Batopilas to Chihuahua City

Friday 4/02/2004

Unfortunately I made a special trip to a Seattle area Fred Meyer to buy a box of colored pencils, flew them a thousand mile, hauled them around in my luggage, carried them around in my pack all day every day, and then forgot to bring them out to see the Tarahumara – my best opportunity to give them away. Luckily Alfonso was going to send the harmonica out to them, so I added most of my pencils to the stash. I gave the rest of them away to some kids walking along the road later that day. They were nervous when I stopped, and the older ones hesitated, but the youngest of them, a 4 year old boy, immediately ran over smiling. I was adjusting to give him one of them when instead he grabbed all of them out of my hand and ran off smiling. You snooze you lose, huh.

We had breakfast at Reyna’s home-restaurant again. On the way there Bob stopped to supervise a street cleaner.

One of the locals helping with street cleanup.

Getting ready to ride.

The ride out was great, the overnight rain held down the dust and made for good traction and the temperature was perfect.

Rain-swollen river. A home on the canyon road.

A shot across the canyon from the road on the ride out.

Me on the road out. Dad and I at the bridge before the ascent.

Rene capitalizing on an opportunity to pose for a picture.

Alfonso took this one of Dad riding off the bridge.

On the ascent a dog ran out in front of Dad and he hit it, but luckily he’d slowed down enough to not actually run over it, just bump it out of the way with his front tire. It wasn’t limping or anything afterward and looked pretty much fine but a little shaken up.

On the dirt road over the mountains a couple boys ran out into the street at me, smiling and yelling, and nearly caused me to dump it avoiding them.

Back on the pavement, first stop for tire pressure change.

The road from here to San Juanito was as I remembered, a spectacularly twisty road ride, I think I enjoyed the second time even more.

We stopped for lunch in Guerrero again, and the Restaurant La Cava that we’d been to before. Afterwards as we were getting ready to go a seemingly mentally disabled guy walked up to Dad and I and started smiling and making unintelligible noises and pointing over at a car. In the front seat of the car was a more normal looking guy that looked like he was counting through a bunch of US bills. Except the bills seemed a bit too large and bright, and it appeared that he was trying to make it look like he had more money in his hand than he really had – like he was counting through a bunch of bills really fast but not actually transferring any more bills to the receiving hand. All around it was a pretty shabby presentation. The other guys had already left so we had to roll without finding out what the scam was, and I’ve been wondering ever since.

We got off the main road and went into Treia so Alfonso could make a phone call. Treia is the town where Alfonso grew up. This was another one where there was lots of cruising going on. Alfonso ran into a friend of his and after talking to him was unable to start his truck. We pushed it up the road a little bit to get it to a good spot to leave it.

Pushing Alfonso’s truck.

Luckily Alfonso’s friend was there to help. We threw our stuff in his truck and he and Alfonso led us into Chihuahua city. That was the first time we’d ridden at night much, and it was a little scary. We’d seen a few big rocks in the highway, up to cantaloupe size – the kind that would almost certainly dump you. Riding at 65 mph at night with those rocks around is a pretty big deal on a motorcycle. Fortunately even though we saw multiple rocks like that before dusk, we (or at least I) didn’t see any more after dark, so there was no problem. Chihuahua city is big, really big, so we were sticking pretty close. If we lost our guide in there it would be very difficult to hook back up in the dark, from a highway, with no idea where we were. And I didn’t (and maybe no rider did) know which hotel we were going to, as this was improvised. At one point Alfonso’s friend did a pretty quick lane change and got into a left turn lane. Most of us were separated from him by a couple cars, and we saw the light cycle once and only let about 3 cars through, so it was looking like we had decent odds of losing him at the light. I think it was Rene up ahead that made lots of room for us and waved us up, so we rode in between the lines of cars and pulled in behind Alfonso’s friend’s truck again.

We got to the Hampton Inn a little before 8 pm, and it was back to civilization. It’s a large, modern hotel, with English speaking people at the front desk, so it really felt like the end of the trip. There was a free open bar going in the restaurant until 8, so we made the best use possible of the short time we had. Jay was up there getting beer and chips literally as the guy broke down the bar. I poured myself a really stiff margarita thinking I might as well try to make it last, then when I was up getting chips Jay poured another shot or two of tequila in there without my knowing. That margarita was so stiff I spilled a bunch on the back of my hand and it evaporated off in about 5 seconds leaving no stickiness whatsoever. Wisely I didn’t finish it.

Happy hour at the hotel in Chihuahua City .