El Sol de Durango...

After our ‘Sleepless in Los Mochis’ experience we caught the famous ‘Copper Canyon’ train to Creel. It was an eleven hour journey over 37 bridges and through 86 tunnels, the astonishing track winding its way up and through a seemingly impossible landscape of narrow dead-end valleys, pointed pinnacles and up onto a cool, piny mountain plateau. We stood between the carriages sticking our heads out of the window and playing ‘chicken’ with the approaching tunnel walls. Mindless, but thankfully not headless, fun.

It was so cold in Creel we were glad of the carbon monoxide spewing ‘Death Machine’ gas heater in the corner of our room. A slow, lingering gaseous demise seemed preferable to being frozen into unconsciousness. As the heater warmed up it performed a passable impression of Rolf Harris on a wobble-board, it’s casing buckling and boinging with the heat.

To warm ourselves up we hired bikes and set off to see some of the local weird, wind eroded rock formations. The Valleys of the Frogs and Mushrooms were a little underwhelming, I think someone had been on the peyote when they mistook the blobby boulders for amphibians, at least the ‘mushrooms’ looked vaguely fungal. Far more impressive was the Valley of the Monks, where huge rocks stood sentinel-like in meditative groups along a narrow chasm. (That’s me…the tiny black dot in the photo to the right to give a sense of scale).

Next day we caught the bus to Hidalgo del Parral. We never made it. The bus was rammed with country folk and carried the heady aroma of earthy bodies and woodsmoke. The tortuous winding mountain roads did for one passengers stomach and added the pungent piquancy of puke to the already fragrant cocktail. Then the bus broke down. To this day we’re not entirely sure where, and we spent an unplanned night in a roadside motel.

A couple of days later we were in Durango – the home of the Mexican film industry. We stayed at the ‘Hotel California’ which wasn’t exactly as I’d imagined it from the lyrics in the Eagle’s song. I’m sure Don Henley didn’t have to sleep on a plastic sheet for a start, and it’s location was less ‘dark, desert highway’ than ‘dingy, suburban backstreet’. Durango itself was a handsome city however and the setting for a slew of classic westerns ‘A Man Called Horse’, ‘Jeronimo’ and…er ‘The Mask of Zorro’ (starring that famous Mexican actress Catherine Zeta Jones). So we strutted around town doing our best bow-legged John ‘The Duke’ Wayne impressions.

We must have caught someone’s eye as the following day a truly bizarre set of coincidences aligned themselves. Catching the bus to Zacatecas we bought a roast chicken and some tortillas to nosh on the six-hour journey. Lacking napkins and wishing to avoid an on the bus grease-fest I bought a random newspaper to wipe our mitts on. After devouring our tasty bird and sacrificing a couple of oily sections of the paper I was idly flicking through the remnants of the local rag. Attempting to exercise my meagre Spanish reading talents I spotted a familiar looking couple in a picture accompanying an article about tourism. ‘We’re in the paper’ I deadpanned to Fi. And sure enough we were: