The Copper Canyon Adventure

Days 46-48

These days were spent crossing the infamous Copper Canyon (El Barranca Del Cobre) – a beautiful area which rivals Arizona's Grand Canyon in scale, but is totally lush and even the rocks are green (which is why it was misnamed the Copper Canyon although the rocks are actually green from lichen rather than copper). The vast majority of travellers travel across this area by a famous and picturesque train line, ranked among the top train journeys in the world. However, our Lonely Planet guide said there was a 'new road' through, for 70km of which you would need a 4WD. Reading this to mean there was a new road we decided it was a great way to see the area by bike. Actually what we should have understood, though, was 'there is a new rough track, 70km of which you will need a 4WD, but all of which you will wish you were in a 4WD if you are not'. So our proposed 70km of unpaved road turned into 200km of unpaved road, about 100km of which was very hard work!

Thankfully we'd already decided before we left to break the journey into two days thanks to some local advice but it wasn't until the unpaved road began – the last 30km of the first day – that we realised what we were letting ourselves in for. Having averaged around 15kmph on this section and being about 15 km from our first night's destination we had a choice: return to Creel and take a paved road back round to the coast, adding a few days on to the trip, or continue on with the knowledge that we might have a lot more of this type of road to do the following day! We decided to carry on: we didn't particularly want to go back along the road we'd just done and knew was awful, so the unknown and the promise of spectacular scenery seemed a better choice. Plus, Ric was sort of enjoying it!

Just after we got to our break point for the night, in a quaint little mountain village called Cerocahui, the heavens opened and the rain came flooding down. There was lightening and storms for many hours all around the area and an astonishing amount of water everywhere. Excellent as our timing was to avoid the rain (we also avoided another heavy shower while having lunch that day), we knew the effect on the 'road' for the next day would not be great. We set off at 8.20am in the morning for our mammoth off-road journey - around an hour later than we intended as it took us until that morning to realise the clocks had changed (2 days ago)! On the advice of our hosts we had to decided to lengthen the day slightly to go up to a beautiful viewpoint 20 minutes off our route – definitely worth it, especially as the terrain hadn't been too bad up to that point. But the road got a lot worse as we knew it would – winding steeply up and down canyons the road often looked more like a rocky river bed than something you'd want to drive across, and due to the previous night's rain there were little streams to ford all over the place. The last 90km flattened out into a road made of sand; thankfully our exhaustion forced us to be 'relaxed' – the best way to be on such a surface.

The terrain was as bad and in places worse than anything we'd encountered before, even on our off-road course, but also compared to then we were on bigger bikes, loaded with luggage, with only one off-road tyre each, and with the controls not really in the right positions for standing up! Despite this we managed two exhausting days with only one drop each: Emily on the first day when we got held up going up a steep rocky hill by a very slow truck (speed is the only way to get up such a hill – stalling is bad!), and Ric on the second day when he looked round to check Emily was still with him (awww). No damage was done to the bikes that we couldn't fix with a hammer, and the other damage to Emily's bike from contact with a large rock was easily fixed by bending the brake lever back into place. To make things a bit more challenging for Ric, though, his bike decided to go down to one and a half cylinders for a large part of the toughest section on the second day (and recovered itself later on when things got easier).

Extremely tired, hot, sweaty and dehydrated from spending many hours on the pegs we arrived in El Fuerte at around 5.30pm, having only had around an hour in breaks all day, and found a beautiful lodge for the night. Ric accidentally got them to knock 10% off the price and we're staying here for an extra night to recover, give the bikes some TLC (they took quite a beating, and it's a miraculous feat of German engineering that they still work at all), and sample the local river fish for which the town is famous. For those that are interested, we think we found the cause of the failure on Ric's bike – a loose connection on some spark plug electronics, probably from a sloppy mechanic at the last service point.

It was a great few days, and we did enjoy some really special scenery, but next time we think we might just take the train like all the other tourists!