6

Thursday

The station was moderately crowded, with both the first and second class trains running that day. In a peculiar reversal of priorities, the first class runs daily while the second class operates only thrice a week. This is stranger given that the first class ticket from Los Mochis to Chihuahua, at the other end of the line, costs $50, beyond the reach of most Mexicans, while the second class is a more affordable hundred pesos. Possibly, the priority on this route is freight, with primera especial tourists subsidizing the line to an extent. The second class runs at delays frequently out of control, having to make way for freight trains on the single line. To quote Lonely Planet's quote, the poorest Mexicans take the segunda clase, the next poorest walk.

The first class train is air-conditioned, and the windows make it difficult to take photos. Targeted at its high-end passengers are a couple of hotels at strategic points along the way, perched spectacularly on the edges of the canyons, with rooms costing upwards of hundred dollars. The only Mexicans there, I suppose, would be the staff.

We found Alice and Phil at the station alright; leaving the girls to girl-talk, Phil and I queued up at the ticket-window, desperate to be the first ones to get the tickets when second class sales began at six. It wasnt much of a station: a waiting hall with a ticket window, and a single platform. Security was obtrusive though, with guards frisking people and luggage with metal detectors; even on the train, they'd poke and prod into suspicious looking bundles. Wonder which terrorist group wants to blow up this line.

A woman with a gaggle of eight to ten year olds was in the queue ahead of us; she was going all the way to Chihuahua, then hoped to catch the train north to Ciudad Juarez, a town that abuts the US at El Paso, Texas. We were going only upto Creel, to spend the last couple of days of our vacation in Canyon country. To her kids I insisted that we were actually in the Chihuahua station, and we were all traveling to Los Mochis; some of us, then, would take a bus to Guadalajara. Children hate to be contradicted; for some time they protested vehemently; then, acting smug, sure-of-the-facts grownups wearily resigned to a world full of mistaken notions, they said – OK, fine, we are going to Los Mochis. They were unable to take my ah-another-mistake-corrected expression for very long, though, and started wailing – WE ARE GOING TO CHIHUAHUA. Mexican Railways are in terrible disarray, being in the process of privatization (the IMF-touch!), and the Copper Canyon Railway is one of the few regular lines in the country. I told their mother that last fall I'd wanted to take the Ciudad Juarez-Mexico City line from Chihuahua, and it wasnt running then. Guess I have to take a bus.

When the queue started moving, both Phil and I insisted that the other go first, not that it mattered at all (which is probably why we were doing it); so English, this you-first, said Philip; he and Alice had this quaint notion that the English were a polite, gentle folk, always giving up their place in the queue. I couldnt bring myself to remind them of the soccer lovers who make periodic visits to Holland and Germany.

The train was certainly better than what we expected from a segunda clase; in fact, it was nearly as comfortable as a first-class in India; the bathrooms, though, were definitely segunda-clean. It moved at a pace most charitably described as sedate, the speed of a streetcar in Calcutta. The first few hours were quiet and unexciting, we passed through plainland – farms, fields, behind peoples backyards, ate our supply of croissants and muffins bought at a panaderia the evening before, and sipped coffee that I ran out to buy from a kiosk outside the Los Mochis station moments before the train started. Pricey food and drinks are sold on the first class train (Lonely Planet).

Maria del Rosario Olguin Valdez and her kids had occupied a row of seats halfway across the car, and I took out my longest lens and put in the fastest film to take candid shots of the children lit by soft light streaming in through the window. They made wonderful subjects – sometimes, fully aware that they were being photographed, they stared straight into the camera without looking posed, almost like professional models. These were people who wanted to have their pictures taken, and not being adults, didnt pose the problem of wanting to appear on photograph the opposite of their real personalities. Their mother spoiled the show for me by deciding her little ones would be browned into ugliness by the early sun, put up a makeshift curtain on the window and dragged my meter down 2 stops. When I walked down the aisle to talk to Phil and Alice, the children were all over me with requests for more photographs. I switched to my fast normal lens and obliged.

The depth and height of the landscape was breathtaking: when the train skirted close to the edge of the canyon, you had to peer down and crane up to take in all of the view, from the river below to the peaks above; sometimes, the train would be stranded on a bare scaffolding-like bridge stretched across a gorge with little water — and plenty of brain-dashing-to-pieces rocks — in the arroyo below. And as you're absorbed in this, suddenly, all goes black before your eyes – the train pierces through unscalable mountain in one of the 84 tunnels on this route. Some time past noon, we come to an interchange on the line. Several trains were queued up here, waiting for the steep gradients ahead to free up, while rearranging themselves in order of priority along the single line. There, we could see a thin, worming thread of a freighter winding along the opposite hillside, while the primera especial was disappearing into a tunnel almost right over our head, boring into the same hill that we were grazing along. I wonder what goes on in the minds of the surveyors who design such lines: doesnt it feel strange to go through a bunch of topo maps, or fly over the landscape, and figure – we'll put a bridge across this valley, we'll punch a tunnel through this hillside … or maybe not, on second thought, it might be better to put a line climbing up this gradient, so we can get to a more favorable place to span the canyon. And then what happens if something goes wrong halfway through construction? an accident slides a hill down the mountainside; a tunnel, running into ground water, collapses onto itself – do they have to perform improvizations in railroad building to save the situation? Or maybe political support for the gargantuan project dries up, the backers back out, years of delay and corruption set in, arrival of civilization on the mass-scale to the Tarahumara Indians, with all its curses and benefits, is set back by years.

As the day wore on, there was a change in the ethnic composition of passengers; fewer Hispanic faces got into the train; instead, we saw more aboriginal features – the Tarahumara, I assumed. Poorer people with dirty, colorful dresses, small babies, squatting on the floor of the train, or wherever there was a little space. The Tarahumara are known to be great cross-country runners, and their well-wishers have attempted to use this ability of theirs to draw attention to them and their condition: the alien diseases that have decimated their numbers, their lack of education, their poverty. Then again, I remember seeing a webpage which said – bollocks! the Tarahumara have given up running for ages now.

Divisadero station is the place with the most spectacular view along the way. You dont get to see it from the train, though; you get off the train and run with your camera to the edge of the canyon, and try to drink in as much of the landscape as you can in the fifteen minutes that the train stops there, while worrying if your seat would've been confiscated by a couple of Tarahumara, or the train would whistle off without you. We wished we could spend a couple of days there. With a Tarahumara guide, you could go down into the canyon, descending from a cool, temperate zone to tropical humidity in a few hours. You could choose to stay in a local family rancho for 40 pesos a night, or shell out $150 in the Hotel Divisadero Barrancas. Divisadero gave us the first inkling that we were spending the least time in what was possibly the finest thing on our itinerary.

Getting bored with their own games, the little sisters came over to investigate us. So, how are you related? Smiles and silence on our side. Tu es novios (you're girl/boyfriends), they announce. More silence on our side. C'mon, you're novios, arent you? Changing tack, the more voluble one says – Tu es feo...why havent you shaved? — observations now come thick and fast — there's hair on your chest. What's feo? I interrupt. You dont know feo? feo is,... feo. They're completely thwarted, how could one not know feo?

El es mi esposo (he's my husband), Revathi volunteers. They're thorougly shocked, and somehow completely embarrassed that they were trifling with a couple of esposos, rather than mere novios. That's the last we see of them, other than some vigorous waving while getting off the train, along with reminders and promises to send prints of the photos. I asked the people sitting around me about feo. At first they said they didnt know; must be some childrenspeak, I reckoned. After a while, a woman said – your hair's all over the place – that's feo. Later, I found out feo means plain ugly. Shocking, isnt it, those sweeet kids. Or maybe it's a milder and more casual word, after all, in their school.

The moment we set foot on the platform at Creel, we were mobbed by a bunch of urchins and led towards Casa Margarita. Two German girls who were on the same train were slightly apprehensive at this welcome and asked me if I knew the way to the place. I assured them, according to the Lonely Planet map, we were going in the right direction.

The door opened into a large kitchen with two tables, a big crowd of people eating at them, and still more waiting for their turn. Most of them were unkempt and heavily sunburnt (as were their clothes) – the kind of hippie look one associates with westerners in Goa or sees in Pratidwandi (The Adversary) admiring cows on Calcutta streets. A man of indeterminate nationality, speaking Spanish and English with equal ease, but looking neither, appeared to manage the place. He led us into a courtyard, and after figuring out how many of us were there, who was paired with whom, and what degrees of privacy we desired, went through a chart on a clipboard he carried, then proceeded to tuck two people in a room in a corner up a flight of stairs, one in a sty of a dorm with bunks stacked totem-pole fashion, two more were led down a dark alley – the place seemed to add rooms to itself as business grew. We got a cosy room walled with polished logs kept together with white mortar – this one has a fireplace, it will be 180 pesos today; tomorrow I could move you to a cheaper room, or you could keep this for 200 pesos. Heaven knows what market forces dictated those prices, which include a pre-set breakfast and dinner.

The trick to enjoying a meal in Casa Margarita, we discovered, was to be among the last to sit down to eat, so you could eat and talk at peace without the pressure of the next batch of hungry hikers waiting to take your place. The first night, we started dinner with a delicious carrot soup; they had no problems serving vegetarians either. We were flanked at our elbows by Pete, a Japanese anthropology student at the University of Colorado, and Mike, who used to be a PL/1 programmer in Toronto and had run away from the job to become a tightrope-walker in a Guatemalan circus. The ringmaster had a drug problem, which he took out on the performers; the animals were uncared for, the elephant fell into a depression – the only way it could get some air was if one of the artists took it out for a walk. Of course, the troupe quickly disbanded.

This summer, Pete was teaching English and Math in a village-school near Creel; that way, he could get to know better the Tarahumara, get invited to meals with the kids' families, whom he was studying as a part of his thesis work. So what about their regular teacher? I asked. Oh they dont have a regular teacher; they have this videotape instead, which they dont follow at all; I'm trying to bring them up to standard. D'you know enough Spanish to manage children? That was tough, sientate – sit down and callate – shut up were the first things I had to pick up.

"How long have you been traveling here?" was the standard way to start a conversation with strangers at your table. Mary and Paul were a couple from California – a friend of theirs had his wedding in Hermosillo; handing over the keys to their apartment to the newly-weds for the honeymoon, they'd come away to Copper Canyon for a short holiday. Where are you from? We had a machine-response to this – we're Indians, but we live in New York. Mary and Paul had lived in New York City and knew White Plains; I grew up in Croton-Harmon! exclaimed Mike, overhearing us. We love Indian food, said Mary, touching a pet peeve of mine.

What passes as Indian food in restaurants in the US, I proceed to lecture, is really food from a very specific part of India, saturated with fat and cream and spices; that's not really Indian food. In fact, I hate that food. So what is Indian food? Well, there is no single thing which can be called Indian food – the cuisine changes from one part of India to another, changes across caste-lines in the same region. My mother-in-law wont touch the cauliflower masala in an Indian restaurant in the US. Generally, poorer people will have spicier food, to make up for the poverty of ingredients. I then told them this story:

Long ago, when Bengal was one piece of land, undivided by India's independence, the landscape being dominated by rivers and canals, boats were a convenient way of getting from one place to another. (Bengali schoolchildren still learn this sentence in their grammar-books – Bengal is a land mothered by rivers.) A baboo (a member of the bourgeoisie, not a petty-clerk, as the Brits misapplied the word) was traveling on the river Padma, when the boatman, an emaciated old Muslim with the characteristic goatee — thin and grey — of his faith, pulled over at the bank for lunch. The baboo observed the man cook and eat his meal. He made a hot, red curry out of, apparently, a boiled egg, embellished with onions and garlic and chillies. The egg was nice and smooth and white, the gravy was fiery and enticing (much more fiery than the bhadralok stomach would take, increasing its appeal for him), but the old Muslim would just move the egg around in his plate, shifting it from one heap of rice to another – saving it for the last, he is, thought the baboo. The man finished his meal, the egg remained uneaten – it turned out to be a smooth pebble that he'd picked up somewhere. Baboo, cant afford an egg, dont like a gravy with only onions and salt, so I throw this stone in.

Mike, the ex-PL/1 programmer, had his stone-soup story. A tramp arrived one evening at a camp of itinerant harvest-workers, without a morsel in his sack. He built a fire, put a large pot on it, filled it with water, and threw in a few stones. Soon, it was bubbling, and one of the tired farm hands came by to investigate. What's cooking? Soup. D'you happen to have an onion? An onion? sure. In went a chopped onion, and the pot was boiling away, with the two men expectantly staring into it. In a few minutes, one more worker dropped by: What's that boiling away? Soup. D'you have a few potatoes? Potatoes? why not? He peeled and diced them, and threw them in. Soon, a carrot from another man, a few beets from a third, a sprig of basil, and delicious stone-soup for ten was ready.

Friday

The town of Creel was out of gas, and our departure to La Bufa was delayed indefinitely while they got fuel from the next town. Six or seven of us loitered in a loose knot outside Casa Margarita, waiting for the bus to show up "any time now". Anna was a German marine biology student – you have to work and travel for years and years abroad before you can get a permanent job in Germany. Ashley, a twenty year old from Canada, worked as a kayaking instructor. She'd spent a month learning Spanish in Mazatlan before starting to tour the country, and wondered how offended her friends in Mazatlan would be if she didnt make it back there for Semana Santa – the Easter week, one of the most important fiestas of Mexico, when the entire country is apparently on the move, and you'd be well advised to stay away from buses, trains and hotels. John had majored in Latin American history, and studied in Chile for some time – but of course, there are no jobs in Latin American history, so I taught myself a couple of computer languages and took up programming. After five years of staring at a computer-screen, I decided enough was enough, sold all my belongings and bought a bus ticket south. Revathi and I wondered aloud how long it would be before we too "chucked it" – computer programmers seemed particularly susceptible. With curiosity and respect for the people of the land he was traveling in, John was the exact opposite of the archetypal American couple we saw at the Santa (oops, no! they called it "Sanna", like "manna") Rosalia ferry office, looking to haul their gargantuan camper over the Sea of Cortez, dripping contempt for the country with every hard consonant ("cinco ddhay la ttharddhay") in the few words of Spanish they uttered. John wanted to learn Quichua, an indigenous language spoken in parts of Peru, and spend some time among the native people. I entertained the party with mathematical puzzles like why sewer-covers are always circular.

Why is it that we never have this kind of social interaction in the US? Is it because buses are never late? Or that, even when they are, one would rather inhabit a personal bubble defined by a walkman-space, than make conversation with the next bored guy? Or that, only the homeless, the dropouts, the junkies are unable to afford the bigger personal bubble, the Car, and of course, normal social interactions break down with this class?

"A circle is the only shape which cannot fall in; with a rectangle, any edge can go through the diagonal of the opening."

In the bus, we were joined by a woman from California, Tracy, and Nat, a Canadian with a dingeree-doo, a long wind instrument made of plastic burnt to give a wood finish, that apparently was capable of producing a single note. Both Nat and Tracy were characters of indeterminate age. While Nat's lanky, almost snaky frame, covered by a copper color skin concealed its age by months of traveling and Canyoneering, Tracy's hid behind plasters of paint. Throughout the journey, Tracy and Nat kept up an unbroken conversation, Tracy doing most of the talking. Their social positions were as nebulous as their ages. In the cloud of their jabber, I heard Tracy mention her "Chinese children" and her "Spanish children"; cant be sure if Nat betrayed the existence of a family. While the rest of us were oohing and aahing over the landscape, Tracy would be discoursing with Nat – I think it is in his forties that a man really comes into his own. Something happens to his face, he gets a certain look …

Our first stop was a lookout that gave a view of a Tarahumara settlement in the valley below: rectangular blocks of ploughed earth, a few farm animals, a hut or two, tracks going up the mountainside. Nat started blowing a few soft puffs through his dingeree-doo, giving the apperance of one in in the know of some magic set of frequencies that ferret Tarahumara from their homes to wave to passing tourists. I asked if he was positive the sounds his dingeree-doo was emitting were not obscenities in Tarahumara language. I didnt get a reply – maybe he was too absorbed in his music, which didnt work anyway.

Halfway to La Bufa, we had to turn off the main highway into a narrow, dusty track. The driver stopped the bus here for lunch. A plywood kiosk sold warm soda and tacos; we bought some biscuits (cookies, for Americans) from the shack next to it. Tracy asked the driver if there would be a baño (bath/rest/lady's room / toilet) at La Bufa. Muchos baños naturales, came the reply, much to our obvious and expressed amusement. The barb apparently stuck; when Ashley was missing for some time, and we were wondering where she could be, Tracy suggested – maybe baño natural?

The unmetalled road, for the most part, was wide enough to permit only one vehicle to pass. Several times, we met jeeps or SUVs coming from the opposite direction, and one of the parties would have to back up to a place broad enough to allow two vehicles. Some of the SUVs had seats mounted on the roof; of course, this road being too dusty and too bumpy, we saw nobody sitting on these, but they would have provided fine, unobstructed views of the landscape. One of the most exhilarating journeys in mountain country I've ever done was on the roof of a bus in the Garhwal Himalayas. This story was presented with suitable embellishemnet to Tracy as she started whining and worrying about doing the return-trip along that road after dark. On that rooftop journey, crouching and ducking to avoid decapitation by overhead cables and mutilation by tree-branches had been reduced to a sport. If the view from a bus window, limited on the gorge-side by guard-rails along the road, and on the mountain-side by the window frame, is compared to a tourist's snapshot with a point-and-shoot, the scene from the rooftop vantage, extending from the acrophobic depth of the gorge to the spondylitic height of the green mountain, feels like a grand Ansel Adams landscape shot on a 4" by 6" sheet of film with a view camera.

A mile before La Bufa, the driver let us off the bus, saying we could walk down, while he'd drive down there and wait for us. La Bufa was the lowest visible point in the landscape, surrounded by huge mountains on all sides. A tiny bridge could be seen down below; the road to Batopilas ran across that and behind an apparently unscalable mountain. I am incapable of putting in words the overwhelming nature of that landscape; unfortunately, the day was cloudy and dull, casting nary a shadow, bringing out hardly any shapes in the monocular vision of the camera.

We were taking our own time to amble down to La Bufa, stopping to admire the views and take futile photographs. The driver must have decided that, at that rate, it'd be dark before we started; he drove the bus back up from La Bufa and picked us up on the way. I can bet a reasonable amount of money that Tracy had something to do with this haste. At one point, the driver slowed down to show us the remains of a truck that had rolled off the road and down the hillside; Tracy must have felt her paranoia vindicated.

There was still some twilight left when we were "out of the woods" (Tracy) and onto the divided, two-lane highway; we stopped at the last of the scenic viewpoints of the day. My tripod served some social function by holding up Ashley's point-and-shoot while she ran into the frame and the party was flash-frozen into one featureless cheesy grin.

It was late and we were getting hungry; the bus sped along the smooth metal; in the darkness we heard a female voice in an American accent recalling the most significant observation of its owner's trip to the Czech Republic the year before – all the restrooms are manned by men, and they hand out the tiniest strip of toilet paper.

Dinner turned out to be the ubiquitious arroz y frijole; conversation turned to drugs. A fat girl with a pierced tongued claimed LSD had helped her get an A in a college course (some rarefied liberal arts thing) in spite of heavy — again, LSD-induced — bunking, while the assiduous ones came off with B's and C's. Alice (another surprise marijuana-experimenter in college) said she'd read in a psychology course that that if you prepare for an exam in a stoned state, you must be in the exact same state while writing the test to successfully regurgigate what you crammed. She also had this story of an English chap called John who dug in at Batopilas for a while, practically living on pot, and introducing himself to strangers as I'm John from Batopilas.

Saturday

Apparently, there is this intensive six-week TEFL — Teaching English as a Foreign Language — course, after which you're a certified homeless English teacher. In Australia, they'd earned about 60 US dollars a day; in Mexico, the pay is so low that one did it only for adding experience to the CV; they'd heard the money was good in Cuba, but another TEFL worker at the table reported the bottom had fallen out of the Cuban market; their plans of teaching in Chile had been spannered by Pinochet's arrest in England, and the English becoming officially unpopular in the country. You get to see people and places; the hours are short, you have a lot of time to yourself; but you never go into teaching for the money. Having been plagued throughout my life by horrible teaching, first at an expensive instiution (Don Bosco School, Calcutta), and then a taxpayer-supported one (Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur), Alice's words couldnt have fallen on more sympathetic ears: I really feel that, by paying teachers poorly, society is cutting its corners at the wrong place. If you have incompetent teachers, you have uneducated citizens, and then again the worst of them become teachers. Look at nurses in England – they work sixty hour weeks for peanuts, and the doctors get paid shitloads. And then only the doctors can afford to send their children to medical school, so only a few can become doctors, which keeps the market nice and tight, so that those doctors can go back and charge anything they want... When we went to the university, we hardly paid anything, but this Labour Government has got rid of all subsidies, so when our children go to college... Oh, you dont call Tony Blair labour...
Casa Margarita, truly in a time-warp: I saw a book titled Soviet Youth in a book-case in the dining area, and even a guy wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.

Creel, at 2338m, wasnt quite out of winter in the month of March, we found out. There were a few flurries of snow that morning, and off-again, on-again splashes of rain, enough to put off Tracy, who, though she was not staying in Casa Margarita (Best Western, maybe?) had landed up to tag along wherever whoever from the previous day's group was going. Revathi and I only had time till about four in the afternoon – we had a a bus to catch to Chihuahua. Ashley, too, was looking for a short trip somewhere. We decided to walk to nearby Lago (lake) Arareco. None of us had enough the guile to get Tracy off our backs. Luckily, the weather took care of her.

If you ever traveled by bus through landscape you found mildly interesting, you should go back and walk through the same place to realize how much you missed. We walked along the road leading out of the village of Creel that we had taken on the way to La Bufa the day before, but only now did we really notice the convoluted, fluted surfaced rocks and hills scattered about the landscape, some just next to the highway, which we'd have whizzed past in a flash. Monoliths were piled, perched and stacked one over another, gaps between them sometimes even being inhabited. You could see sooty stains on the stones, a meal being cooked on an open stove, a dirty snot-nosed child staring at passers-by.

Luckily, there were no more flurries that day, but it did start drizzling, and we were generous enough to donate to Ashley one of our 99¢ ponchos bought at Sports Authority. I always found raincoats a terrible encumbrance on my Himalayan hikes; heavy and hot, they're impossible things to walk up a slope in with a load on your back. These disposable plastic sheets with holes for the limbs and a hood for the head are a major innovation – God bless consumer America.

Lago Arareco had toilets for prospective campers, a few upturned boats and notices warning off swimmers. The first living thing we noticed was a small Tarahumara girl running towards Ashley as fast as the bounds of her dirty long skirt would allow, and pitching her — mucha hambre, tengo mucha hambre (I'm very hungry) — to buy one of those pathetic red-blue-green handknit woollen sashes. The prodding parents stayed behind some rocks and trees they'd made their home. However clichedly ethnic, these sashes are actually made by the Tarahumara – we saw a group of women sitting by the highway knitting them out of balls of wool.

We would see real Tarahumara craft later that day, when we made a visit to the store run by the catholic missionaries in the town of Creel. Baskets of all sizes, some comprising sets of succeeding sizes nested one inside another were there in large numbers. The things that interested us most were tiny, wooden figures of animals. The smallest, no bigger than an inch in the largest dimension, reminded me of the little plastic animals that used to come in the Binaca Fluoride Toothpaste carton when I was a child. Binaca had a whole series of these, but for some reason, I can recall most vividly the anntenaed snail. The Tarahumara craftsmen had managed to scratch in surface details on the soft wood; the edge of an owl's wing was represented by deliberately leaving unpainted, chipped areas on the wood.

I was getting a throat itch and we all needed some refreshment after the eight kilometre walk to Arareco. There were no cafés around, but I thought the grocery shack next to the highway was worth a try. The woman there told us to wait a minute, boiled a kettle of water on a stove in the back of the shop, and handed it to us with a jar of Nescafé, milk powder, sugar, a spoon and 3 enameled aluminium cups. This make-your-own-coffee thing is not uncommon in Mexico; in some places, they'll even ask about your prefered brand of instant coffee. A bunch of mucha hambre urchins appeared as we were sipping our coffees; Ashley told them she had no money and gave them biscuits instead – this way I know it's going to them.

Our holidays were coming to a close. We said our goodbyes, inviting Alice and Phil to our place in White Plains, quoting Lonely Planet "It's harsh but true: if you want to find a good, cheap place to stay in New York City, the best thing is to find a friend who lives there". They'd already invited us to their home in Surrey, even offering to have friends in other parts of England put us up. Nice people. Hope they think the same way about us.

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