That afternoon we risked life and limb once again, and rode the bus back to Bahuichivo. That's our railroad car on the siding.

The train was expected at 3pm, but didn't show up until 6pm. The shade of a boxcar and some soft gravel was the best place for some local residents to wait.

Jack, Louisa and Bob monitored the tracks for approaching trains in order to predict who would win the bet: Would the train arrive before or after 6pm?. The Tecate was a critical component of the process. (Thanks to Vicki Hendrix for this photo.)

Luckily, we had Felipe, who kept our air conditioner running throughout the trip.

Once hooked up to the train, we (everyone in our group of 27) assumed the end of our trip was near. Our updated plan was to arrive in El Fuerte by about 10pm, get a good night's sleep, and take off for home on Sunday morning. But it was not to be so easy. Because there's only a single railroad track, we couldn't leave the siding and head down the mountain until the train traveling up the mountain first passed us. And because we were late, we had to wait for not just one train, but two. And neither of those trains could pass us until a fourth train—traveling down the mountain, as we were—pulled in behind us on the siding. So it wasn't until 8pm that we finally left Bahuichivo. We'd already been waiting five hours at the train station.

Banditos!

It was dark, so we couldn't see the spectacular scenery to which we'd been treated on the way up. And it began to rain. Hard. As we approached the point where the major derailment had occurred two days earlier, the train slowed and eventually stopped. We waited while the work trains were moved to allow us to pass. We saw a large wrecker—a crane mounted on a railroad car—that had been used to get the derailed cars off the damaged tracks. In the rain, the scene was illuminated only by the headlights of switch engines and the bright worklights surrounding the area. Onboard our train, many people were sleeping, so things were quiet.

All of a sudden, the Federales who were riding in the public cars in front of us came running through our car with flashlights and their guns drawn. Cessna was able to understand the Spanish on their radios. "They're trying to board from the rear of the train!" There were banditos in the hills, waiting to ambush stopped trains, and it's the job of these armed Federales to keep them from doing so. I had wondered why we had armed police on the trains. Did they shoot people who didn't have valid tickets? As we learned later, the banditos are a constant problem, and they're the reason trains carry armed police, roughly one to a car.

Silly us—we thought we'd finally had all the excitement we were going to have. But banditos? In the Sierra Madre no less.

The Rock

Because it was raining, the train crew was particularly concerned about rockslides, and because it was night, we had to progress down the mountains quite slowly. Given all the twists and turns along our route, they had to be sure they could stop the train within the range of their vision. Of course, we didn't know about this, any more than we knew about the Federales and the banditos until after we had reason to. Eventually, we did have reason.

About a half hour after midnight, the train slowly came to a stop. Quiet, dark, and still raining. We'd been inching our way down the mountain anyway, so the stop seemed uneventful. But we were stopped on a slight curve, and after a few minutes we noticed the headlight of what appeared to be an approaching train engine. Only it wasn't approaching—it was pulling away from us. Then the train crew came through our car with their large flashlights, and covered in raingear. More banditos? No, it wasn't the Federales; it was the crew.

We then learned that a large boulder, the size of a Volkswagen, had fallen down the mountainside and was blocking the tracks. The crew had spotted it, and stopped the train. They had proceeded to disconnect the engine from the rest of the train and to use it to try to push the boulder off the track. After 30 minutes of trying, they were unsuccessful. We then heard rumors that they were looking for volunteers to help push it off the track using tree branches, etc., as levers. Officially, they didn't want passengers on the tracks, but some of us did don our raingear or ad-hoc garbage-bag ponchos, and head out onto the tracks to help or at least see what was happening.

It was impossible to move the boulder, but because it was made of somewhat crumbly rock, the crew decided the only solution was to break it up into smaller pieces that the engine could eventually push off to the side. They had small emergency tools, such as a fire ax, and they went at the boulder, breaking it up piece by piece. Finally, at about 3:00 am, they succeeded in reducing it to a manageable size, and the engine did, indeed, push it off to the side. The engine reconnected to the train, and off we went, down the mountain at a snail's pace.

And where was I during all this excitement? Was I out in the rain, breaking up boulders with a hammer? Certainly not! But not for the reasons you might imagine. It turned out that Cessna must have eaten something earlier in the day that wasn't quite "right," and after having another meal in the dining car, she became violently ill onboard the train. I won't go into details, but visualize the image of her standing in the area between the railroad cars, leaning over the edge, illuminated by the rear headlight of the engine ahead, which was moving slowly back and forth trying to clear the boulder. Then add the rain, and the light striking the raindrops, and you're starting to get a sense of what our evening was like. Cessna said the rain felt good.

Finally, at about 6am, we pulled into the station at El Fuerte, and our car was cut to the siding. The normally four-hour trip from Bahuichivo to El Fuerte had taken us nearly 10 hours. Amazingly, the town's taxis were there waiting to take us back to the Posada del Hidalgo.

Armed Robbery

The airport is located between the railroad station and the town of El Fuerte, so most of us decided to stop by to check on our airplanes and to stash in our airplanes all of the Tarahumara baskets we'd purchased rather than schlep them to the hotel and back again the next morning. A few pilots decided to head home immediately, without so much as a few hours of additional sleep.

It was barely dawn at 6am, and using the our taxies' headlights to illuminate the airplanes created another eerie scene. But one pilot, Tom Combs, couldn't find his airplane. There are frequently one or two Federales armed with machine guns at small airports in Mexico, but on this morning there were more than the usual number. Tom tried to ask them about his airplane, but they didn't answer. Instead they told him something about "the Mayor." Some of them hopped into a truck and disappeared.

A while later, the Federales reappeared, along with the Mayor of El Fuerte. Eventually, Tom was able to get some answers. Here's the description written by Jack McCormick on the Baja Bush Pilot's web site:

Jack had made some rather extraordinary arrangements to secure our airplanes. Each pilot paid the local police $30 plus a $10 tip to guard the airplanes for the five days we were off in the mountains. It was all above board, and we even got signed receipts. There was, of course, speculation that this had been an "inside job." Was it? We'll probably never know, and Tom will most likely never see his airplane again. The Cessna Turbo 210 is the #1 favorite airplane of drug smugglers in Mexico. It's fast and has a large payload. This looked like a well-planned operation, and I think they were specifically looking for a T210. Jack says there was another T210 in the group, but I don't think it was a "T" (turbo) model. It wouldn't have been difficult for them to watch Tom enter the country at Ciudad Obregón (30 minutes away by air), and learn that he was headed to El Fuerte. All the bad guys would have to do is listen to the radio transmissions between Tom and the Ciudad Obregón tower.

The group was tired from our ordeal on the train, but we were upbeat. Now this event cast a very sad shadow over our departure. We also felt a strong sense of togetherness from having shared the events of the past 24 hours. But now one of our own had suffered a real loss, and the enthusiasm changed to sadness and a desire to get home.

Cessna and I learned of all of this when Jack knocked on our door at 7:30am. We'd been asleep for only an hour, and he apologized profusely. He knew we were from the Bay Area and that we probably had plenty of extra space to take a passenger or two. He asked if we wouldn't mind giving Jane a ride back to Livermore, which we were glad to do.

Ground Damage

You're probably thinking—as we were, at the time—that certainly the theft of an airplane would be the end of it. Sadly no; there's more.

One of our group's airplanes—a Baron—had a landing-gear problem on the flight into El Fuerte. Because he had a problem on the way in, the pilot, David Ovenden of Orinda, CA, had planned to take off for the return trip as soon as he arrived at El Fuerte, and head back to California with the landing gear down. He didn't want to risk retracting it and perhaps discovering that he couldn't re-extend it for landing, and there wasn't much chance of finding a qualified mechanic to help him in rural Mexico.

But something else went wrong. As David applied power to start his taxi toward the runway, his Baron suddenly swerved to the right. Before he could stop it, his left wingtip managed to hit two of our group's other airplanes. It broke one window on a Cessna and gouged the cowling from the door up to (but just short of) the prop. The Baron's wingtip struck the cowling and prop of another Cessna. I didn't get a chance to speak with David (he was pretty bummed, as you might imagine), but given that it had rained a lot the day and night before, the field was very muddy. I imagine he might have had to use a lot of power to pull himself out of the mud, and then had his right main gear stick, spinning the airplane towards that side. The Baron has the same landing gear as our Bonanza, but the Baron weighs 1,000 pounds more.

The Cessna pilot with the bent propeller, bent it back (approximately), test-flew the airplane, and declared it safe enough to make it home. The crew of the other Cessna, with the broken small window, filled the hole with dirty laundry, and took off for home. They had to fly low to avoid colder air, but when we caught up with them in Calexico (where we reentered the US, and cleared immigration and customs) they seemed to be doing fine. Unfortunately, the David's Baron sustained too much damage to fly it out as-is, so he was till in El Fuerte when we left. It was generally agreed that some sheet aluminium riveted to the leading edge of his left wing would be sufficient to make it home.

Still at the hotel during all of this, Cessna and I managed to go back to sleep, and got in a good four hours. After refreshing showers and a good breakfast at the hotel, we, along with Jane Chaplin—who would have flown back to the states in Tom Comb's T210—headed for the airport and then took off for home. We stopped in Ciudad Obregón to officially exit Mexico, in Calexico to reenter the US, and dropped off Jane at Livermore. Twenty minutes later, at about 8:30pm on Sunday, July 8, we landed at home, Gnoss Field (Novato, CA).

Epilogue

Although the last 36 hours of the trip included far more excitement than we wanted, in total it was a terrific adventure. Our enthusiasm for travelling in Mexico has been dampened by these final events, but Cessna and I would, probably do it all over again, and we still recommend the trip to anyone considering it. Just remember that travelling in a third-world country is not without its challenges. This was our sixth trip to Mexico, the first to the mainland as opposed to the Baja peninsula. There's always something that goes wrong when flying a small airplane into Mexico, but usually it's nothing more serious than a delay that causes you to spend a night somewhere short of your intended destination.

This trip was the exception to the rule. After many years of leading trips to Mexico and Baja, Jack McCormick of the Baja Bush Pilots Association has never before had one of his groups' airplanes stolen. And I'll bet he never encountered banditos, a major train derailment, or a Volkswagen-sized boulder on the tracks.

I know that what he has encountered is what we, too, encountered on the first six days of our trip. Beautiful scenery, friendly local people, and a chance to make lots of new friends among the other pilots and their passengers. We might take a break to absorb the experiences, but we'll be back for sure.

Doug Kaye
July 2001

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©2001 Doug Kaye