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Brian A. Hopkins Bahlobo y los
Gringos: Creel: Saturday morning, Danny and I were up and at 'em, raring to go. We had to pound on the door of the DR-Z Boys' room and practically drag 'em outta bed. Dammit, it was time to ride! We had breakfast at the little restaurant next door to the hotel. It was good, but the service was S.L.O.W. We made arrangements to leave the van and trailer at the Three Palms ($3 per day), then hit the border. It took less than an hour to go through immigration/customs and do the paperwork on the vehicles and whatnot ... then we were officially on Mexican soil. In Ojinaga, we laundered some money, then we were ripping through picturesque mountains on some gloriously twisty pavement which eventually spilled us out into the Chihuahua desert. In the desert, the wind was brutal. Likewise, the traffic in Chihuahua. But we fought through it all, Don Quixote types one and all, to arrive at last -- after what we all thought was the longest 320 or so ass-breaking miles of our lives -- in the little town of Creel.
Our plan was to base most of our riding out of Creel, thus eliminating the need to carry all our clothes and crapola on the bikes every day. The only exception would be an overnighter at the bottom of the canyons in the town of Batopilas, basically because it would be nearly impossible to make it down there and back to Creel in one day without having to ride after dark. Compounding the issue was the fact that we wanted to ride the much lesser known and rougher road out of Batopilas to Urique, and there was no chance of doing all that in one day. You absolutely do not want to ride in this area after dark. There are just way too many critters sharing the roads and trails with you. I liked the town of Creel. The people were friendly (although the Tarahumara Indians were mostly aloof), courteous, and helpful, even if very few of them spoke any English. None of us had more than a rudimentary grasp of Spanish. We grunted and pointed a lot and said "por favor" and "gracious." I never felt as if I was in any danger while exploring the town, even when off the more public thoroughfares. This isn't the touristy Mexico of Cancun or one of the sleazy towns sharing a border with the U.S.A. Vendors didn't harass me to buy crap or offer to let me sleep with their sisters for fifty pesos. Nobody tried to sell me any weed. (I've had all these things happen in places like Tijuana, Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Cozumel, etc.) When I bought things and suggested the merchant keep the change, they always counted the change back to me and insisted that I take it. The Mexican women we saw were very attractive and well built. (The first thing we noticed when returning to the States, in fact, was that there were fat women everywhere we went.) The primary form of entertainment in Creel appeared to be loading your favorite chica bonitas in the backseat of your car or the back of your truck and driving up and down the main street of town. The town, like every place we saw in Mexico, was horribly littered. Mexico really needs to implement some sort of litter control program. Our room was clean, but the hot water situation was tenuous. I think maybe they turned off the water heater during the day. I took more than one cold shower. The room had a television, but it got only one or two channels -- entirely in Spanish. Most of the news that week was focused on the death of some famous Mexican actor named Pedro, but we did eventually learn a bit about what was transpiring in the States that week (i.e., the horrible events at Virginia Tech). Both mine and Danny's cell phones were working. I stuck to text messages back and forth with the wife at home, because T-Mobile wanted $1.49 per minute for calls to and from the area. Text messages sent from there were 35 cents a pop, while received messages were free. Most of my texting amounted to "Safe & sound. Miss u. Luv u. Bye," with the exception of the night I sent "Very hard day. Me go boom. Me not hurt. Beemer not so good" (more on that later).
I certainly wouldn't hesitate to stay in Creel again. We located the bank (where we paid the fee for our tourist visas), the Western Union office, the Post Office ... just about everything we needed. We had great roasted chicken at a place called Pollo Gordito -- or something like that (big yellow building on the southern outskirts of town). Danny and I had not-too-terribly-bad pizza and talked at length with Rueben, a street vendor who understood a fair amount of English and was ever-so-proud of being his own boss. We had another enjoyable conversation with one of the local jewelry artists, Obierto (Alberto?). All in all, a great time ... but we'd come to RIDE, so let's get on with that part of the adventure!
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