Ferrocarril Pacifico Chihuahua

With nothing much of note happening in Los Mochis I turfed in for the night, setting my alarm for the ungodly time of 4.15am. If you add the lack of sleep on the boat to this, you see I wasn´t giving my sick body too long to recover from this illness. I wrestled out of bed, packed up and headed down for the bus that Lonely Planet assured me ran from 5am. Half an hour later and with no bus in sight I grabbed a taxi down to the railway station. Arriving there I attempted to buy a ticket for the train by card, only to be informed that the card machine was broken and the nearest ATM was back in town. Bugger, thats why I always carry cash. I took a taxi back to town and again back to the station for about $10 wasted. As I arrive back into the station, the bint behind the glass puts up a sign saying no tickets till 6am so I have to sit and wait. When she eventually comes back and I get my ticket she says she has no change and I have to wait for 100 pesos. Tired and ratty I had to resist the urge to just punch her in her annoying face. Eventually I stagger onto the train which is cased by drugs dogs like the one in Serbia. This trip was having harrowing echos with my inter-railing experiences. For the first 3 hours the train lopes past fields like those in New Mexico full of wild horses and it was so exciting I fell asleep for about an hour and then did another Spanish lesson. I was beginning to wonder what all of the fuss was about.



Just past El Fuerte the train begins to climb and some little kids keep hitting me with their paper aeroplanes, which is amusing at first. The little kids were so hyperactive I began to suspect the Rocky Mountain High may have been slipped into their morning coffee. My mind wandered to something I had forgot to mention earlier. In New Orleans I had posted a message on couchsurfing complaining about the curfew. This had been answered gruffly by a man in his 40s who thought some 'tourists' should keep their opinions to themselves and wasn't it terrible that the attempt to enforce the law to protect from looting was stopping someone getting pissed. Personally despite his sarcasm I thought it was terrible. A girl Robin leapt to my defence by stating that if you are going to criticise someone you should at least type properly, to which he responded that it was a little difficult when you only have one hand. One of those awkward places where it becomes difficult to extricate yourself from there. Anyway just as I was getting bored, bam. The train rounds a corner ala Colorado and you are treated to an awesome sweeping vista of a valley with a river scything through the base and a multitude of colours dancing on the cliff face. There were white rocks, yellow patches near the loop, red brick formations and a fantastic green in the main canyon, which is why the Spaniards had christened it copper canyon in the first place. There were tens of bridges and tunnels as this impressive engineering work snaked its way to the canyon mouth. I'd wahcked on my mp3 player and as the sun danced along the canyon Bob Marley would be my accompaniment for much of the journey and all was good in the world. The canyon itself is like a crossbreed between the vastness of the Grand Canyon and the beauty of Zion on steroids. I realised at this point that I should have stayed in Creel and gone hiking. Its a cool little town up in the middle of the mountains. Just after leaving Creel I was informed that we would have to leave the train for a bus that would take us the rest of the way. I had my first awful conversational attempt at Spanish with an older woman on the train and helped her with her bags. We packed onto the bus and were treated to a stuttering, breaking version of Ghost Rider, while I was made uneasy by the guard sitting behiond me with an automatic weapon in his lap. We eventually rolled into Chihuahua at 10.30pm and I was finally in my first decent town.



The hostel right by the station is run by a great French/Mexican couple with a cool Alsatian dog. I wandered out into the town and found a proper supermarket where I could get cereal bars to stave off hunger on bus journeys. Walking around town I found a lovely cathedral and this being a cowboy town they sold cowboy boots for cheap. I wanted some but figured I would allow myself till Durango to stew over that decision. The Palacio de Gobierno in town has fantastic murals around the walls detailing the city's history. It also has a small Hidalgo museum in Spanish. If you walk out to the Parque el Palomar at the far end of town you get great sweeping vistas over the surrounding hills and the beauty of Chihuahua's location becomes apparent. Quinta Gamaras was a pretty house with an art exhibition that had been built for a sweetheart who ran off with the architect. The hostel is however located next to a prison, which makes for an amusing morning walk. I wandered through the Parque Revolucion and was still being sick a bit from the whooping cough. That night I was supposed to meet Liz, so I headed out and grabbed some Elotes before taking in the dancing fountain show behind the palace. Its cool and reminded me of Vienna or that time in Versailles where I snuck into a formal do. Everyone was in their tuxedos and I was there with my rucksack and bobble hat. Then again I usually look the most trampy in a room so it did not change much. The fountain show is free and good. Music ranged from Dido to ET to Enya to Magnificent Seven. I headed to Cafe Calicanto and listened to some really good live acoustic music and when Liz failed to show I had a beer and headed back to the hostel. There I met some older Yankees who had just come in and were heading up into the canyon to hike. We chatted for a while and one wrote history books and another was a teacher. It was a pleasant conversation and then I turfed in.



In the morning I got chatting for a couple of hours with the French owner of the hostel. He informed me that the heads of four policeman had been delivered after decapitation to the local police chief and subsequently there had been a spate of resignations. It seems the drug wars were moving further from the border and he described the frustrations of everyone being in the pocket of the drug cartels and how there is a concerted effort to keep the poor down by lending them money at 67% a year interest and other ridiculous financial systems. He even has to buy his medical insurance for his family from the States. We talked for a while about US politics and then moved onto his French military service. When he was 19 he had applied for a post in French Guyana that involved wearing full uniform to raise and lower a flag once a day in a hut in the middle of nowhere. He had lived out among the natives for one year alone. They had often stolen his uniform in a game so he had to come to the village and barter for it back. It must have been solitary but he said it was the best year of his life. We talked on many things and then I headed out to the Casa Chihuahua which was free on thursdays (or so Lonely Planet incorrectly informed me). I was beginning to suspect they did not check anything properly since being taken over by the BBC and that the Aussies did a much better job. Its a cool little museum, even if part of it fell on me. I was frantically trying to put it back together when I heard footsteps of curators coming my way. Reminded me of those kids on the platform at Garston. Gathered in their hoodies one of them noticed the glass had been vandalised from a train shelter and had climbed over to get it and then`put it back on the roof. If any police had come along they would have suspected that the kids had broken it and they would have had limited defence. Lovely how our Rashomon societal prejudices play out. I was also invited to a new gallery opening while I was there but declined politely. On the way out I grabbed a great breakfast from cafe 60s that the Frenchman had recommended and found out Spurs were still shit.

When I arrived back at the hostel I got chatting with a girl named Angelica who worked at the hostel. She had studied mechanical engineering up in Washington state and had just come back from visiting her boyfriend's family in Bulgaria. Was a good chat and I promised to send her stuff on teaching Spanish abroad as she wanted to get back to Europe. The French owner also told me an amusing story about a German girl who had stayed there. She had been in the States on a student visa and was heading into Mexico. She got through in El Paso and they said she had to pay $20 for a visa. She had no US money on her so they sent her back. US customs said she was only on a student visa and could only enter once, so she was not allowed back in the States. So they sent her back to Mexico. She ended up getting played like a ping pong ball until the US guards eventually allowed her to use an ATM. As I was heading for the bus I was assisted by a Mexican woman who informed me she had lived 15 years in Houston (with a husband and two kids) but was originally born in Chihuahua. Immigration had found her and deported her back across the border. Now her husband is a US citizen, as is the younger of the girls. Both children are deaf and in a special school in Austin. She is now refused entrance to the US and because the older kid does not have US citizenship she can't come to visit without being deported herself. So as a mother she is separated from her family for 9 months of the year and from one daughter indefinitely. Whatever people think of immigration, it has to be morally wrong to separate a family with arbitrary borders and is a sick system that needs fixing. I tried to reassure her that an Obama administration may reenact the Bush/McCain liberal immigration bill that was killed by house Republicans and that then she has a path to citizenship, but to be honest the political circumstances sounded hollow when the moral ones are so clearly wrong. I eventually made it to the bus that was late as always. I settled down and watched the end of some crap Michael Madsen film called 'detectives 2'. I was unsure how a second one got made, but hey ho it was on to Monterrey.