Adventure Rides the Rails in the Copper Canyon

The advertisement said simply that a San Pedro travel firm, Bananafish Tours, was offering a four-day train trip over the holidays for $275 a person to the remote Copper Canyon area of Mexico’s Chihuahua state.

Appearing late last summer, the ad was my introduction to a trip that was to highlight some of the questions that arise over what a traveler can or should expect from a low-cost tour.

When some of the 110 persons in the group grew irate later, I found myself sympathizing, on balance, more with the harried tour director than with those who were complaining. While he had made some mistakes, should he have been held responsible when the pipes froze at our destination and the toilets would not work?

Very Low Price

From the first, the price certainly seemed right, far less than the cost of most Copper Canyon tours. Travel would be by privately chartered railroad car attached to regular Mexican trains. Departure and return would be at Mexicali, just across the border from the Imperial Valley.

The $275 included accommodations at a motel in Mexicali the night before the trip began, a bedroom, double occupancy, on the train, and one night in a hotel near Creel, a center of the primitive Tarahumara Indians high in the Sierra Madre.

During the scenically spectacular Copper Canyon section of the 1,700-mile round trip, those on the tour would also have exclusive use of an open gondola car attached to the sleepers.

With its 86 tunnels, 57 bridges and 8,000 feet of elevation gain, the 150-mile Copper Canyon segment is properly billed as North America’s most spectacular standard-gauge train ride.

Tour master Bill Wallace’s brochure, mailed on request, made clear what was not included in his offer, meaning meals. And while Wallace said the tour would provide a free shuttle from a parking lot in Calexico to the Mexicali motel, he specifically noted that it would be up to travelers to pay for their own taxi from the Mexicali railroad station back across the border when the trip was over.

I talked to Wallace before signing up. He was quite explicit that this was not a luxury tour. He mentioned, for example, that the traveler should take food because there would not be diners during some of the segments of the train ride. He was careful, also, to note that it was quite cold in the winter in Creel. He said he would take tour members to one chicken dinner, “the best you ever ate,” at Sufragio in Sinaloa state, but that the dinner would be at the traveler’s expense.

A Genuine Interest

In any event, my 12-year-old son and I enjoyed our tour. We like trains and this was not our first trip. As a tour master, Wallace may not have always had command of the best English, or the best spelling in his daily travel memos, but he proved to have a genuine care for and interest in the Indians we were visiting and a sincere regard for the scenery and country through which we were passing.

Wallace seemed hurt when, on the way back, he tried to give a lecture on the Tarahumaras and the Chihuahua and Pacific Railway through a loudspeaker system he had specially rigged up through his five cars, and hardly anyone stopped talking to listen.

Throughout the trip he took an interest in many passengers, taking my son and many others into the train caboose for special views, often stopping to chat. On one occasion, as night fell in the spectacular deep canyon through which the train was descending, he invited a group to the gondola car and produced a free bottle of champagne to drink in the open air.

Although there was nothing about it in the brochure, on New Year’s Eve Wallace invited everyone to a party for which he provided the refreshments.

So Many Complaints

Why, then, were there so many complaints? As the trip wore on, a number of the passengers felt the tour director was cheap for charging for extras. They resented a 300-peso (33-cent) charge for hot coffee on a siding one morning. They chafed at a 900-peso ($1) charge for tuna fish sandwiches at a stop in the mountains. They were bothered when, after the chicken dinner, they had to pay 500 pesos (55 cents) for the three-mile bus ride back to the train.

Considering that our party of nine at one table were charged 28,000 pesos (about $3 each) for delicious dinners of almost a whole chicken each, tortillas and numerous beers and soft drinks, I didn’t feel we were being treated unfairly.

Still, one person suggested that Wallace would have been far smarter to have tacked $20 onto his tour price, charged $295, and provided the coffee, the sandwiches, the chicken dinner and the bus back to the train free. “I don’t like to be nickeled-and-dimed to death,” the man said.

Had Wallace done this, he would have made a bigger profit. Asked about it, he responded, “I try to keep the basic cost down.”

Braving the Cold

What really caused the trip to go sour for some of the travelers was what occurred when we got to Creel on the second day, several hours late in cold early evening darkness.

Normally, Wallace houses his travelers in two adequate hotels in town. But on this trip he had a far larger complement than normal and some of the overflow had to go to the Copper Canyon Lodge, half an hour out of town but rather close to a scenic waterfall.

I was among those who chose to go to the lodge. It was not until we were packed in two buses, one driven by a youth who appeared to be about 10, that we learned from Wallace’s assistant, Sandy, that the hotel, on a dirt road, was, at night, more than an hour away from Creel, and had no electricity.

Worse was in store. Although each room was fitted with kerosene lamps, and wood-burning stoves had been lit just before our arrival, the hot water for showers was exhausted within the first few minutes. Eventually the water in the rooms, including the toilets, stopped running altogether. The pipes were frozen.

Inadequate Meal

The evening meal served at the hotel, for which everyone was charged the equivalent of $6, was inadequate: two scoops of rice, a tiny portion of meat and a little thin soup. At this distance from the train, no other food was available.

Wallace, the next day, was apologetic. He indicated that he would complain to the Copper Canyon Lodge about conditions there.

In his brochure, and in conversations before the trip, Wallace had clearly stated that the time in Creel for shopping and touring would be relatively short and there would only be a 90-minute tour “to see how the Indians live.”

Many of the tour members, however, blamed him when a visit to a single Tarahumara cave turned up a scruffy group of Indians living amid trash and blatantly seeking a handout. The Indians were within two miles of town, probably far too close to be all that representative of the 50,000-member tribe, which lives for the most part in extremely isolated small hamlets scattered over 200 square miles of mountains and canyons.

Favorite Burritos

A small stand beside the track in Creel provided for 300 pesos (33 cents) each what my son proclaimed the best burritos he had ever eaten.

Wallace was extremely careful to advise tour members throughout the trip what they should eat and what they should not. He gave gallons of fresh water to everyone, and it was a tribute to him that on the entire trip no one became ill.

I heard no one, however, give him any credit for this. Indeed, many of the tour members seemed to naively feel that traveling in Mexico should be just as easy and regular as traveling at home.

The stay in Creel might have gone over better had our train cars arrived as scheduled at 2:30 p.m. rather than at dark. But that was not Wallace’s fault. An Arizona tour operator, who was charging a reported $900 for a similar trip from that state, using fancier railway cars and his own diner, had managed to get his cars attached to the early train on the Copper Canyon segment in place of ours. We were attached to a later train.

Cranky Travelers

By the time we returned to Mexicali, four days of train travel had taken its toll and many of the travelers, including me, were cranky as we arrived about 8 on a Saturday night. Imagine our consternation, then, when we found our keys locked away at the Calexico parking lot, and no attendant in sight.

Wallace had stayed on the other side of the border, tending to his train cars. But by fortunate happenstance, one member of our party knew where the parking lot operator lived. It took about an hour for him to show up to free us. The lot had charged $2 a day.

About half the tour members took advantage of a bus Wallace provided to take them round trip from Los Angeles. For this he charged $30 extra per person.

Some of those returning who were destined for the bus, which was parked just over the frontier in Calexico, were taken by mistake to the parking lot in taxis that Wallace had secured for them. It took almost two hours before the bus driver found them. The bus arrived back in Los Angeles at 3 the following morning.