Isabel and I took the train from Chihuahua to the mountains on Wednesday morning. "The Chepe" as it's known is the Chihuahua-Pacific passenger train and the only passenger train in the country. I couldn't believe the rail system for passengers is non existent not including the aforementioned. Again there was some desert to pass through and the section through the mountains was nice. Chihuahua is a big exporter of apples and the higher altitudes hosted many many orchards. The journey took about 4 and a half hours, so I tried to sleep, read some of my book (Dracula) and took a few pictures out the window. I'm sure I spoke to Isabel at some stage too. The gas for the kitchen in the dining cart was out of service so we didn't get a proper breakfast. All in all it was a pleasant trip. The second part (from Creel to Los Mochis) is suppose to have more spectacular views and we'll spend about 8 hours on it tomorrow going through the copper canyon towards the Pacific so I'll write some more on it then.
Creel is a small town about 2230m above sea level with a population of 5300 (thank you lonely planet). My first impression wasn't too good. It seemed like a relatively derelict station we got out at and we were immediately greeted by a gang of locals asking did we want a hotel. The platform was also full of Tarahumara girls selling handcrafted trinkets. (A little more on them later).
We popped into Casa Margatita a little hotel place Isabel had stayed before and got the last double room. The room was really comfortable which re-comforted me. We dropped our bags and walked down the main street for some food. Creel is pretty small and it didn't take long to walk up and down the street. After our early morning the two of us conked out for a couple of hours post breakfast/lunch.
The afternoon was considerably more exciting than our power nap. We rented a quad bike for an hour and drove about 10km outside creel to one of the nearby lakes. The lake was extremely low and we arrived at the end of a particularly bad drought in the area. (And I literally mean we arrived the last day of the drought). We got some nice pictures though, I just have to get to a PC and upload them.
Again there were a lot of the indigenous Tarahumara around the lake area. On the way out the road we even saw plenty of houses spotted between the valleys and hills belonging to them. From what we could see they didn't have a very good quality of living and from what we could tell the children would most likely only ever know this way of life. To somebody raised in Celtic tiger Ireland it seemed quite sad. However the people themselves didn't appear sad. Over the next 2 days we saw the Tarahumara all over the canyon. Some on the edges of cliffs, some on the canyon floor, some even in caves on the canyon walls. Another very interesting thing is that the Tarahumara people's preferred transport is their own two feet. Tarahumara means light feet according to Isabel. At stages over our visit we were an hour driving from the next village and these people were out living a hard life in the canyon.
Our breakfast and dinner was included in our room fee which was awesome but as the Casa was under renovation we had to dine down the street in their sister hotel. The food was authentic and we were joined by a pleasant young American guy, Scott, from Santa Fe New Mexico. The following morning we breakfasted with Scott, a French traveler named David and Sophie who was holidaying from Switzerland. Scott (a journalist) had heard of a Tarahumara violin maker that lived deep in the canyon near a village called La Bufa. He wanted to interview him for a story so after a little to-ing and fro-ing we organized a guide to drive us there. Cesar our guide warned us that the road might be closed as there was major road works happening in that part of the canyon. The weather was nice when we set off and the trip was two hours of winding and winding roads, up and down. We stopped several times along the way for excellent photo opportunities and once for lunch in this tiny village. The views, as you can imagine were awe inspiring. The copper canyon is the second largest canyon system in the world after Peru. It use be the third but the Chinese flooded theirs when they built the three gorges dam.
We finally got to the road leading down into La Bufa, but across the valley we could see plumes of dust. The construction crew were in the middle of dynamiting as part of the road building. Cesar stopped and chatted to one of the engineers who said we couldn't go down currently and if we were let down wouldn't be able to get out until night. The engineer did allow us down one of the access roads to see a view of the valley. When I say this access road was small I mean it only just fit the truck in which we were driving. On one side was a relatively freshly excavated cliff face/wall and on the other side was (not to sound dramatic) death. Halfway down a rock about the size of a fist tumbled off and put a lovely dent in the bonnet of Cesar's truck. We had to stop shortly after because the workers started dumping a load of rock down about 25m away from us. I snapped some pictures quickly when I got out and opted to walk back up as Cesar had to reverse some of the way to get out. It was an experience but also a pity not to get down to the village as it was another two hour drive back. The heavens opened en route back to Creel and it pretty much hasn't stopped raining since.
Isabel and I took a trip to Divisadero today. The views once again were spectacular. Here one can see where 3 parts of the canyon converge (or diverge, I'm not sure). Unfortunately the pictures we got weren't as clear as the day before because of the weather. We were lucky in so far as we had intended on renting a moped to travel the hour there. The rain started coming down in sheets about ten minutes into the journey, stopped for a little while we were there and continued pretty steadily until now (~23:00). I'm afraid Creel might get washed off the top of the mountain. The thunder and lightning has been impressive as well.
We got drenched going to the shop for munchies for our train tomorrow. I even wore my flip flops to dinner due to the amount of water if the street. I probably would have worn them anyways. Once again it is late and I must retire for a journey tomorrow. Hasta luego :)
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