The Vilisar Times

THE ADVENTURES OF ELI; A RE-POSTING OF OUR ARRIVAL AT RANCHO EL NOGAL
Thursday, 22 September 2005

We find a yoghurt cup of detergent yesterday morning and decide to make use of the bright and sunny day to finish up our laundry. The sun has already warmed up the water in the storage tank, the generator is working fine and even the agitator-washing machine performs without a hitch. I let spring water run into each of two rinsing tubs, which Eli, 6, decides is just the thing to play in. So while the generator splits the silence with its noise and the washing water gets dirtier and dirtier from our rural work clothing, Eli practises swimming and putting his face underwater in the still-clean water in the tubs. In all of this we do actually get the washing done, rinsed, squeezed out by hand and hung out in the bright sunshine to drip dry, They are dry by late afternoon before the rain squall hits us.

Eli is not big on showers, hand washing and other such un-rancher-like activities. Although it is not cast in this way, this is going to his bath. When we insist on other days that he have a wash he is well armed with specious arguments about why a bath is not such a great idea. We finally convince him one day to run out to the water tanks near the guest house and corral, strip off, and take a wash under the spout. The idea is so outrageous to him that he decides to try it. It is in fact what we ourselves do for showers although of course we wait until Simon goes off for the day on his mule. He goes into his room, strips off amid repeated iterations of “Nobody look! Nobody look!”, streaks past us through the living room, down the covered walkway to the corral area, gives himself a good rinse, and dashes back again into his room leaving a trail of water and wet gravel across the tile floor. When he comes out again he announces that it is the best shower he has ever had and he now wants to do it every day.

Dutch spends a sometimes frustrating day yesterday trying to hang the new Dutch doors for the kitchen. He has fashioned the whole thing using rough lumber, a chain saw and a few hand tools. When the chain saw quits we find some electrical tools under the daybed in the ranchhouse and he is able to do the last bits a lot more easily. As it is, his hands are raw from sawing, rasping, screwing and lifting. But now we can keep the animals out and still have enough light and ventilation in the kitchen. And Bob sees it and it is good.

Early in the afternoon yesterday I am in the guesthouse quietly having a siesta when Kathleen fetches me. Eli has tried to climb the pole that keeps the laundry line high. I had hung his bathing suit there to dry after his rinsing-tub aquatics and he was after it. On the way down he catches the sole of his foot on a rusty nail. He is shrieking in pain when I go in. We wash his foot with soapy water and Dutch gets a tube of some sort of sulpha salve for infections that he brought with him from the Netherlands. This, a band-aid, and cuddling up to Kathleen calms him and, twenty minutes later he is the same old Eli, laughing and talking. But he decides that his foot is too painful to walk on two feet and even this morning he is hopping everywhere. The lesson about wearing his sandals doesn’t stick however and he is hopping on a bare foot. No matter how often I send him back for his sandal(s) it seems he is deaf in that ear. Little Bateese. Just now he comes by, dressed for some reason in a clown suit with a frizzy wig. We get out a hammer and he personally knocks out the offending nail. Closure!

Kathleen is spending a lot of time reading classical Brother-Grimm fairy tales to Eli that she downloads from the internet. This morning was “The Fisherman’s Wife”, a poor lady who was so dissatisfied with her lot in life (she and her spouse did actually live in a pigsty) that she pushed her husband to get her more and more things and bigger houses. Finally she gets more and more out of touch with reality and wants to become king, then emperor and finally Pope. It is a magic flounder who makes all this possible. (Yes, a magic flounder. This is one up on fairy godmothers, at least.)

(The fairy stories are fun to read again and Eli is fascinated. But for a fresh interpretation people should look at www.StoriesWork.org. This site is managed (right word?) by Professor Lenora Ucko, an anthropologist living near Duke University in North Carolina.)

This morning Simon leaves with Dutch for five or six hours to check on cattle in a distant pasture. Dutch is aboard Chip, a big bay horse, the biggest horse on the spread, in fact, and Simon is aboard one of the mules. Hungry and thirsty the last time they went out, Dutch this time makes himself a sandwich from the fresh whole-wheat bread we baked yesterday afternoon and fills up a plastic bottle of water from the tap in the kitchen. Bob tells him that he can just drink from the streams near the pastures as well. The water is clean and potable. We all have another good laugh at his expense about his hardships on his first time out a few days ago.

Before they leave, Bob and I follow the ¾-inch tubing back from the house to the source in the hills. For some reason there is no water flowing to the kitchen tank. Somewhere back up there we finally note that it has started to run again. Only later do we realise that Simon has been way ahead of us and reached the source to get the water flowing again. Sometimes the pipe comes out of the water instead of the water out of the pipe.

A Reposting of Our Arrival at Rancho el Nogal

This is a reposting of a portion of the very first blog and the very first one concerning our stay at Rancho el Nogal. It begins with an email I wrote to friends.

Rancho el Nogal, near Yepachic, Chihuahua, Mexico, 04Sep05

Dear All:

We arrived at Rancho el Nogal after an 8-hour bus ride through the Sierras (only double lines on the highways, which however did not prevent the driver of the admittedly very comfortable and air conditioned bus to overtake everything he came up behind!) Cindy, the owner of the ranch, met us when the bus let us down in the tiny mountain village of Yepachic, a name probably derived from the Mexican word for Apache, and drove us in her 4-wheel drive pickup truck to the ranch - 90 minutes on the worst and most washed out sometimes-gravel road I have seen and, being from Canada, I have seen some really bad ones. My kidneys are still aching.

The 17,000 acre ranch is located in a very large and currently very lush valley. The ranch buildings are sited above a bend in the Tutuaca River. Everything is very primitive but pretty original. Even the help are called cowboys and actually do their work on horseback for much of the time. This morning we helped in the main corral to cull cattle for weaning, selling, branding, fattening and selling as rodeo-roping calves or beef cattle. Imagine me slipping around in cow shit and chasing longhorns through a gate while staring at their genitals to be able to categorise them as bull, cow or etcetera (meaning too soon to tell or too late to be of importance any more) and you kind of get the idea. Kathleen wisely acted as tallyman only occasionally and genteelly shoo-shooing the unwanted away from the gate where she stood with her pen and pad at the ready. A Kodak moment!

This is the rainy season and it generally clouds up in the afternoon and pours. It is supposed normally to stop at dusk but somebody forgot to tell the weather gods today and, well after dark, it is still really coming down.

The owners left today with their two little towheaded boys for various travels on business. We are the “caretakers”, we along with Simon, a Pima Indian, the hired hand and our sometimes Spanish teacher. Our job is to be around to keep an eye on the house and buildings, to feed the 6 dogs, 2 cats, 2 pigs, 18 chickens and 1 guinea fowl, milk the (1) nanny-goat and keep an eye on the solar-charging system (no grid electricity out here).

Not two hours after the family had left the two pigs got out, found their way into the feed room, upset a big bin of dog food, and made a huge mess. I ran into the oinkers as I was heading out to coop up the chickens for the night. I coaxed one back into the pen with a bucket of kitchen slops. The other one, the white one, disappeared into the long grass like a greyhound to be seen no more. Simon, who speaks only Spanish and some Pima, shrugged his shoulders when I told him, which I interpret to mean either: a) it will come back eventually if a mountain lion or coyote doesn't get it; or, b) pigs are stupid anyway. One chicken and the guinea fowl got up in a tree and refused to come down. They can stay there all night too as far as I am concerned. The culled cows are bawling from the pasture on the far side of the river for their weaned calves who bawl back at them. Kathleen, ever the musician, says that some of them sound like horn players. One of them has laryngitis, though, I think; he’ll never make it to the Berlin Philharmonic. You can hear the cattle clearly inside here despite the non-stop drumming of the rain in the night on the tin roof. Hope they shut up when we go to bed. This morning we were wakened by a cock just outside our window. There might be chicken stew around here before the owners come back in three weeks!

If I can figure out to post my blogs you can follow us on www.vilisar.com. For the moment there are only some dated photos by Albert Pang.

Greetings to all

Ronald

Later on 03 September 2005

And what a place! The site and the view alone are worth the trip. All around us are high mountains. Below us runs a river through a lush valley. The buildings are rough and ready, some of them, the cowboys’ bunkhouse for example, is basically a log cabin. Drinking water comes from a spring way back up in one of the hills; there is a cold-water tap in the kitchen. Personal hygiene is served by composting toilets inside or an outhouse near the corral. Showering is done outdoors with the aid of a solar-shower bag if you want the water warm, or a hose if you don’t care. Bathing can be done at a thermal warm (not hot) springs a 25-minute walk from here or in the river some 100 feet below the house. Electricity is provided by large solar panels out of sight on the roof and stored in a battery bank under the eaves. There is a telephone with more or less unlimited usage and a U.S.A. number. The house and the telephone works through wireless computers, rather strange when you consider that everything else here is basic. And by “basic”, I mean “primitive”.

Rancho el Nogal, near Yepachic, Chihuahua, Mexico
Saturday, 03 September 2005

It’s 0530 and a big red rooster that lives under the eaves just outside our door has just started up calling back and forth again to the head rooster over in the chicken coop. It sounds like he’s right in the guest house with us! And I was wondering how I was going to be able to wake up this morning!

What a place! And what a day we had yesterday, leaving Vilisar on a mooring buoy in San Carlos in the sweltering heat, catching a ride to shore in his dinghy with Alex, our Mad-Magyar neighbour from S/V True Companion at 0430 and then in his van in the pre-dawn darkness with no headlights (he flashed the hazard lights the whole way instead) to Guaymas to catch a 0600 bus to Ciudad Obregon to the southeast along the coast. Just as we were buying the tickets in the Guaymas-bus station Kathleen realised she had lost her wallet. We could scratch up just enough change to get on board this bus and to buy the connecting tickets in Obregon for Yepachic. Not showing up would really throw a spanner in the works at the other end: they have to drive for hours to get to Yepachic, once she has started her journey, we have no way of contacting Cindy Tolle, the ranchera who is meeting us,.

Arriving at the central bus depot in Obregon we had barely enough time to buy our tickets for Yepachic, buy some food for the trip (little realising that street vendors would be boarding the bus at regular intervals until we got up into the remote highlands); Waiting for the restaurant to finish the sandwiches I kept the bus waiting and the driver was already backing out of the slot and revving the engine. He shot me a stern look for delaying him, mentally no doubt tapping his foot. He and his co-driver had a lot of kilometres to cover that day, some 600 kilometres to Chihuahua through the Sierras Madres Occidentale.

The bus ride went north up Highway 21 to San Nicolas where it joins Route 16, which is a secondary road running east from Hermosillo in Sonora State to the state capital of Chihuahua province. Not long after crossing the state line, is Yepachic. This route is almost as good as riding the Copper Canyon Railway. The two-lane highways are well-paved and engineered with solidly built highway bridges of obviously recent construction. Fortunately so, for as we get farther and farther up into the mountains the curves and switchbacks and ups and downs are non-stop. Incredible! Sometimes there are views straight down for 500 or more metres. At one point I was looking down at a group of turkey vultures hovering below us in the thermal up-draughts and only slightly upwards to bare mountain tops. After the first few hours the highway seemed to circle and snake near the top of huge valleys. You can see the stretch of road you are going eventually to be travelling only a few kilometres away but the bus has to drive another ten kilometres around the rim of the valley to reach it.

We are both exhausted all day from getting to bed so late. We moved Vilisar to her mooring buoy in the late afternoon and mounted the two-part “chameleon” dinghy on her foredeck for our absence. We stripped everything we could off the deck and stored the stripped-off jib, staysail and drifter as well as all the spare lines down below out of the sun and potential high winds. I tied off the halyards, cleared as much as I could off the decks, and lashed everything else as tight as I could. I also wrapped the mainsail tightly with two lengths of webbing. If a hurricane comes through there is lots of wind and lots of tropical rain. I left two fans running down below powered by solar panels.

Alex brought over strawberries and a farewell jug of ice-cold white wine at sundown; this had done nothing for our heads when we got up. Kathleen therefore gives up sightseeing from the bus and falls into a fitful sleep. I want to do the same. But the constant swaying of the modern, air-conditioned bus and the spectacular scenery keep me looking out the window. Cindy later tells us that many people get seasick on that busride.

The area around Ciudad Obregon, Sonora, is one of Mexico’s breadbaskets. Agriculture is big here and Obregon is the market town for all this. At first, the bus is nearly full. Country people heading back from the city. There are a lot of older guys in white Stetsons, leather belts with big buckles and cowboy boots; they look a little out of place on the coast. We are heading into ranching country. There are also older and younger women, some with children. Hours later, outside Yacora, in the high mountains, the bus is flagged down by three Indian women and two pre-school children, Pimas I later guessed, since they get off in the reservation town down the road. By this time there are only about a dozen people left; passengers have been dropping off at remote intersections and sometimes in places with no sign of even a dirt farm road.

In the afternoon, it begins to rain, sometimes heavily, as it does here every day at this time of the year. Summer in these mountains is the rainy season, like springtime elsewhere; the hot, humid, tropical, coastal-air masses bang up against the Sierras and cause huge upwellings of cumulus clouds that empty their loads of water in the afternoons and evenings. These are the same electrical storms that swoop down from the mountains to San Carlos and Guaymas on many nights. The drivers (the second driver has taken over) slow a little bit in the wet but not much. Miles to go before they sleep.

I wonder if, when we get off in the middle of nowhere, we will still be in a downpour. One of the Indian ladies tells us as she gets off in Maycoba that Yepachic is another hour down the road. Around 1600, although still under a grey sky, the rain abates somewhat as we pull off on the shoulder of the road in a loose collection of small houses, some of logs. The driver scowls at us from the front and shouts back “Yepachic” to us in the rear. We leap up out of our seats, dash to the front, struggle off with our loose hand baggage, and watch while the relief driver pulls out our two army-surplus duffel bags and the out-of-place-here red backpack with a handle and small wheels full of computer stuff and books. The driver disappears inside again, the door closes with a little whoosh, the engine revs up, and the bus roars away with its last eight or ten passengers.

A woman’s voice calls to us and we turn to see a lanky blond in blue jeans and t-shirt heading towards us. Cindy Tolle, our host and the owner (along with her husband Bob) of Rancho el Nogal. We made it!

Well, not quite yet! Over a cup of Nescafe at Lucy’s, the local inn (two rooms and the only phone in town), Cindy tells us that she has been away from the ranch for ten days selling calves. After a little chitchat, we sling our duffel bags into the open back of the pickup truck on top of gasoline jerry jugs and boxes of food supplies and cram ourselves into the cab. Rancho el Nogal (i.e. “The Walnut Ranch”; somebody planted a few walnut trees down by the river years and years ago) is very remote. This being the rainy season, the gravel “road” is in pretty bad shape, Cindy tells us, turning off Route 16 near the edge of town and stopping to shift into 4-wheel drive. The pickup moves forward at a near crawl.

“This looks like a bad road in the Canadian North,” I venture.

“Oh, this is the good part. We’ll have to slow down when we get onto the actual ranch road. This road belongs to a gold-mining company, Canadian, I think. They are supposed to start making it more permanent in the next few days. That will be great for us.”

The drive takes an hour and a half and to say it is kidney-jarring would be an understatement. After an hour we reach the boundaries of the ranch marked by one of four or five barbed-wire gates we have to stop for. Cindy is right: the ranch road is even worse. Cindy tells us that they have a bulldozer at the ranch and as soon as the rains have stopped they will run it over the road to fill in the holes and gulleys that the heavy mountain rains have created.

As we come into a very large, lush alpine valley some 90 minutes later Cindy points out the ranch house proper on a bluff in the distance. We still have to ford a river in flood; Cindy hesitates at the edge of the rushing water, wondering if the pickup will be able to make it without drowning. Then she guns the engine and wades right in to cross the ford. The water reaches up well beyond the axels but we make it. We double back on the river on a dirt track and climb a very rough last hill. I am convinced that we must have cracked the whole frame when we come down particularly hard once and another time Cindy thinks the road is so washed out that we might not get up the steep incline.

Finally, we pull into a complex of wooden buildings and corrals situated on a bluff above a bend in the river. Now, maybe, we can say we have made it. We have had eight hours of dizzying and swaying bus-ride followed by an hour and a half of bone-jarring, basically cross-country pickup-truck ride. I chortle to myself when I think of those spotlessly clean 4-WD pickups you see in cities. They have probably never even been driven on the gravel shoulder of the highway.

posted by rjb,
3:24 pm

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		News From Ron and Kathy Bird__
For more pictures of Ron and Kathy Bird and the Vilisar, see these beautiful photos by Albert Pang Click here to e-mail Ron Click here to e-mail Kathy Archives January 2004 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 February 2007 March 2007 Vilisar Translation Expert German-English translation available; business and finance our specialty. SachverstÃ¤ndige Deutsch-Englische Ãbersetzung; GeschÃ¤ft und Finanz unser Spezialgebiet.	Thursday, September 22, 2005 THE ADVENTURES OF ELI; A RE-POSTING OF OUR ARRIVAL AT RANCHO EL NOGAL Thursday, 22 September 2005 We find a yoghurt cup of detergent yesterday morning and decide to make use of the bright and sunny day to finish up our laundry. The sun has already warmed up the water in the storage tank, the generator is working fine and even the agitator-washing machine performs without a hitch. I let spring water run into each of two rinsing tubs, which Eli, 6, decides is just the thing to play in. So while the generator splits the silence with its noise and the washing water gets dirtier and dirtier from our rural work clothing, Eli practises swimming and putting his face underwater in the still-clean water in the tubs. In all of this we do actually get the washing done, rinsed, squeezed out by hand and hung out in the bright sunshine to drip dry, They are dry by late afternoon before the rain squall hits us. Eli is not big on showers, hand washing and other such un-rancher-like activities. Although it is not cast in this way, this is going to his bath. When we insist on other days that he have a wash he is well armed with specious arguments about why a bath is not such a great idea. We finally convince him one day to run out to the water tanks near the guest house and corral, strip off, and take a wash under the spout. The idea is so outrageous to him that he decides to try it. It is in fact what we ourselves do for showers although of course we wait until Simon goes off for the day on his mule. He goes into his room, strips off amid repeated iterations of “Nobody look! Nobody look!”, streaks past us through the living room, down the covered walkway to the corral area, gives himself a good rinse, and dashes back again into his room leaving a trail of water and wet gravel across the tile floor. When he comes out again he announces that it is the best shower he has ever had and he now wants to do it every day. Dutch spends a sometimes frustrating day yesterday trying to hang the new Dutch doors for the kitchen. He has fashioned the whole thing using rough lumber, a chain saw and a few hand tools. When the chain saw quits we find some electrical tools under the daybed in the ranchhouse and he is able to do the last bits a lot more easily. As it is, his hands are raw from sawing, rasping, screwing and lifting. But now we can keep the animals out and still have enough light and ventilation in the kitchen. And Bob sees it and it is good. Early in the afternoon yesterday I am in the guesthouse quietly having a siesta when Kathleen fetches me. Eli has tried to climb the pole that keeps the laundry line high. I had hung his bathing suit there to dry after his rinsing-tub aquatics and he was after it. On the way down he catches the sole of his foot on a rusty nail. He is shrieking in pain when I go in. We wash his foot with soapy water and Dutch gets a tube of some sort of sulpha salve for infections that he brought with him from the Netherlands. This, a band-aid, and cuddling up to Kathleen calms him and, twenty minutes later he is the same old Eli, laughing and talking. But he decides that his foot is too painful to walk on two feet and even this morning he is hopping everywhere. The lesson about wearing his sandals doesn’t stick however and he is hopping on a bare foot. No matter how often I send him back for his sandal(s) it seems he is deaf in that ear. Little Bateese. Just now he comes by, dressed for some reason in a clown suit with a frizzy wig. We get out a hammer and he personally knocks out the offending nail. Closure! Kathleen is spending a lot of time reading classical Brother-Grimm fairy tales to Eli that she downloads from the internet. This morning was “The Fisherman’s Wife”, a poor lady who was so dissatisfied with her lot in life (she and her spouse did actually live in a pigsty) that she pushed her husband to get her more and more things and bigger houses. Finally she gets more and more out of touch with reality and wants to become king, then emperor and finally Pope. It is a magic flounder who makes all this possible. (Yes, a magic flounder. This is one up on fairy godmothers, at least.) (The fairy stories are fun to read again and Eli is fascinated. But for a fresh interpretation people should look at www.StoriesWork.org. This site is managed (right word?) by Professor Lenora Ucko, an anthropologist living near Duke University in North Carolina.) This morning Simon leaves with Dutch for five or six hours to check on cattle in a distant pasture. Dutch is aboard Chip, a big bay horse, the biggest horse on the spread, in fact, and Simon is aboard one of the mules. Hungry and thirsty the last time they went out, Dutch this time makes himself a sandwich from the fresh whole-wheat bread we baked yesterday afternoon and fills up a plastic bottle of water from the tap in the kitchen. Bob tells him that he can just drink from the streams near the pastures as well. The water is clean and potable. We all have another good laugh at his expense about his hardships on his first time out a few days ago. Before they leave, Bob and I follow the ¾-inch tubing back from the house to the source in the hills. For some reason there is no water flowing to the kitchen tank. Somewhere back up there we finally note that it has started to run again. Only later do we realise that Simon has been way ahead of us and reached the source to get the water flowing again. Sometimes the pipe comes out of the water instead of the water out of the pipe. A Reposting of Our Arrival at Rancho el Nogal This is a reposting of a portion of the very first blog and the very first one concerning our stay at Rancho el Nogal. It begins with an email I wrote to friends. Rancho el Nogal, near Yepachic, Chihuahua, Mexico, 04Sep05 Dear All: We arrived at Rancho el Nogal after an 8-hour bus ride through the Sierras (only double lines on the highways, which however did not prevent the driver of the admittedly very comfortable and air conditioned bus to overtake everything he came up behind!) Cindy, the owner of the ranch, met us when the bus let us down in the tiny mountain village of Yepachic, a name probably derived from the Mexican word for Apache, and drove us in her 4-wheel drive pickup truck to the ranch - 90 minutes on the worst and most washed out sometimes-gravel road I have seen and, being from Canada, I have seen some really bad ones. My kidneys are still aching. The 17,000 acre ranch is located in a very large and currently very lush valley. The ranch buildings are sited above a bend in the Tutuaca River. Everything is very primitive but pretty original. Even the help are called cowboys and actually do their work on horseback for much of the time. This morning we helped in the main corral to cull cattle for weaning, selling, branding, fattening and selling as rodeo-roping calves or beef cattle. Imagine me slipping around in cow shit and chasing longhorns through a gate while staring at their genitals to be able to categorise them as bull, cow or etcetera (meaning too soon to tell or too late to be of importance any more) and you kind of get the idea. Kathleen wisely acted as tallyman only occasionally and genteelly shoo-shooing the unwanted away from the gate where she stood with her pen and pad at the ready. A Kodak moment! This is the rainy season and it generally clouds up in the afternoon and pours. It is supposed normally to stop at dusk but somebody forgot to tell the weather gods today and, well after dark, it is still really coming down. The owners left today with their two little towheaded boys for various travels on business. We are the “caretakers”, we along with Simon, a Pima Indian, the hired hand and our sometimes Spanish teacher. Our job is to be around to keep an eye on the house and buildings, to feed the 6 dogs, 2 cats, 2 pigs, 18 chickens and 1 guinea fowl, milk the (1) nanny-goat and keep an eye on the solar-charging system (no grid electricity out here). Not two hours after the family had left the two pigs got out, found their way into the feed room, upset a big bin of dog food, and made a huge mess. I ran into the oinkers as I was heading out to coop up the chickens for the night. I coaxed one back into the pen with a bucket of kitchen slops. The other one, the white one, disappeared into the long grass like a greyhound to be seen no more. Simon, who speaks only Spanish and some Pima, shrugged his shoulders when I told him, which I interpret to mean either: a) it will come back eventually if a mountain lion or coyote doesn't get it; or, b) pigs are stupid anyway. One chicken and the guinea fowl got up in a tree and refused to come down. They can stay there all night too as far as I am concerned. The culled cows are bawling from the pasture on the far side of the river for their weaned calves who bawl back at them. Kathleen, ever the musician, says that some of them sound like horn players. One of them has laryngitis, though, I think; he’ll never make it to the Berlin Philharmonic. You can hear the cattle clearly inside here despite the non-stop drumming of the rain in the night on the tin roof. Hope they shut up when we go to bed. This morning we were wakened by a cock just outside our window. There might be chicken stew around here before the owners come back in three weeks! If I can figure out to post my blogs you can follow us on www.vilisar.com. For the moment there are only some dated photos by Albert Pang. Greetings to all Ronald Later on 03 September 2005 And what a place! The site and the view alone are worth the trip. All around us are high mountains. Below us runs a river through a lush valley. The buildings are rough and ready, some of them, the cowboys’ bunkhouse for example, is basically a log cabin. Drinking water comes from a spring way back up in one of the hills; there is a cold-water tap in the kitchen. Personal hygiene is served by composting toilets inside or an outhouse near the corral. Showering is done outdoors with the aid of a solar-shower bag if you want the water warm, or a hose if you don’t care. Bathing can be done at a thermal warm (not hot) springs a 25-minute walk from here or in the river some 100 feet below the house. Electricity is provided by large solar panels out of sight on the roof and stored in a battery bank under the eaves. There is a telephone with more or less unlimited usage and a U.S.A. number. The house and the telephone works through wireless computers, rather strange when you consider that everything else here is basic. And by “basic”, I mean “primitive”. Rancho el Nogal, near Yepachic, Chihuahua, Mexico Saturday, 03 September 2005 It’s 0530 and a big red rooster that lives under the eaves just outside our door has just started up calling back and forth again to the head rooster over in the chicken coop. It sounds like he’s right in the guest house with us! And I was wondering how I was going to be able to wake up this morning! What a place! And what a day we had yesterday, leaving Vilisar on a mooring buoy in San Carlos in the sweltering heat, catching a ride to shore in his dinghy with Alex, our Mad-Magyar neighbour from S/V True Companion at 0430 and then in his van in the pre-dawn darkness with no headlights (he flashed the hazard lights the whole way instead) to Guaymas to catch a 0600 bus to Ciudad Obregon to the southeast along the coast. Just as we were buying the tickets in the Guaymas-bus station Kathleen realised she had lost her wallet. We could scratch up just enough change to get on board this bus and to buy the connecting tickets in Obregon for Yepachic. Not showing up would really throw a spanner in the works at the other end: they have to drive for hours to get to Yepachic, once she has started her journey, we have no way of contacting Cindy Tolle, the ranchera who is meeting us,. Arriving at the central bus depot in Obregon we had barely enough time to buy our tickets for Yepachic, buy some food for the trip (little realising that street vendors would be boarding the bus at regular intervals until we got up into the remote highlands); Waiting for the restaurant to finish the sandwiches I kept the bus waiting and the driver was already backing out of the slot and revving the engine. He shot me a stern look for delaying him, mentally no doubt tapping his foot. He and his co-driver had a lot of kilometres to cover that day, some 600 kilometres to Chihuahua through the Sierras Madres Occidentale. The bus ride went north up Highway 21 to San Nicolas where it joins Route 16, which is a secondary road running east from Hermosillo in Sonora State to the state capital of Chihuahua province. Not long after crossing the state line, is Yepachic. This route is almost as good as riding the Copper Canyon Railway. The two-lane highways are well-paved and engineered with solidly built highway bridges of obviously recent construction. Fortunately so, for as we get farther and farther up into the mountains the curves and switchbacks and ups and downs are non-stop. Incredible! Sometimes there are views straight down for 500 or more metres. At one point I was looking down at a group of turkey vultures hovering below us in the thermal up-draughts and only slightly upwards to bare mountain tops. After the first few hours the highway seemed to circle and snake near the top of huge valleys. You can see the stretch of road you are going eventually to be travelling only a few kilometres away but the bus has to drive another ten kilometres around the rim of the valley to reach it. We are both exhausted all day from getting to bed so late. We moved Vilisar to her mooring buoy in the late afternoon and mounted the two-part “chameleon” dinghy on her foredeck for our absence. We stripped everything we could off the deck and stored the stripped-off jib, staysail and drifter as well as all the spare lines down below out of the sun and potential high winds. I tied off the halyards, cleared as much as I could off the decks, and lashed everything else as tight as I could. I also wrapped the mainsail tightly with two lengths of webbing. If a hurricane comes through there is lots of wind and lots of tropical rain. I left two fans running down below powered by solar panels. Alex brought over strawberries and a farewell jug of ice-cold white wine at sundown; this had done nothing for our heads when we got up. Kathleen therefore gives up sightseeing from the bus and falls into a fitful sleep. I want to do the same. But the constant swaying of the modern, air-conditioned bus and the spectacular scenery keep me looking out the window. Cindy later tells us that many people get seasick on that busride. The area around Ciudad Obregon, Sonora, is one of Mexico’s breadbaskets. Agriculture is big here and Obregon is the market town for all this. At first, the bus is nearly full. Country people heading back from the city. There are a lot of older guys in white Stetsons, leather belts with big buckles and cowboy boots; they look a little out of place on the coast. We are heading into ranching country. There are also older and younger women, some with children. Hours later, outside Yacora, in the high mountains, the bus is flagged down by three Indian women and two pre-school children, Pimas I later guessed, since they get off in the reservation town down the road. By this time there are only about a dozen people left; passengers have been dropping off at remote intersections and sometimes in places with no sign of even a dirt farm road. In the afternoon, it begins to rain, sometimes heavily, as it does here every day at this time of the year. Summer in these mountains is the rainy season, like springtime elsewhere; the hot, humid, tropical, coastal-air masses bang up against the Sierras and cause huge upwellings of cumulus clouds that empty their loads of water in the afternoons and evenings. These are the same electrical storms that swoop down from the mountains to San Carlos and Guaymas on many nights. The drivers (the second driver has taken over) slow a little bit in the wet but not much. Miles to go before they sleep. I wonder if, when we get off in the middle of nowhere, we will still be in a downpour. One of the Indian ladies tells us as she gets off in Maycoba that Yepachic is another hour down the road. Around 1600, although still under a grey sky, the rain abates somewhat as we pull off on the shoulder of the road in a loose collection of small houses, some of logs. The driver scowls at us from the front and shouts back “Yepachic” to us in the rear. We leap up out of our seats, dash to the front, struggle off with our loose hand baggage, and watch while the relief driver pulls out our two army-surplus duffel bags and the out-of-place-here red backpack with a handle and small wheels full of computer stuff and books. The driver disappears inside again, the door closes with a little whoosh, the engine revs up, and the bus roars away with its last eight or ten passengers. A woman’s voice calls to us and we turn to see a lanky blond in blue jeans and t-shirt heading towards us. Cindy Tolle, our host and the owner (along with her husband Bob) of Rancho el Nogal. We made it! Well, not quite yet! Over a cup of Nescafe at Lucy’s, the local inn (two rooms and the only phone in town), Cindy tells us that she has been away from the ranch for ten days selling calves. After a little chitchat, we sling our duffel bags into the open back of the pickup truck on top of gasoline jerry jugs and boxes of food supplies and cram ourselves into the cab. Rancho el Nogal (i.e. “The Walnut Ranch”; somebody planted a few walnut trees down by the river years and years ago) is very remote. This being the rainy season, the gravel “road” is in pretty bad shape, Cindy tells us, turning off Route 16 near the edge of town and stopping to shift into 4-wheel drive. The pickup moves forward at a near crawl. “This looks like a bad road in the Canadian North,” I venture. “Oh, this is the good part. We’ll have to slow down when we get onto the actual ranch road. This road belongs to a gold-mining company, Canadian, I think. They are supposed to start making it more permanent in the next few days. That will be great for us.” The drive takes an hour and a half and to say it is kidney-jarring would be an understatement. After an hour we reach the boundaries of the ranch marked by one of four or five barbed-wire gates we have to stop for. Cindy is right: the ranch road is even worse. Cindy tells us that they have a bulldozer at the ranch and as soon as the rains have stopped they will run it over the road to fill in the holes and gulleys that the heavy mountain rains have created. As we come into a very large, lush alpine valley some 90 minutes later Cindy points out the ranch house proper on a bluff in the distance. We still have to ford a river in flood; Cindy hesitates at the edge of the rushing water, wondering if the pickup will be able to make it without drowning. Then she guns the engine and wades right in to cross the ford. The water reaches up well beyond the axels but we make it. We double back on the river on a dirt track and climb a very rough last hill. I am convinced that we must have cracked the whole frame when we come down particularly hard once and another time Cindy thinks the road is so washed out that we might not get up the steep incline. Finally, we pull into a complex of wooden buildings and corrals situated on a bluff above a bend in the river. Now, maybe, we can say we have made it. We have had eight hours of dizzying and swaying bus-ride followed by an hour and a half of bone-jarring, basically cross-country pickup-truck ride. I chortle to myself when I think of those spotlessly clean 4-WD pickups you see in cities. They have probably never even been driven on the gravel shoulder of the highway. posted by *rjb,* *3:24 pm* Comments: Post a Comment
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Thursday, September 22, 2005