I walked an easy five blocks to the car rental agency in Los Mochis, and a few minutes later I was driving a gleaming red VW to the hotel to pick up my stuff. My first objective was to go down to the beach, which is about half an hour from Los Mochis, but I got sidetracked by the offer of birria de borrego at a roadside stand. De-li-cio-sa! The port of Los Mochis is called Topolobampo, and I can vouch that it is the most colorful town I have ever seen. From the distance it looks like an alebrije, with the dragon-like hill covered by houses painted in bright primary colors. On close inspection, the home owners have gone as far as painting the rock foundations with the same bright colors, so there is not a single spot that is not brightly colored.
The bay and coastal lagoons are very scenic, but most of the shore is occupied by the port facilities. If there is a tourist beach I was not able to find it.
What to do next? It was too early to head for Navojoa, so I thought I would go down to El Fuerte, 100 km inland, to try to figure out why so many people had stopped there.
I take back all I implied about El Fuerte as being just a lonely and dusty train station. It is actually a very handsome old town, with freshly painted old homes and a beautiful central park. Lots of quaint hotels and appealing restaurants invite the tourist to sit down in the shade and linger (fortunately the sky is overcast, so it is relatively cool and pleasant to go for a walk). As an added bonus, El Fuerte has a beautiful riverfront a couple of kilometers away from the old downtown, where there are al sorts of opportunities for the locals to go bathe in the Río Fuerte, play in the park, have a picnic, or just walk the dog along the side of the river.
After such a good experience I figured the next stop should be Alamos, Sonora, which I am told was an old town just like El Fuerte and at some time was the capital of the then joined territories of Sinaloa and Sonora. I whipped out my Google Maps and saw that I could take the long way by going back to Los Mochis and using the highway, or by taking a secondary road that skirted the mountains between the two old towns (something like going from Mariposa to Sonora), and which just happened to start at the riverfront.
Ay Dios Mio!
The paved road gave way to a dirt track as soon as it climbed away from the river and turned into the dam of the Miguel Hidalgo Reservoir. Oh boy, are they in trouble. The reservoir is so low, that the intake structures (there are two of them) are standing high and dry, so the little water that remains is inaccessible.
From there I went through nearly 150 km of dirt track, which ranged in quality from bad to terrible. But I was driving a rental car, which by definition is an all-terrain vehicle. It was a lonely terrain that reminded me a bit of the Kalahari in Africa. Very green with a thorny vegetation but little surface water. What water was present formed big puddles in the bad portions of the road, so my gleaming red car soon turned into a lovely Gaia color. I was happily driving along when I remembered that the backroads of Sonora are not the safest place for a strange face; and I had promised myself that I was going to keep away from dangerous situations. But my concerns were groundless, and after 2 hours of hard dirt track driving I entered the Alamos Reserve of the Biosphere, which is dominated by a craggy mountain massif that probably has every living thing ever seen in the state of Sonora. An hour later I reached the town of Alamos, which again surprised me pleasantly by being a handsome old town that is trying hard to make itself appealing to locals and visitors. I stopped here and had some excellent tacos de pescado and tacos de camarón.
My final push brought me to the town of Navojoa, where I found a hotel that will become my center of operations for the next four days. The only bummer is that their internet is down, so I will have to send these messages later, when I get to La Paz.
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