Our plan was to drive from Punta Perula to the small town of Mascota. Mascota is a Pueblo Magico (magic village), one of several villages in Mexico that have earned the distinction due to their stunning location, their colonial architecture, or their historical significance.
We ended up staying five nights at Lo de Marcos, we just couldn’t pull ourselves away from the beach and the town. It was so easy to stay. Every day or so a man would come by with a truck full of vegetables for sale, and one day two pretty young women quickly talked Derek into buying some fresh lobster, which we cooked up that night for dinner.
We drove south from Mazatlan to an ocean front campground near the town of Teacapan called Color Marino RV Park. We took the libre (free) road, instead of the toll road, travelling through several small towns. Peoples’ reaction to us varied from enthusiastic smiles and waves, to slight frowns (damn tourists!), to indifference. Many of the small towns we drove through looked very poor, and we later learned that many farms in the area were badly damaged by hurricanes and have not recovered.
We have really good internet here in Mazatlan, so I thought I would take advantage of it and upload a few pictures from our walk around town yesterday. To enlarge an image, just click on it.
We had two options for driving from Durango to Mazatlan. The first was the old highway, part of which is known as La Espina del Diablo (the Devil’s Backbone), described as a treacherous road that snakes through mountains known for their marijuana fields and opium production, and which would take about 7 hours, if all went well. The second, a fairly new highway, costing about 35 CAD in tolls, with 115 bridges and 61 tunnels and a driving time of about 3 hours. We love adventure, but treacherous, not so much, so we opted for the toll highway.
(Nov 18, 2017)
We set our afternoon’s destination as the Museo (Museum) of Pancho Villa in the small town of Canutillo, south of the city of Parral. We had read that you could camp for free without any hassles in the parking lot, and we were interested in visiting the museum as well. Quite a timely activity, as November 20th is an important holiday in Mexico, celebrating the start of the revolution in Mexico against the widely perceived corrupt government lead by Porfirio Diaz. Pancho Villa was a key figure in the revolution.
(Nov 17 – Nov 18, 2017)
After leaving Creel, we camped for a night at Lake Arareko, visited interesting rock formations, and hiked into a nice waterfall, then made our way to the town of Batopilas in the bottom of the Copper Canyon. We had been told that the road was paved, but was steep, and scattered with rock and debris. The first part of the 65 kilometre drive seemed pretty relaxed, we saw a few rocks and thought “Hey, this isn’t so bad”.
(Nov 15 – 16, 2017)
Prior to coming to Creel we had booked an overnight tour with Eco AlterNATIVE Tours. We were not sure what to expect from the tour, we just knew that we would be visiting a village of the Raramuri people.
We looked at the map and made a rough estimate of the distance from Tonichi to Basaseachic Falls. It looked like maybe 175 km. Nice easy day. A little way down the road when we got phone coverage, Google Maps said it was 250km and would take 4.5 or so hours….what?
We wanted to make our way towards the Barranco del Cobre (Copper Canyon) and we knew we wanted to spend a night at Basaseachic Falls along the way, but we were pretty sure we could not make it there in one day. We looked at our map and decided on a route that would take us on some lesser travelled road. We had some concern that the one road might be not much more than a track, but decided we would assess it when we got there and if it looked bad we would take a detour that would add a few kilometres to the day but allow us to travel on better roads. We didn’t know where we would camp that night, but hoped we might find a nice place to park along a river.