Los Mochis

May 17,  2016

I checked into the Hotel Montecarlo in Los Mochis which is a clean, well run place costing about $23 a night. I seem to be making it about four nights camping out and then I’m ready for a shower and a bed.   Not as tough as I used to be. The Montecarlo is old and ornate with solid masonry structure.  It’s said that towns in this part of Mexico were founded by 19th century US mining companies, and the Montecarlo’s architecture could pass for that era.  The city of Culiacán, a 100 miles to the south, plays a part in Wallace Stegner’s historical novel Angle of Repose where mining engineer Oliver Ward lives for a time.

I got there about 11 am and checkout was noon the next day.   The 24+ hour stay is the usual strategy to maximize the break from the highway and to allow time, when it’s necessary, for resupply errands on an unladen bike.  The hotels seem to want you gone by a certain time, but don’t really care what time you check in so long as there’s a room available.

Barancas del Cobre (Copper Canyon) is about a 100 miles or so from Los Mochis and upstream on the Rio Fuerte river which passes north of town. Where the river meets the Seirra Madre Occidental mountains it splits into 6 tributaries that drain a tortured network of ridges and canyons larger in area than the Grand Canyon and, in places, said to be deeper. A passenger train, the Ferrocarril Chihuahua al Pacifico or ChePe, runs from Los Mochis over the crest of the Sierra Madre to Ciudad Chihuahua, passing through the tourist village of Divisadero, a sort of “North Rim” to the canyon. They say the train trip is worthwhile.

An indigenous tribe of Native Americans, the Tarahumara, live in the canyon with sects of the tribe living nearly independently of the modern world.   Their future holds the same uncertainties as many other primitive cultures where survival of their way of life depends on walking a fine line between trade with the outside world and absorption into it.  For the Mexican government the canyon provides tourist revenues, but continued development attracts more and more people and threatens the habitat the Tarahumarans depend.   The Government has made a national park out of it and has in place conservation measures akin to US national parks,  but there is little or no enforcement.   Ironwood (Olneya tesota) is cut for making charcoal and exported to the US and the hardwood Amapa (Tabebuia chrysantha) is used in woodworking.  They say only 2% of the original old growth forest on the 8000 foot plateau regions remains.  Open pit copper mines are still operational.  Marijuana and opium production are of course big business and the government makes perfunctory raids that includes massive use of herbicides.  The Natives are the end losers to all of it.

Life in the steep canyons has evolved in the Tarahumara people a culture of running as a means of transportation that still exists today.  In the 1990s some US long distance runners visiting the area saw the Tarahumara potential and arranged for them to run in Colorado’s 100 mile long Leadville Trail 100 race.  The event didn’t go well.  They had to learn all the procedures having nothing to do with running itself that goes along races in the US.   Things like head lamps and what was to be expected at aid stations were unknown.  They were told to wear running shoes for something this extreme.  None finished the race.   They came again the next year however and things were different.  They jettisoned the Nikes preferring their car tire sandals tied on with a leather chord (huaraches- now eponymous with a running shoe model made by, you guessed it, Nike!) and, with no acclimating to the 12000+ foot elevations encountered,  they placed 1st, 2nd and 5th.   The 3rd year Tarahumaran Jaun Herrera set the course record.  Tarahumarans typically celebrate the end of a race with cigarettes.  The notoriety from the running serves to strengthen their culture much the way WWII code talkers did the Navajo’s.  A sillouette of a runner is on the Chihuahua state license plate.

So I had the day to kill and walked around looking for a bookstore with a bird book as well as a bike shop with a rear tire for the bike.   It appears I will only get about a thousand miles out of the rear on Mexican roads.   Might get three times that out of the front tire.   Struck out on the bird book but got a decent 700c tire (made in China!) for about $5.

I couldn’t help but notice there is a dentist’s office here on about every other block.  Back in February,  I began the process of a tooth implant which is essentially the removal of a bad tooth and the installation of a titanium root to which a porcelain  cap is attached.  The root needs 3 months to “heal”, or bond in the root cavity, after which the cap’s put on.  The dentist in Logan sent me with the cap to have that part done by a dentist somewhere on the road.   Since my 3 months were up, and dentists plentiful, this seemed as good a place as any to get it done.   The first door I knocked on just did general dentistry but a guy in the office escorted me a block-and-half to one that did implants.  The receptionist scheduled an appointment for the next morning.   In my imagination I was going to get the cap put on and be back to the hotel in time for check out.  Well, it couldn’t be that simple.  The next day the dentist, Dr Gerardo Carlón, said the gum had shrunk around the implant enough that it needed to be “stretched” to accept the new tooth.  A smaller interim tooth would be needed for a few days and then the permanent tooth.   Whatever.  Suddenly I found myself with five days to kill in Los Mochis.

Communicating with the dentist and his staff was made possible with the iPad.   They of course had Wi-Fi and I could pull up Spanish-English and English-Spanish screens that you could translate sentences with.   I think it was probably the dentist’s daughter that was doing the typing for his comments and we were all getting a pretty good laugh translating jokes about the situation.  It would have been tough communicating everything with just a dictionary.

On the following Sunday Dr Carlón met me at his office, did the coup de gras, and a problem that’s been  looming for a couple of years came to a conclusion.  I payed him and then he asked if he could take me to lunch!  How many times has your dentist done that?  The answer was “of course”.  We went to a “taco stand”, Mariscos, that specialized in sea food and had 3 or 4 courses of food served that consisted of clams, shrimp, prawns, crappie, octopus, escargo and others that I was never able to translate the names of.  The sauces were amazing, incredibly rich, and naturally a little lime & hot sauce accompanies everything.

After lunch he took me for a drive to Topolobampo, a nearby town that’s on the ocean but in a sort of estuary where there are lots of birds and mangroves.   Fishing is a big industry- we had just eaten some of what they catch- and Topolobampa is a port for container ships and Pemex oil coming from the Gulf of Mexico.   It was unfortunate that we were out of Wi-Fi reception and therefore couldn’t translate conversations.  He was loading me up with all kinds of information that I was maybe getting less than half of, and that much only because he had the patience to repeat everything five times.  After a wonderful afternoon we made goodbyes and I went back to the hotel and prepared for getting back on the road the next morning.