Riding El Chepe to Copper Canyon, Mexico
Back on the (rail)road again...
It’s been a minute, as the kids say. And by a minute the kids surely mean seven months of competing deadlines, during which time I fully remembered why I hate full-time contracts and felt frustrated at not nearly spending enough weekday afternoons at the cinema.
Anyway, I departed London on Christmas Day and touched down in Chihuahua on Boxing Day, so it seems the perfect moment to resurrect whatever this is. My last Mexico adventure was from Valladolid on the Yucatán Peninsula to CDMX via Campeche, Chiapas, Oaxaca and Veracruz. It was the perfect start to 2020. And we all know what happened next. So yeah, Covid lockdowns, moving house and then renovating the house (plus the ever-present freelance fear of running out of money) kept me grounded.
I knew embarking on my first excursion outside of Europe in four years would mean flexing my travel muscle memory. This first instalment – from Chihuahua to Mazatlan – looks at just that.
The early evening sun slices into Rico’s Tacos, hitting the stainless steel salad bar where we load our plates with limes, shredded lettuce and jalapenos and select our salsas. A bubbling dish of melted cheese arrives and we pause to clink beer bottles. But instead of taking our time, we’re piling tortillas high while frantically tapping at our phones – booking the last couple of seats on a night bus and searching for somewhere to stay. Yep, in the words of Celine Dion, it’s all coming back to me. Being on the road, that is. Working out a route, realising it's not realistic, working out an alternative route. Giving yourself over to the unpredictable, the mundane and the frustrating – all for the promise of a perfect moment.
In this instance, we'd planned to spend a night in Chihuahua, then take a bus to Creel and spend a night there before boarding Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacifico or El Chepe (Mexico's last remaining passenger train, although there are plans to reintroduce several routes currently being used for freight in coming years) and rolling towards Barrancas del Cobre or Copper Canyon. We had nothing booked and no real sense of when trains might depart, although this blog post does a really good job of explaining the sights and stops along the way and helped inform our pretty chaotic ticket purchase.
In the end, we spent a night in Chihuahua but boarded the train the next day and arrived eight hours later in Posada Barrancas. There's a 20-minute stop at nearby Divisadero, which gives passengers a chance to see the canyon, but because the service only runs every few days we ended up spending three nights in Areponapuchi, which meant we got to gaze at it for a lot longer.
Let's get this straight. The canyon is breathtaking — easily the best I've ever seen (previous canyons include the Grand one in America and the Colca one in Peru) but having exhausted every restaurant and greeted every street dog, we were glad to get moving again. Leaving in the afternoon and arriving in Los Mochis late at night, we dashed from the train station to the bus station and arrived in Mazatlan early the next day. Anyway, that's the logistics, here's the feels when you're forced to press pause...
We sit in the sun on the steps of the bandstand in Chihuahua's Plaza Mariachi, squinting up at a silver Christmas tree and a lazy-rotating Ferris wheel. The pitstop punctuates an afternoon spent walking to the outer edges of this low-slung town, past stores selling cowboy boots. Earlier we stopped for a plate of gorditas because everyone else was. We ate them leaning on the counter, staring down the street, stupid with jet lag.
We're here to ride El Chepe, a 406-mile journey that will bookend an enforced stay of three days in Areponapuchi — a sleepy village with sensational views of the Copper Canyon and where time moves like treacle. Unlike the train, which clatters through the countryside - transporting us from flat scrubland to the soaring Sierra Madre Occidental mountains.
We stand on the platform, shivering in the darkness but once we’ve boarded and the train picks up speed, we leave our seats and stand at an open window. Eyes watering in the icy-cold air. Each bend revealing a seemingly never-ending metal caterpillar of carriages.
Tunnels plunge us into darkness, bridges invite vertigo, and as the surroundings get increasingly steep during the latter half of the journey, we crane our necks to see cacti clinging to the cliffs.
Several times we join the queue that snakes around the dining cart but give up before we're anywhere near ordering coffee and tamales. There’s a stop where we stretch our legs and take selfies in front of the canyon before a whistle blows and everyone scrambles back to their seat.
Disembarking at Posada Barrancas, it's a 10-minute trudge to Areponapuchi where check into the Hotel Mansion Tarahumara. It isn't within budget and isn't as luxurious as it looked on the website, but what can you do? The swimming pool is ice-cold and we wonder how we're going to pass the next three days. Thankfully, lunch (chilli rellonos, refried beans), hot chocolate and a pre-sweetened instant coffee takes over an hour to arrive — so that's the best part of the afternoon done. We watch woodpeckers hide acorns in the cracks and crevices of a telegraph pole for a long time. We collect our own acorns and see how many times we can hit a fence post. We sit outside a convenience store surrounded by sun-weary street dogs and work our way through three packets of chips.
Our stay revolves around a visit to Parque Aventura, where we feel queasy as we approach the canyon edge. Its dizzying, disorientating scale. Its endless undulations a ruched duvet cover spread before us. It's mesmerising, mindblowing, magnificent.
There's the lazy passage of cable cars sliding from craggy peak to craggy peak, casting shadows on the slopes. And, because the park is less about hiking and more about hurtling through the air, there are shrieking, soaring zip lines and people launching themselves off platforms. Tentative steps onto a swaying rope bridge. Condors silently circling above. We pass local Tarahumara women weaving baskets, their children running where we're clambering. When it's time to leave, we walk back to Areponapuchi along the railway line — skipping between sleepers — a couple of kids on horseback ahead of us.
The afternoon passes slowly on our cabin's porch. The sun sinks behind the pine trees, the bright moon rises and the temperature drops to minus-something-celsius. The evening speeds up when we find a little bar tucked behind the hotel's grand dining room. We order bottles of Bohemia Weizen and, on our final night, throw in a shot of Gran Centenario Reposado Tequila to celebrate our imminent departure.
The next day, we do the rim walk — directed by a dog who asks for nothing more than the occasional scratch. We all stop to wait for each other to pee and I'm pretty sure we're going to be together forever until she departs as abruptly as she arrived.
We repeat the walk (sans spirit animal) a few more times and it never gets boring — the canyon glows in a blush-pink dusk and dazzles after breakfast (huevos a la Mexicana) against a backdrop of blue skies. Standing on the platform (the train is, of course, almost two hours late) while soaking up the sun, we’re ready to see where's next…