Photo Essay: Creel

June 13. 2017

I’m in Mazatlan today, having just arrived this morning.  But I’m still playing catch-up with the blog due to the Internet blackout up in Copper Canyon.  And I couldn’t leave Copper Canyon behind without a quick look back at my home base, the little town of Creel.

Creel is the tourist hub for the canyon district, and it puts on the Mexican charm in a clean, trim single street, with brightly colored shops lining the raised sidewalks on both sides: restaurants, little hotels, littler convenience stores, adventure shops advertising ATV tours / hiking tours / horseback tours, an ATM booth with a long line.  Its tiny stone side streets are violently at odds with the vehicles of the canyon tourism trade—gigantic SUVs, vans, flatbed trucks, and mega tour buses—whose drivers expertly wriggle their dinosaurs through the defiles to deposit their passengers at the door of their hidden hotel, while all traffic around them patiently waits.

I saw inside two hotels, my own (the Casa Margarita) and an associated one a couple of blocks away (the Café Tierra) where our included breakfasts and dinners were served.  Both were done up in classic Mexican décor, heavy on tilework and bright colors and thoroughly postcard-worthy.  I ate in company with my Tasmanian family trio, with whom I had become good friends, and we joked about never knowing what our included meal would be or, after a delicious pork soup appetizer, when the main course would  arrive—it turned out we had just eaten it.

But Creel is also a thoroughly Mexican town, a touristy needle in an oval of the typically run-down local town, and the locals’ life floods the place.  Amplified music plays from the plaza as well as (in bass-heavier form) from the pickup trucks cruising the strip in the evening, and at 7:00 am the church bells clang out.  Some of the Tamahumara souvenier shops are manned by real Tamahumaras, and others stroll the streets in their distinctive clothing.  A traffic jam occurred when a pickup truck inched through town with its horn blaring, its bed filled with blue-uniformed kids holding aloft a silver trophy; the added horns from the cars behind it seemed to denote proud parents.  I was glad for the reality.