing on the western Mexican peninsula at 8 mph with the storm's center expected to move over land within hours, forecasters said.

Bands of steady rain swelled normally dry stream beds and ran down some streets, but with the eye still 85 miles away Friday afternoon, there was little wind and officials had no immediate reports of damage. John wasn't likely to affect the United States; cooler Pacific waters tend to diminish storms before they reach California.

Known for the rugged beauty of their unique desert-ocean landscapes, the two resort cities of San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas on the southern tip of the Baja peninsula are studded with high-end golf courses. The resorts are extremely popular with sports fishermen — and celebrities.

Hollywood stars including Demi Moore, Ashton Kucher, Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn visit places like the One and Only — a hotel where the posted rates go well above $2,000 a night. Keith Richards got married in Cabo San Lucas with Mick Jagger as best man; Christina Aguilera had her bachelorette party there; Jessica Simpson celebrated her 26th birthday there, and Kate Beckinsale's stay was immortalized on the Internet by paparazzi shots of her in a bikini.

On Friday, thousands of tourists who couldn't get flights out prepared to ride out the storm.

"That water wasn't that high a few minutes ago," said Dale Broomfield, 26, a nurse from Adelaide, Australia, who negotiated a makeshift plank bridge over water that rose up between his hotel and an adjoining convention hall-turned-shelter in Cabo San Lucas.

Nearby, Guadalupe Amezcua, a 50-year-old tourist from Mexico City, set up camp on one of many mattresses on the floor of the hall, where windowless rooms provided protection from wind.

"This is like an adventure for us, but I've learned now: never travel during hurricane season," Amezcua said as she folded her clothes.

"We came for the sun — and now look!"

Miles away from the glittering coastal hotels, 46-year-old bricklayer Francisco Casas Perez sat outside a schoolroom where he and his 14-year-old son spent the night. They were evacuated from their tin-roofed shack in Tierra y Libertad, one of the squatters camps that dot the sandy flats around Cabo San Lucas.