A three-hour hike and a beautiful canyon – La Barranca de Huentitan – lie just on the edge of the city—if you can brave the rocky incline.
We took the 66 bus up Belisario Dominguez, my friend and I clattering our way along the spindly hair of a street in the back of a lumbering, bilious steel oaf. The late morning sun melted through the windows of the sticky transport. The handful of sleepy patrons on that side shifted a little. Hundreds of squat, unmemorable buildings crawled by both rows of scenery—crayons rolling slowly down a belt.
On the other side of the Periferico, the sky yawned. We were drawing close—the street maybe just wider, the trees maybe just taller, the houses maybe just emptier. At the end of the line our metal carriage coughed us out. Vendors hawked to the left of the street. Decrepit shops not more than garage ports with a few display cases advertised necessities for the hiker: a few abarotes with their color-filled plastic packets, a dim sportswear shop with hasty, crooked exhibits of track pants and t-shirts. On the right, a row of buses, resting, beasts of burden catching a moment to chatter amongst themselves before venturing back out on their solitary slogs through the streets, soaking up the unfocused and resigned frustrations of a city. Beyond those a bit, an old fence, old broken car carcasses.
This is the Mexico that gringos picture, holding blankets close around their shoulders and gazing over hermetic living rooms. Dirty Mexico. Poor Mexico. Where the pavement ends. The dirt road running into a wild frontier of western vistas. Here, the Barranca de Huentitan was just the place to vindicate those suspicions.
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