Revenge of the Stetsons:
Riding the Chihuahua Pacifico through Mexico's Copper Canyon CountryMountains loom up from the canyon floor, dwarfing the seventeenth-century mission church. Cacti reach for a hot, china-blue sky, children scrabble in the dust around the church whilst stetson-hatted figures come and go in battered utility trucks with deep, rumbling eight-cylinder engines. This must be the quintessential Mexico…
¡No Imposicion! We demand free elections! Señor Gobernador - Indigenous communities in this district have been abandoned!
The message is clear, the mood is tense. The bush has come to Batopilas, deep inside the Copper Canyon country of northern Mexico and still accessible only by an epic drive on switchback gravel roads. Arms crossed, unsmiling smallholder campesinos blockade the town hall, supported by colourfully-garbed but equally unsmiling, nut-brown Tarahumara Indians. The pistol-packing Federales, stationed here to track down marijuana plantations, keep a discrete distance.
This is the new Mexico, where mestizo peasant farmers and indigenous Indians unite to challenge the Tammany Hall machinations which stage-managed Mexican politics for so many decades. "It's happening all over the country," says Carlos Bustillos, then excuses himself to catch the latest news.
Deep inside the Sierra Madre Occidental of northern Mexico, the Copper Canyons tumble to greater depths than Arizona's Grand Canyon. Rich lodes of gold and silver, not copper, awaited the Spanish conquistadores who packed their bullion out along the Camino Real, the Royal Road still serving as a bridle path, three centuries later.
This rugged terrain, the Sierra Tarahumara, is traversed by one of the world's most dramatic train rides. The railway crosses 39 bridges and penetrates 86 tunnels as it climbs 2,400 metres from the arid tropical plains beside the Sea of Cortez up to the high, rolling wheatfields of Mexico's Altiplano. The Ferrocarril Chihuahua Pacifico opened in 1961, a century after Albert Kinsey Owens began campaigning to build a link from Kansas to the Pacific coast.
It is a twelve-hour ride between Los Mochis, on Mexico's Pacific coast, and the inland city of Chihuahua (due south of El Paso, Texas) but the stretch between the sixteenth-century colonial garrison town of El Fuerte and Creel, high in the Sierra, encapsulates the highlights. Passengers catch vistas of three magnificent canyons, Septentrion, Urique and Tararecua, with distant glimpses of a fourth.
During Semana Santa, the Easter Holy Week festival, the Tarahumara, who call themselves Raramuri, perform dances and ritual jousts which interweave their tribal beliefs with the Catholic ritual introduced by 17th century Jesuits. Otherwise, the best time to visit is early autumn, when, in a good year, the canyons are clothed in velvet green and the mists rise up each morning to return as the afternoon deluge.
Three levels of track meet at Témoris, negotiating the canyon formed by the Rio Septentrion. On the river flats, fields of Indian corn surround dusty cottages of adobe and corrugated-iron. Here the track crosses two curving bridges to reverse its direction, ascending in a series of loops before disappearing into a long tunnel.
We have inched up onto a stony plateau lightly forested with conifers: ponderosa pine and Douglas fir which give way to piñon, live oak and juniper at lower elevations, then merge into the arid-tropical mesquite, agave and cactus. Soon we reach the canyon-rim station at El Divisadora, crowded with vendors of burritos, postcards and handcrafts.
A few minutes back down the track, the apricot adobe cabins of the luxurious Posada Mirador perch right on the very rim of the canyon, 2200 metres above sea level, contrasting with the natural green of the canyon walls. Less ostentatious, the Diaz family operates a casa de huespedes or simple guesthouse in the nearby village of Areponapuchic, to which I returned by road to watch the sun set over the Barranca Tararecua. Stetsons fixed firmly, the men of the family moved through the family kitchen as Señora Diaz served up plates heaped with meat, beans, cheese and tortillas.
By late afternoon the locomotive clatters into Creel, one of those awkward frontier towns where Third World indigenes mingle uneasily with the global middle class of the Information Age; a rough-edged timber-milling town on the flank of a high, shallow altitude valley or arroyo. On the main street souvenir shops rub shoulders with one-room general stores (boots, infant wear, canned food, stetson hats) and pseudo-alpine tourist lodges like Margaritas, crowded tonight with young Germans, French and English backpackers. That cacophany down the road is the pipe and drum band at the primary school, whose practise session is wrapping up - thank heavens. Cottonwood trees glow a rich, radiant gold in the late autumn sun.
Mañana. Fresh chill as the first rays of the sun strike the hilltop Christo Rey (Christ the King) statue. Bound for Batopilas, I'm embarking on a journey back down into the depths of the canyons. By 7:45 the seven a.m. bus, one of those utilitarian American school bus models, pulls out of town, rolling past frost hollows, log cabin cottages, pine woods. Mists swirl above Lake Arareko, steaming like a cauldron.
A timber cottage with smoke puffing from the chimney reveals itself as a cafe supervised by a newly-arrived American mission volunteer and, amongst others, a one-eyed Tarahumara Indian woman. Cheerful clamour prevails until we're all fixed up with huevos, (eggs) frijoles, (chips) tortillas and Nescafe.
The tarred road ends at the crossroads at Samachique, where bashful Tarahumara youths, girded in loincloths and colourful shirts, take the air outside the general store. Copses of pines, interspersed with open frost hollows and corn plots, give way to apple orchards, then to cactus-strewn slopes. After Quirare, heart-stopping vistas stretch out over the canyon, when the bus pulls over beside a roadside shrine (three nuns are riding with us). The abyss is clothed in green; upriver stand the massive pink and green layers of Cerro El Pastel, Wedding Cake Mountain.
Now the hairpins become truly tortuous and the bus sometimes reverses to complete a turn, inches from oblivion. Hail Mary! Avocado and mango trees thrive at the tiny hamlet La Bufa, disfigured by the lunar wastelands of a centuries-old mine tailings dump. Another hour of bends and precipices, following the Rio Batopilas upstream, before at last we rattle into the cobbled streets of Batopilas to halt at a shady plaza, after what must be one of the great epic Third World road journeys.
This isolated community, straggling up the riverbank, was once one of the richest towns in Mexico, built by the silver first mined in the late sixteenth century. Around 1900, the mines prospered again under the direction of American mining entrepreneur A. R. Shephard. Bougainvillea now climbs over the ruins of the Hacienda de San Miguel, Shephard's estate and mill across the river, and giant figs spread their matted roots across the stone embankments.
Not until after eight does the sun peep over the top of the ranges to bathe the whitewashed walls in warm light. Mule trains and pack horses clatter over the cobblestones.
A rutted, dusty road follows the route of the Camino Real, the old Spanish Royal Road, along the valley to Satevo where the 17th-century mission church of Santa Señora de Satevo stands weatherbeaten but proud. Precarious ladders climb by stages to the belltower, where the oldest bell was cast in 1630. The church's interior is an austere blend of whitewash and electric blue; gaunt, saintly figures lie frozen in enduring agonies of mortification. I bounce back to Batopilas in the tray of a grocery supply truck, jolting about with the half-empty cartons of green-tinged oranges and stringy carrots.
Back to Batopilas, where by mid-afternoon the issues remain unresolved but the tension has eased; negotiators are expected from Chihuahua, the state capital. The protestors have settled in around the plaza, which doubles as a basketball court. The Tarahumara sport brilliantly coloured and patterned shirts, with long white headbands to hold back their pageboy locks. The men's loins are girdled by breech-cloths and their feet shod with huaraches, the distinctive sandals fashioned from discarded tyres, but the indigenes are in no mood to be distracted by this foreigner fumbling with the leather thongs on his own freshly-made footwear.
A late afternoon riverbank hike follows the century-old aqueduct and the much older Camino Real, still partly paved with flagstones, up the western bank of the Rio Batopilas, towards a disused suspension bridge and a vista dwarfed by the glowing pink escarpment of Cerro Quimova.
Away to the northwest an accident of topography has created one of the world's great waterfalls - North America's third highest - at Basaseachic. Although the national park lies beside a major highway, the area is thinly populated; it takes an hour to wave down a rattling pick-up truck driven by a weather-beaten hombre who uses his stetson to good effect as the sun drops. Gorges deepen as we race against the sun and the clock - it's the Switzerland, or at least the Tatra or the Jura of Mexico, where timber cabins nestle alone beside mountain streams and plots of grain, tucked into steep-walled, forested valleys.
Morning mists rise off the Basaseachic valley as smoke rises steadily from cottage chimneys. In the national park, graded paths weave through the pines to the top of the falls, then switchback down to the very bottom. In spite of a long, dry summer, torrents still cascade down sheer faces of flesh-pink volcanic rock. By midday I've explored La Ventana, the Window, and the Divisaderos, or lookouts. It's time to trudge back to the highway, where for four hours I wait in vain for transport towards Chihuahua city. At last, a lift - and American-educated Aurlio Carlos, who's not yet thirty but owns several timber mills, again reveals the face of a new, impatient Mexico.