Planet Kapow 08 : Huajumar to Yepachi

WE LEFT: Huajumar in the morning under light cloud, still excited about going to work on the farm despite the repeated delays. We knew extremely little about it - what work we'd be doing, how remote it was, how many people would be there - but the mystery made it more thrilling, and we were keen to have a new experience and learn some new things. We arrived in Yepachi at about 9:30am, grabbed some quick breakfast, went to the little community centre where a woman unlocked the door to the dusty computer room - looked at our emails and, sure enough, there was one from the farm, explaining that we probably wouldn't be able to get a lift and would instead need to hike out to the farm, some 25km away. The first 8km, the email said, would be easy to hitchhike, as it was along a well-used mining road. The rest we would need to walk.

So we strapped on our backpacks and headed out, down the mining road. In a moment of stunning idiocy, we decided not to take any food and only a litre of water. I don't know what we were thinking - perhaps that we'd pass a small village along the way? - but that's what happened.

In any case, there was certainly no hitchhiking. We saw a few cars pass over those first couple of hours as we puffed our way over the mountains, but they were invariably traveling in the wrong direction. We spent a while trying to determine which was the right turnoff - the email had said there would be rough-looking road off to the right after five miles, but there were several rough-looking roads off to the right after five miles. Eventually a truck stopped and let us know which one it was - "But hurry," he said in Spanish, "there's a storm coming."

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The song on this episode is Dick Dale's epic "Spanish Kiss", which we've been saving especially for an occasion like this.

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Planet Kapow
• Yepachi
• Huajumar
• chihuahua
• mountains
• forest
• mexico
• awesome
• hiking
• backpacking
• wwoofing
• granja
• farm