The Canyons of Chihuahua / Showdown In Durango

  Durango, Mexico
Sunday, January 28, 2007

The first I knew about 2007 was a 5 A.M. alarm call. Still rubbing the sleep from my eyes I headed to the station. The train pulled out of Chihuahua shortly after seven o'clock bound for Los Mochis on the Pacific Coast. El Chepe - otherwise known as the Copper Canyon Railway - is often cited as one of the world's great train rides and is a big draw for foreign tourists. It's also one of the few links between the neighbouring states of Chihuahua and Sinaloa. The second-class service was quiet on New Year's Day and only one of its dozen or so carriages was full. Along with the handful of other people who constituted overspill I was shunted into a second carriage, away from the mean looking hombres in black cowboy hats.

Cattle ranges, thick with gold-hued grass and enclosed by ranges of knobbly hills, characterised the journey to Cuauhtemoc, an hour or so to the west. Thereafter the railroad climbed up into the Sierra Madre and a frozen landscape of snow-covered pine forests. I was on my way to the town of Creel, high in the mountains and the gateway to canyon country. For the best part of a week, while the sun shone in Chihuahua, snow had been falling in the mountains. The roads had been blocked and the railway had been closed by landslides. It was a relief to be finally underway again.

A couple of touts were waiting at the station. I brushed them off and pushed my bicycle across the square. On the main street a thaw was underway. Rooftops dripped and the pavements were covered in slushy ice. Indian women wrapped in long flowing skirts and colourful blankets peddled trinkets to passers-by. Babies slept in the folds of material around their mothers' backs.

Road To Lake Arerako

The roads were largely free of ice. I dumped my stuff in a guest house and went out on the bike to explore. The road to Lake Arerako ran through a valley of unusual rock formations, outcrops of bulbous-tipped limestone flutings made beautiful by a tinge of snow. I wandered around the shore of the small reservoir. In the woods nearby families celebrated the New Year with picnics by the campire. It was getting cold and I turned back past knots of racing walkers who were wiggling their arses in the direction of town. Outside a cave dwelling some Indian girls had built a snowman. They laughed mischievously as a snowball exploded on the road beside me. Shaking my fist, I yelled 'Troglodytes!', and pedalled on.

Viva Chihuahua - norteņo style

As well as being on the railway line, Creel sits at the junction of the Sierra Tarahumara's two paved roads giving the town the unofficial status of gateway to the canyons. It's a small ramshackle sort of place given over almost entirely to tourism. At night, when the temperature plummets, foreigners congregate by the fireside in the local pubs to be serenaded by balladeers - whether they like it or not.

After my second day in Creel, which I spent writing beside the hearth in a local restaurant while freezing rain poured down outside, I was glad to find that I had a room-mate in the form of Gilles, a French-Canadian who had saved up his dole money to escape from the cold of Montreal (a case of out of fridge and into the freezer if ever there was!). He was resolved to escape to the coast at the earliest possible opportunity.

I almost joined Gilles on the train to Los Mochis the next day but I changed my mind when I saw what a beautiful morning it was. I brushed a three-inch thick coating off snow off my bike and loaded up the panniers. My goal was to reach the village of Divisadero, perched on the lip of Copper Canyon some forty-five kilometres to the west.

The tracks of motor vehicles cuts swathes through the snow and ice as the two-laned road climbed through the pine forest and I struggled for breath in the thin mountain air. Oncoming traffic sprayed me with slush as I struggled on, gripped by the exhiliration of lunacy, until ten kilometres into the journey, I arrived at the crest of a hill to be greeted by a mass of black cloud which loomed over the mountains to the west. On the hillside below a gang of workmen scraped ice from the road with shovels.

The Road to Divisadero

In a week in which several indigenous Tarahumara people had died from the effects of cold, to have continued would have been reckless in the extreme. I turned around and pedalled back towards Creel as fast as I could given the conditions. A couple of kilometres short of my objective the storm clouds caught up with me and snow began to fall. On a steep descent I hit a patch of ice and lost contol of the bicyle. Snow cushioned my fall and I escaped with only a gashed left knee. Later, as I dressed the cut back at the hostel, I concluded that cycling on roads covered in snow and ice is a very stupid idea indeed.

My new room-mate was an interesting-looking character. An old guy with goggle-like plastic glasses, the beginning of a silver-grey beard and half a mouthful of long nicotine-stained teeth, he was wearing a colourful blue poncho and a bush hat studded with enamel badges - a Comanche Crocodile Dundee with a Brummy accent.

Joe And The Bus to Batopilas

When I next saw Joe at the pub later in the evening, he was offering to buy the local ballad singer a beer on the condition that he shut up. I joined him by the fire and we fell into conversation. Joe was seventy going on seventeen and he'd been all over the world on his travels. It was his third time in Mexico and he was on his way to Batopilas, a town with a sub-tropical climate located at the bottom of a deep canyon.

It was several degrees below zero when we boarded the battered old school bus which served Batopilas at seven o'clock the following morning. After descending for an hour or so via an winding ice-covered road the frost on the windows started to melt revealing a frozen landscape of pine. A short while later we caught our first glance of a canyon, a line of high limestone bluffs rising above the forest.

A number of rivers arise in a relatively small area, each forming a separate canyon, and the road would climb up the side of one canyon to a watershed with extensive views across a canvas of blue sky, green forest and porcelain-grey limestone, before winding its way down into another canyon. After three hours of climbing and descending we turned off the paved road onto a dirt track. The bus slowed, almost to a standstill, to negociate the rutted surface.

Our driver was a bear of a man, broad-shouldered with hazel brown eyes and a full black beard. Across the back of his baseball cap in bold red capitals was emblazoned the word 'cock' (appropriately, a brightly-coloured cockerel graced the front of the cap). Later I would come to appreciate his expertise behind the wheel.

Leaving the forest behind, we entered the head of a narrow ravine and climbed across a steep hillside inches from a drop of a couple of hundred feet, a foretaste of things to come. We emerged from the ravine onto a preciptous mountainside high above the canyon of the Batopilas River to be greeted by a stunning panaorama. A man-made barrier of rock slabs (the only concession to road safety along the entire route) separated the track from a vertical drop of ridiculous proportions. By a roadside shrine The Cock let us out for a breath of air. Like over-excited dogs we surged through the doors into the warmth of the sunshine as delicious as the view before us. Joe rolled a cigarette while the rest of us ran around like we'd just seen a bitch in heat. clambering over rocks, cameras at the ready, snapping this way and that. Asides from myself and Joe, there were three Gringos, and Italian couple and a pair of young Mexican lovebirds.

Road Into The Batopilas Canyon

A chasm, thousands of feet deep, lay beneath us, enclosed by rugged chains of snow brushed peaks on either side. From the narrow ribbon of mud-brown water at the foot of the canyon walls of pink sandstone, interspersed with green scrub, spread upwards in an uneven series of steps. 'La Bufa' said The Cock, pointing to a handful of rooftops among a distant patch of greenery close to where the river disappeared around a bend in the canyon. Lured by the promise of lunch, we piled back onto the bus.

Halfway down a long series of switchbacks which coiled their way across the steep hillside, I caught sight of a cordon cactus, its green snake-like limbs rising twenty feet into the air. As we descended futher, the giant cacti multiplied across the bone-dry slopes like a cartoon weed. 'Bienvenidos a Mexico!' they seemed to chant in unison.

Cactus And Canyon

A large boulder blocked the track and we came to a halt. Half a dozen of us made an unsuccessful attempt to shift it before The Cock appeared with a long chain. He wrapped one end around the rock and made a knot and attatched the other end to the undercarriage of the bus. Reversing back up the hill he succeeded in dislodging the boulder, which loosed itself from the chain and bounced down the hillside with a resounding series of cracks before exploding with a boom in the valley below.

We crossed the river on a rickety bridge and began the climb up the far side of the valley, arriving in the hamlet of La Bufa a short while later. After a quick burrito stop at the local cafe we reboarded the bus for the final leg of the journey.

A drop of frightening scale opened up beneath us as the track climbed higher and higher up the hillside. Nerves of steel were required as we inched past the occasional pick-up trucks travelling in the opposite direction. Across the valley great crags of sandstone, glowing red and ochre in the afternoon sun, rose above steep cactus-strewn slopes. Far below, we picked out walking trails which ran alongside the murky waters of the Rio Batopilas.

View of Batopilas

Gradually we began to descend and, rounding a bend in the canyon, the town of Batopilas came into view, strung out along the opposite bank of the river below a line of craggy peaks. After alighting from the bus in a palm-fringed square, Joe and I took a room in a nearby guesthouse where I lay down to make up for missed sleep.

The town was in darkness, the result of a power cut, when I emerged sometime later. A restaurant across the square was the only place with lights and here I found Joe having a drink. A group of musicians were playing to a small crowd, among whom I spotted a couple of faces which I recognised from the bus ride.

I ate and drank while Joe drank and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, leaving his half-eaten plate of chips to go cold. Unable to resist the intoxicating cocktail of beer and tobacco smoke, I was soon cadging cigarettes (later Joe would give me one of the many packets of Golden Viriginia which he carried in his rucksack). Joe was a raconteur and I listened attentively as he told his story. He had been a ten pound Pommie who'd emigrated to the Australia in the 1950s where'd he'd spent a few years working in remote mining camps. After contracting malaria during a spell in Papua New Guinea he returned to Birmingham where he'd worked a host of engineering jobs in order to finance his annual peregrinations which were timed to coincide with 'the miserable English winter'. In almost fifty years on the road he had accumulated a catalogue of anecdotes from the four corners of the world, most of which began with the soon to be familiar words 'I was in this pub in ...'.

Upon venturing out into the balmy heat of the following morning, I was struck by the elegance of the main plaza, an elegance I had not expected to find in a remote place, a hundred kilometres from the nearest paved road. Chirldren played by the orante iron bandstand while on the benches nearby old men in white straw hats sat around talking about the affairs of the day. Beyond the shady palms which lined the perimeter of the square stood rows of opulent buildings, bright, airy and solidly built in the colonial style with the decorative ironwork and intricate colours of the second-storey balconies a particularly outstanding feature.

The wealth of Batopilas derived from the silver mines hidden in the surrounding hills. Along with Joe, I headed across the river in search of the abandoned hacienda of the American magnate who'd overseen mining operations at the turn of the last century. After a short sharp climb we found that the directions we'd been given were unclear and turned back. On re-crossing the bridge Joe declared that he was exhausted and went off in search of a pub.

I followed the town's long main street along the river bank, spied the unremarkable ruins of the hacienda on the opposite shore, and continued past the simple iron road bridge which we'd crossed the previous day, onto a footpath which led along the water's edge towards a deep section of the gorge.

Simple stone cottages lay at intervals along the route and donkey traffic filed past in the opposite direction. Across the river vehicle wrecks littered the hillside beneath the road which ran high above. Giant cordon cacti, their prickly green fingers a couple of dozen feet tall, towered over me as I rounded a bend in the canyon.

Pico Colorado

Ahead, a giant hulk of sandstone, resplendent with pinks and reds, dominated the valley. At the mouth of a side-canyon, a village straddled the river, its two parts connected by a hanging bridge carrying pedestrian traffic - two legs and four. I continued upstream along the left bank river through the settlement of a score or so cottages, each on its own little plot. Children played barefoot in the dusty lanes and women washed laundry in a stream, a tributary of the Rio Batopilas. I waded across the shallows, sharp stones punishing my feet.

Low bluffs abutted the confluence of the two streams. I crossed the rough scree of the riverbed to a spot where I'd seen two wild donkeys disappear into the scrub. A rough path clambered across the hillside and soon I was back among the giant cacti. In stony fields, fenced off by barbed wire at the bottom of a ravine, cacti of a different sort were being grown. The edible nopal cactus grows like a surreal bush, its limbs chains of spike-covered ping-pong bats.

Pico Colorado And Cacti

With the shade continuing to lengthen I disappeared back into the undergrowth where I encountered a cowboy on horseback who asked where I was going. I had a vague notion of continuing upstream to a second bridge - which I'd seen from the bus the day before. When the cowboy, whose name was Juan, told me that the bridge was at least two hours further on I took him up his offer to ford the river on horseback instead. We changed places and, having removed his trousers and boots, Juan took the reins and strode out into the current, unperturbed by the stones which had troubled me earlier.

On the opposite shore Juan pointed me in the right direction before riding off into the bush. Another rough path across a hillside brimming with monster cacti brought me to the other half of the village I'd visited earlier. From there I was able to gain the road, arriving back in Batopilas just as darkness fell.

Later in the evening I had a few beers with Joe, who was still suffering from his exertons earlier. There was no way he would be able to walk the seven kilometres out to Satevo, he told me. It so happened that I'd just been talking to a local guide, who'd offered to bring us there the following day for a reasonable price.

Arturo showed up in his battered pick-up truck shortly after nine o'clock. He was forty something with a trademark white cowboy hat and neatly clipped moustache. Like most of the people in Batopilas Arturo was a mestizo of mixed European and indigenous ancestry. We soon learned that he played the guitar in a local band and had slept with more than thirty women, a claim which, if true, might have accounted for the failure of his first marriage.

La Catedral Perdida At Sátevo

The road downstream from Batopilas was rough but scenic, with a backdrop of peaks and verdant hillsides covered in giant cacti. Rounding a bend the vllage of Satevo appeared below spread out across a shelf where the canyon opened up a little. Though a small place with only a couple of dozen houses Satevo had its own cathedral, a simple but beautiful structure built in the early Baroque style from pink sandstone wreathed in dazzling white stucco. A small boy appeared with a large wooden key and we spent a few minutes poking around the inside of the church which was still decked out for Christmas.

Whiskey Priest, La Catedral Perdida, Sátevo

Arturo explained that the Franciscans had built the cathedral in the seventeenth century as part of their efforts to convert the Tarahumara. It had fallen into disuse druing the nineteenth century when most of the people moved to Batopilas to work in the mines.

I spent a few minutes bonding with the jovial Arturo - throwing stones at pigs in a field - and then we went off to have a look around a nearby Tarahumara village. The Tarahumara are the indigenous people of the mountains and canyons of western Chihuahua state, numbering tens of thousands of people. Though most are settled in villages, some continue to maintain a nomadic lifestyle, moving around between some of the area's many caves. I had mixed feelings about going to see the Indian village, suspecting that I was about to come face to face with abject poverty.

A group of colourly attired women were busy making tortilla in the shade of a lean-to shelter when we arrived in the settlement of a dozen or so shacks with breeze block walls and corrugated iron rooves. Dogs growled and chickens scurried arond between giant cacti. Babies cried and snot-nosed kids had bad coughs. My liberal sensibilities were offended when I found out that the children did not go to school.

Tarahumara Village

Los Reyes (Epiphany) is a big deal in Mexico and the men of the village were marking the festival somewhere down by the river. An drunken old man showed up and began arguing with his wife, much to our guide's amusement. Arturo redeemed himself later when he paid what seemed a fair price for a wood stove to the pretty woman with good Spanish who seemed to be the village spokesperson.

On the return journey we learned some more about the history of the area from Arturo who was plugging his trip to the silver mines the following day. After the revolution broke out in 1910 the wealthy gringo who controlled the mines formed a paramilitary group to keep the workers in line. Operations continued until Pancho Villa's men turned up in force, looted the mines and chased off the gringos. So ended mining in Batopilas.

Batopilas Canyon Near Sátevo

I gained an insight into the modern economy of Batopilas later that afternoon when I was offered a kilo of marijuana for the knock-down price of fifty dollars by a group of men who we met in a bar. The scent drifting across the valley, the glut of flashy pick-ups and the military checkpoint on the road out - suddenly it all made sense. I thought of the prison I'd seen beside the railway station in Chihuahua and decided to pass.

The Cock was back at five A.M. on Monday morning. A crowd of fifty or so people had gathered outside the church in the square. The doors opened and a scramble ensued. As the bus climbed away from Batopilas through the darkness I sat huddled in the aisle amongst my fellow losers. After a few minutes the headlights failed but The Cock did not appear overly concerned, and continued to chat animatedly to the pretty girl perched beside him at the wheel. In any case the sun soon appeared from beyond a ridge to illuminate the canyon. By the time I managed to sqeeze my arse onto the edge of a seat life was looking good again.

In Creel, the big freeze was off, the snow having retreated to the surrounding hilltops. Lines of school children, back from their holidays, stood proudly to attention in their playground while some noteworthy unfurled the national flag. At the railway station El Chepe disgorged the latest arrivals onto the platform. I returned to Casa Margarita to be reunited with my bicycle.

It was late of night when I arrived in Durango, several hundred kilometres to the south, along with Joe. After three days in succession travelling by bus we were in need of a drink. We dumped our stuff in a hotel room and headed to the adjacent pizza restaurant for a nightcap.

The journey down from Creel, broken by a night in the town of Hidalgo del Parral, had been uneventful asides from a military search and a visit to a dodgy cantina in Parral. Durango, being at a lower altitude, seemed good starting point for my journey south.

Having Joe along for the ride was an added bonus. I was thoroughly amused by his eccentric behaviour, bolshy attitude and crazy anecdotes. But a combination of gin, tobacco and age was taking its toll and he often struggled to walk more than a few hundred yards. Next day, we hired a taxi to take us the few blocks to the tourist office but the driver gave us the run around and we ended up on the other side of town. I decided to walk back while Joe jumped on a bus.

My journey took me through quiet residential streets into the commercial heart of the city. By the time I arrived downtown I'd formed the impression that Durango was a pleasant modern city with some nice colonial architecture. there was no sign of Joe at the tourist office. I collected some brochures and walked back to the historic heart of the city around the Plaza de Armas.

I found Joe later at the pizza restuarant which had become our operations centre. Somehow he'd managed to convince the waiters that it wasn't worth their while to try and prevent him from smoking. Earlier, he'd got on the wrong bus and ended up in a far flung part of town, returning to the hotel by taxi. I passed on the information he wanted and ordered some food. Joe ordered another beer and started skinning up. Food was a distraction for him. I'd never known anyone to eat so little.

A few beers later Joe confessed that he was finding the travelling really tough going. The current trip could be his last, he continued, before adding that the thought of sitting in his falt 'looking at the four walls' was enough to drive him mad. 'Anyway', he went on, 'I was in this bar in Egypt...'

Gunslinger At Villa Del Oeste

Spaghetti Western Theme

A combination of beautiful landscapes, low costs and year round sunshine has long made Durango a favourite with Hollywood. Many Westerns have been filmed there and most of the genre's big names have passed though at some point. On our second day in Durango we took a bus out to an old film set, located twelve kilometres north of the city. When we arrived at the set the gate keeper told us that the 'attraction' - by which he meant the restaurants, bars and theme shows - was closed but said we could have a look around anyway. For the next hour we had Villa Del Oeste to ourselves.

Cemetary Of The Stars At Villa Del Oeste

Set amid a cactus-studded valley with a backdrop of barren hills Villa Del Oeste is a one-street Wild West town with a bank, a hotel, a saloon, a sheriff's office, a post office, a casino, a stage-coach office and a blacksmith's forge. Hitching posts and water troughs line the dusty thoroughfare. Scattered across a wider area are additional features such as a church, a ranch-house, a railroad car and a few tee-pees. A wind blew in off the hills and clouds scudded across the sky as we wandered around, lending the ghost-town somewhat of an atmosphere. Just when I was expecting a tumbleweed to roll across the scene, a mangy dog loped through the white archway which was the entrance of the picket-enclosed cemetery, conveniently situated next to a set of gallows. Beneath a stately oak I found the 'graves' of a number of stars - John Wayne, James Garner, John Candy and Richard Harris among them - each marked by a mound of earth and a simple wooden cross.

View of Chupaderos

The village of Chupaderos lies two kilometres beyond Villa Del Oeste and I'd heard that it was worth a visit. I cajoled Joe into making the effort with the promise of beer on arrival. From the crest of a hill the town spread across golden ranges enclosed by an arc of rugged mountains. We took a short-cut over the railroad track and under a barbed wire fence to a dusty back street lined by adobe houses. A boy passed by cradling a bloody pig's head in his arms.

Hotel In Chupaderos

A the crossroads in the centre of the village was an old movie set, not unlike Villa Del Oeste, but in a state of advanced dereliction. The main landmarks were the 'hotel' and the 'saloon' but neither had seen a customer since Billy the Kid rode into town. A shop was operating in an old wooden 'saddlery' but it didn't sell beer. I could sense Joe becoming restless.

Upon making some enquiries we learned that there was a bar in the next village, a short distance up the road. A guy in a car told us he was going there himself and told us to jump in. Ramirez was a teacher who owned a house in Chupaderos and was stocking up for a party at the weekend. Twenty minutes later he dropped us back at the ruined saloon with a carton of Carta Blanca each and wished us luck. On the crumbling boardwark we opened a couple of bottles and sat down to wait.

Saloon In Chupaderos

Although the hotel on the corner diagonally opposite was built from brick and in good condition the rest of the 'town' was constructed from wood and was in poor condition. A family was living in the 'church' across the street. Further along a young boy came out of a 'posada' and began kicking a football in the shadow of a wooden gallows. I went over to investigate and found a rope, with a noose still in place, swinging gently in the breeze. Though the splintered door of a rotting wooden storehouse I could make out a plywood coffin bearing the scrawled inscription 'John Candy'.

Playground, Chupaderos

Now and then a local passed by. More often than not our greetings of 'Hola' or 'Buenos Tardes' went unanswered. A vague undercurrent of hostility filled the air. An old guy wearing a white cowboy hat limped up the street and took up position on the boardwalk outside the 'grocery' over the street. His hackles raised by the unwanted presence of strangers, he stared across at us like a gnarled old gunslinger. Not even when Joe brought him over a bottle of beer could he manage a smile. Tension mounted. I wanted someone to take a potshot at us. A second veteran joined the first and an amicable converstion arose. The two viejos quickly lost interest in us. It was time to go and wait somewhere else.

We walked to the main road and the bus stop at the entrance to the village. Traffic was slow and there wasn't a bus to be seen. The sun sank closer to the ridge beyond the town. Another beer passed and there was still no sign of a bus. Joe put out his thumb. After a couple of minutes a pick-up pulled over and we jumped on the back. A wind sprang up as the driver sped towards Durango. We opened another couple of bottles and sat back to enjoy the ride. It had been, as Joe said, 'one helluva day'.

ENDS