518 Words
Mexico - The Grandest Canyons -
Train Travel that Teaches
The hot desert wind whips through the open-sided viewing car. The Sierra Madre Express train is rocketing full-throttle down the rails as we head towards Mexico's Copper Canyon.
It is our first morning aboard the four vintage car "consist". Swaying through the night we have left the U.S. border far behind. My husband and I are on board with 33 other passengers, eight Mexican staff and the tour-guide team of Jim Moline and Ann Brehm-Moline.
Ascending inland the cacti morphs to pine as we arrive at Hotel El Mision where heavily-scented roses surround the open-veranda hallways. The Molines are eager to help us understand one of the remotest Indian tribes in North America. They explain that there are over 60,000 Tarahumara in these canyons, many who still live in caves or primitive plank houses. Due to large distances between homes and rough roads, children often live in boarding schools.
The Molines take us to the Tewecado mission boarding school where 75 young girls sing for us in their native language. Brehm-Moline translates as one of the nuns explains how each girl sews her own skirt by hand and then presses each pleat into place using a heavy iron heated on the fire. A small child guides us to her dorm where 20 matching pink princess beds face each other.
That night, we fall asleep to the laughter of children playing in the town's centro and wake to crowing roosters and the smell of hot corn tortillas.
Re-boarding the train we carry on with our climb into the Copper Canyon. Canyon is actually a misnomer, this is a series of almost twenty canyons that fold and fall into each other, eventually encompassing an area almost five times the size of the Grand Canyon. The comparison ends there. These barrancas are forests of pine and endless blue/green crevasses like sunken mountain ranges falling away from our feet.
Ultimately, we will climb to 8100 feet, passing through 87 tunnels and over 37 trestle bridges; track that took nearly a century to complete.
The train stops so we can buy baskets woven from grasses or foot-long pine needles. The Tarahumara women quietly hold them up. The intricate patterns and the resinous pine speak for the silent women in their floral outfits. Babies, wrapped in bright cocoons, cling to hot-pink sweaters and orange shawls.
They too, say nothing, staring without blinking. Homemade sandals protect the women's feet, while the skirts create colourful tents around their muscular legs. Our tiny compartments smell like hot pine.
The Posada Mirador, our hotel for the next two nights, hangs from the side of a cliff. At night we can see far-off fires from tiny Tarahumara homes. The trail beneath our balcony leads to a home nestled into a cave.
It is this close connection to the locals that hooks the guests.
Donna Winchester, from South Carolina summed it up for all on board, "I thought I had just signed on to travel in my own private train to a remote landscape...I had no idea I would feel so educated about the local culture."
Get on board: www.sierramadreexpress.com
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