Entry into Mexico

Sorry about the lack of updates, but as you'll see we've been off the grid for a few days.

As part of our plan, we entered Mexico in the early morning hours of 27-Dec. in Agua Prieta, across from Douglas, and was it cold!!!!

We received more scrutiny from the US Border Patrol than the Mexican Border Guards.  The US guys wanted to know whether we had any drugs, weapons, more than $10,000 in cash and any RPGs.  Of course we had none of that.  The Mexican guard asked Curtis where we were going (he just said Mazatlan) and waived him through.  I couldn't hear what was said, and he asked me the same and I kind of laughed and said "Creel, Batopilas, El Fuerte, Mazatlan, Durango, Zacatecas, Guanajuanto, San Miguel de Allende, Real de Catorce, Saltillo, and finally, out at Eagle Pass, Texas."  He smiled and asked to inspect one of my panniers.  We stopped to take a picture before we hit the long road to Creel:

The road past Auga Prieta was uneventful, but cold.  We went through a few military checkpoints (i.e., soldiers with automatic weapons and some manning crew fed machine guns, but they just waived us through. We did have to stop for a break though (not the cowboy boot over the buried telephone line marker)!

We had to make our first stop for fuel in Janos, Mexico, and just outside Janos we encountered our first detailed inspection of our papers.  Since everything was in order we quickly proceeded to Nuevo Casa Grande where I changed some American dollars to Mexican Pesos to pay Curtis back for acquiring our panniers and we had lunch:

Since we had a lot of road to cover to get to Creel by nightfall we didn't linger.  As we made our way we saw a lot of interesting sights (but didn't have time to stop and take pictures): cowboys on horseback, harvesting and drying of chili peppers, and numerous roadside vendors.

However fast we went, it just seemed like we were running out of light and as we entered San Juanito it was dark and we experienced firsthand the utter reliance this nation has on wood fuel.  It was smoke filled and dark -- literally as if it were out of Dante's Inferno.  At points I thought the eyes of the people walking along the road were going to glow red like the characters in Batman Begins after Ra's al Ghul released the toxin from Gotham's water supply.  It was other worldly.  We decided staying there was out of the question and proceeded on up to Creel, in the cold, dark night, and finally made it around 7:00 pm, cold, beat and ready to call it a day - 13 hours and 400 miles into our adventure!