The Doubtful Road to Creel

A brief fly-through of Hermosillo: I went in search of a grocery store at rush hour, guided by Google Maps, and was shunted by a sloshing river of tiny cars through an urban landscape that mixed bombastic luxury and unspeakable decay.  Great glass hotels with hugely-lettered names loomed over chicken-wire lots, half-demolished homes, and little rumbly streets of brightly-colored plaster slums and hand-lettered shops.  After Google spun me around town a few times without no grocery store appearing where predicted, I went back to my hotel—only to find a supermarket three blocks away.  I sallied forth again a couple of hours later when rush hour was over, zipped down the street, and got everything I needed for the drive to Creel in Copper Canyon.

For I had noticed my mistake.                       

After pre-booking my hotel in Creel, I double-checked the directions on Google Maps, and saw that their estimated travel time was 9 hours.  What???  It hadn’t looked anywhere near that far on the map. But the squiggly lines of the connecting road should have clued me in.  Forewarned in time, I stocked up on car food, filled the tank, and started at 5:00 the next morning.

I was not really up for a full driving day.  And this one proved peculiarly stressful.  It did take me nine hours—nine looping, winding, climbing, dropping, pothole-dodging hours at between 30 and 40 mph almost the whole way.  It was, in other words, a very scenic road, rising gradually into the canyon country.

To be fair, when I imagined this trip, this was exactly the sort of driving I dreamed about: small canyon roads with mountain views at every turn.  It’s true that in Mexico things were a bit different.  Each of the small towns I passed through were heralded with canyonesque speed bumps (“topes”) which forced rapid braking (and my low-slung Miata still bottomed out on a few).  Then, the scenic turnouts were usually befouled by litter.

I had to be constantly ready to swerve around huge cratered potholes, and sometimes whole spills of broken rock onto the road.

And when it wasn’t that, it was this:

But these things were more or less entertaining (and already doubly so in the retelling).  What caused the stress on this drive was something else:

I've been questioning my trip.

On this Day 10 out of Seattle I couldn’t help noticing that I was doing a lot of long drives—longer than were comfortable—and that my blue dot on Google Maps was still a very long way from Tierra Del Fuego.  Was I enjoying this?  I very much wished for someone alongside me to share the experience, so that it could chime again and again in recall through the years.  (“Remember that cow on the road—?”)  I’ve been used to living that way; having travel experiences on my own again is strangely empty.

If they're even experiences.  If the goal was to leave my drab routine for something brighter, I’m not sure that silent hours in the car alone with my thoughts was the right medicine.

Then too, as my first long drive in Latin America, other thoughts crept in.  The road was almost deserted—and here I was a gringo driving a bright yellow car through Northern Mexico. More prosaically, I was a gringo alone in the desert who didn’t know anything about car repair...

I caught myself glancing at the map, figuring the best route from Creel back to the States...

But I told myself two things.  Well, three things, starting with the fact that I was physically overtired, sweaty, and prone to double-blinks to make the road lines focus. 

After that came, first, that I should open my heart.  And second, that I was doing my trip basically wrong.

This excursion to Copper Canyon—an exercise in admiring stone—took me at once off the beaten track of Overlanders, who tend to follow the coast if not Baja itself, especially in summer, and it has involved me in Texas-sized distances between points of interest.  Perhaps a tactical mistake.  Moreover, speaking of points of interest, aside from enjoying a day with my friend Greg in Tucson, in my 10 days out of Seattle I’ve DONE only one thing, which was to go hiking at Bryce Canyon.  And that was a wonderful day.

So, diagnosis: the trip is too lonely, and too much driving, not enough doing.  Prescription: I need to find some other people who speak English, and put my Miata aside for a while in favor of tours and activities.  At least that’s what I told myself before devoting all my attention again to swerving around the next hairpin.

The minute after walking into my gorgeous Mexican hotel in Creel, I found three Tasmanians in the common room who were signing up to an overnight tour to Batopilas, the most scenic spot of Copper Canyon.  The tour guide roped me in, the family welcomed me along in a burst of Australian slang, and I signed up.  And we left the next morning for a fantastic tour.

But that’s another blog post.