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.

We passed through some pretty small towns, which were pretty deserted in the heat of the day.  Siesta time maybe?  We did see lots of dogs and a few old cowboys.  When we got to the road that we were worried about we were happy to see that it was paved and turned down it.  We could see from our map that about 40 kilometres or so along the road at a town called Soyopa that a river began to flow parallel to the road and we thought we might find good camping somewhere south of town.

When we got to Soyopa, we followed the road into town, and soon discovered that all the streets led to the river, none to the road south of town.  We headed back out the way we came in and found the road heading south….a very small gravel road.  We had about 50 kilometres to go before we would intersect with a major road….it looked well used….we can always turn around, right?  So we took the road.

And it wasn’t TOO bad.  Lots of washboard, areas of potholes, lots of turns and curves.  But the 50km drive took us about 1.5 hours or so.

Back on the highway it was time to find a place to camp for the night.  It would soon be dark, and driving at night is something that we do not want to do.  We saw that there was another small town a couple of km off of the highway called Tonichi.  We arrived late on Saturday afternoon and asked if we could park in their town square for the night and we were told it would be okay.  We set up and soon a young girl, maybe 13 years old, by the name of Edirna was next to us asking us all sorts of questions in Spanish.  I explained that we were from Canada and that our Spanish was not very good.  She asked if we spoke Russian or English (?), and when I said English she was very excited as she is starting to learn English in school.

Soon there were several children around.  They wanted to see Piper do her series of tricks over and over again, they wanted to see in the camper, I was taken to meet Edirna’s mother.  But when we said we were going into our casita (little house) to make dinner, they respected our space and left us to our cooking.

In the meantime, Derek had met Armando, the proprietor of a small store who spoke good english and had saved his money while working in Jackson Hole, Wyoming as a driver for the extremely rich.  He had come back to his home town with two large beer coolers and two ice machines to start his little business in the central plaza.  Beer and ice was good business and now he buys gold from local amateur prospectors, and is an important man in town.  It felt good to know he was watching over us.

Saturday night in a town square in Mexico is quite a sight.  People of all ages are sitting in groups around the square, music is being played from several different sources, small fireworks are being set off.  By about 10pm most of the people had gone home, but we were unfortunately parked across from the only bar in town, and the music blared and people hooted as their favourite song came on, until about 2 in the morning.  Then the dogs started barking about 4 am.

Needless to say, it was a long night, and we will be keeping an eye on what day of the week if we are going to try to camp in the central square of a town again.