The Vilisar Times

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 gather 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 and we have no way of contacting Cindy Tolle, who is meeting us, once she has started her journey.
Arriving at the central bus depot in Obregon we had barely enough time to buy our on-tickets, 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); the driver was already backing out of the slot. 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 del Oueste.
The bus ride north up Highway 21 to San Nicolas where it joins Route 16, a secondary road running east from Hermosillo, Sonora, to the state capital of Chihuahua province and passing just over the border from Sonora to Chihuahua states through 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 up to bare mountain tops. After the first few hours the highway seemed to circle near the top of huge valleys. You can see the stretch of road you are going to be travelling only a few kilometres away but the bus has to drive ten kilometres around the rim of the valley to reach it.
We are both exhausted from getting to bed so late. We moved Vilisar to her mooring buoy in the late afternoon and mounted the two-part 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.
Because Alex had brought over strawberries and a farewell jug of ice-cold white wine at sundown, which had done nothing for our heads when we got up, Kathleen gives up sightseeing from the bus and falls into a fitful sleep on the bus. 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.
The area around 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 dwindles abates somewhat as we pull off 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 have made it!
Well, not quite yet! Over a cup of Nescafe at Lucy’s, the local inn (two rooms and the only phone), 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 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 stops at the edge wondering if the pickup will be able to make it without drowning, then guns the engine and wades in to cross the ford. The water reaches up well beyond the axels but we make it. We double back on the river and climb a very rough last hill. I think 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,
1:38 pm

<$BlogRSDURL$>

		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 08, 2005 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 gather 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 and we have no way of contacting Cindy Tolle, who is meeting us, once she has started her journey. Arriving at the central bus depot in Obregon we had barely enough time to buy our on-tickets, 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); the driver was already backing out of the slot. 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 del Oueste. The bus ride north up Highway 21 to San Nicolas where it joins Route 16, a secondary road running east from Hermosillo, Sonora, to the state capital of Chihuahua province and passing just over the border from Sonora to Chihuahua states through 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 up to bare mountain tops. After the first few hours the highway seemed to circle near the top of huge valleys. You can see the stretch of road you are going to be travelling only a few kilometres away but the bus has to drive ten kilometres around the rim of the valley to reach it. We are both exhausted from getting to bed so late. We moved Vilisar to her mooring buoy in the late afternoon and mounted the two-part 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. Because Alex had brought over strawberries and a farewell jug of ice-cold white wine at sundown, which had done nothing for our heads when we got up, Kathleen gives up sightseeing from the bus and falls into a fitful sleep on the bus. 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. The area around 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 dwindles abates somewhat as we pull off 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 have made it! Well, not quite yet! Over a cup of Nescafe at Lucy’s, the local inn (two rooms and the only phone), 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 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 stops at the edge wondering if the pickup will be able to make it without drowning, then guns the engine and wades in to cross the ford. The water reaches up well beyond the axels but we make it. We double back on the river and climb a very rough last hill. I think 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,* *1:38 pm* Comments: Post a Comment
Website Counter This website created by Gwendolyn Holbrow All copyrights reserved

Archives

Thursday, September 08, 2005