This is mostly for you folks up north:
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Friday, March 22, 2013
Copper Canyon - Part One
Dancing with Zorro and other Anomalies
You may have wondered where we have been as not much has been posted of late. Well basically we have just been enjoying life at our Winter Residence. Nothing too special. Mrs.T has gone scuba diving every week as usual and reported on the many fish, eels, octopi, rays, etc., that she has encountered down in the deep. Your humble editor has been doing usual chores of food, clothes, dishes, etc. One new activity has been jigsaw puzzling. This often involves several members resident at the complex; BC Judy has been the leader and expert for most of them. Here are a few pictures:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9151458@N07/sets/72157633062515314/
As Mrs. T relates below, we took a vacation to the Copper Canyon up north. I will give a couple of links below that relate to the trip. Let me give a plug for Superior Tours in PV; Astrid and her crew, particularly our guide Poncho, earned the 'superior' name.
I think R intends to write more than one account of our travel. We took over 700 photos, a lot of duplicates and otherwise unusable, that were sorted through to give you some idea of the trip. So here goes the first part:
Dan and I like to take trips around Mexico to get to know the country better. Some of us may enjoy it more than others but Dan tags along. We recently took a trip to Northern Mexico to visit Copper Canyon, El Canyon de Cobre. (More properly Barranca del Cobre -dt) We traveled through three states, Nayarit, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua.
I knew that a lot of our food comes from Sinaloa but I did not realize that it is the breadbasket -or should I say taco basket - of Mexico. If you have traveled through Kansas or Iowa in the US; or Manitoba in Canada; Sinaloa will look very familiar. There are tremendous fields that stretch forever: corn, oats, tomatoes, melons, beans, and tobacco. In Mexico instead of soy beans they grow garbanzo beans. I would never have guessed there were so many garbanzo beans in the whole world.
The corn is a whole different matter. Due to the law of unexpected consequences, that is, if you pass a law to accomplish one thing something else will inevitably occur, Mexico ships most of their white corn (the kind most Mexicans prefer) to the US to make Ethanol. In return the US ships most of its yellow corn (the kind Mexicans don't like) to Mexico. Go figure! Because of the climate they can grow three or four crops a year here. There is only enough water from rain for one crop. They make up the difference with irrigation from the damming of the El Fuerte River, the river that made the canyon. (There are actually six rivers that combine to make Rio Fuerte. And there are six interlinked canyons. –dt) Right now the lakes are 30 meters low because of the drought so if there is not a lot of rain soon they will have to go back to one crop a year. (The automobile license plates for the state of Sinaloa feature a tomato, many of which – tomatoes not auto plates – are consumed in the US and Canada. –dt)
The Mexicans claim the Copper Canyon is what the Grand Canyon would like to be when it grows up. That is because the Copper Canyon is bigger, deeper, and more beautiful. The first two are hard to dispute. As for the third I don't know but I think it is more fun to visit because there are a lot less tourists. But there is a reason for this; you can't get there from anywhere.
First you get on a bus and after 4 or 6 hours you arrive in Mazatlan. The bus was fairly roomy and comfortable but I want to tell you that it is possible to get saddle sores from a bus. The next day we took another long bus trip to El Fuerte. At El Fuerte, we had a choice of an historical tour of the town or a river raft tour to identify local birds and plants. Dan and I went on the river tour. We really enjoyed it. Thank goodness Poncho (our guide for the entire trip –dt) had warned us of the vicious insects, so lavishly coated in OFF we were OK. Many of the birds were the same ones we see in the summer at home up north. Three we don't often see were ospreys, vermillion flycatchers, and prairie chickens. We also stopped at a petroglyph site. Our guide Michael Angel for the river experience explained about them too. Some of the petroglyphs are pretty obvious like the sun, a snake, and people. But some of them such as a drought or religious ideas are far from obvious and I have a sneaking suspicion that some archeologists are just making them up. On the way back to the hotel I practiced my Spanish on Michael Angel; he was very nice about it but his English was much better than my Spanish.
Next day we met the first Tarahumara Indians lying in wait to sell us baskets and tee shirts at the train station while we waited for the train which was only about an hour late. We were told by our helpful guide Poncho that this was almost on time. Hmm! The train was fairly comfortable and served very nice meals in the dining car. If you got tired of sitting you could stand between cars and cool off while looking out at the landscape. Dan suggested that if I were feeling like James Bond I could climb up on top and hop from car to car. It was tempting but I resisted. When a freight train passed us I was surprised to see there were several men resting on top of most of the cars getting a free ride.
The three hotels we stayed in in the canyon area were all lovely. The hotel in El Fuerte used to be a hacienda and is famous as the birthplace of Don Diego de la Vega, otherwise known as Zorro. Of course they make much of the fact and that first evening as we were listening to the music during happy hour who should appear but a masked man! Dan was drinking two beers and I was having lemonada. Dan was grumbling because, although you got two beers for the price of one, they were very small bottles. They put me in mind of the old Coke bottles and I found them rather cute but Dan did not see it that way. Of course since they do not usually get much call for lemonade during happy hour, they became confused and brought me two regular sized ones. Virtue is its own reward.
About this time Zorro started singing along with the live music; he had quite a nice voice. They were doing mostly mariachi songs. Several of the younger ladies in the crowd - in their twenties and thirties I would guess (and not in our older people tour group –dt) - started taking turns dancing with Zorro. Dan leaned over and whispered to me that he thought that Zorro was our guide from the river tour. I was looking at him trying to decide. Then Zorro announced that he had saved the last dance for a very special lady. This was a lady he met on the river tour this afternoon and he held out his hand to me! Well I don't dance really, but if you get a couple of lemonades in me it is amazing what I will do. We have no photos to record this event; undoubtedly someone else in the tour does. Another lady in our tour group who was about our age told me later she was so glad that I had done it; she would never have had the nerve. Was this a compliment? (No telling what Mrs.T will do after a couple of margaritas -dt)
Here are some photos. But a couple of preliminary comments are appropriate. With a modern digital camera is possible to take a lot of photos as noted above; most of us are snapshotters and not photographers. And with the advanced technology, especially image stabilization, pictures come out very nice without editing. However, in a speeding bus, train, or boat, pictures of birds and other things often result in blurs.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9151458@N07/sets/72157633051699773/
Of course Mrs.T will be writing more about the trip. The pictures had just a couple of the canyons; next installment will have more. If you want to read more background, head over to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_Canyon
And you can read the travel details of our tour at: http://www.superiortoursvallarta.com/copcan2013.html
There is more to come.
And we will be back at the Summer Estate soon.
Dan and Rebecca
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
