Despite sleeping basically on the road I had a good night. In the chilly morning hours I make it on top of the major climb towards Batopilas and reach the first and only road sign of the whole trip. <--- Batopilas | Urique ---> with quite a few bullet wholes in it. It appears that Mexicans love to shoot on their road signs just like the Americans.

I shoot some pictures with Klaus leaning against the sign instead. To me it's somewhat a famous sign. While accumulating inspiration for this trip over the years, the copper canyons were one of the few places that were put on the map as a "must do" early on. As mentioned before, there are almost no reliable resources on how to travel this place by bicycle. However, there are some fairly adventurous sounding blog posts about it. Most of them featured this road sign.

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The sudden realization that I am not reading this in a blog right now, that it is not a fantasy in my mind, but that I am actually here, I am actually doing this, kind of overwhelms me. Pretty special moment and reminded me a lot of my feelings I had on my very first day of this journey standing in front of the Prudhoe Bay General Store.

Fired up from the excitement I make my way over the hilly plateau on top. It still is a lot of climbing but at least I can ride now. Compared to the big downhill to Urique I reversed the vegetation zones again and am back in a beautiful pine forest. It also provides nice shade and makes for pleasant riding.

As it is a plateau there are some more small farms on top. The indiginous people stay reserved but friendly. The kids in turn come to the road and shout "Dulce, Dulce, Dulce!" [candy]. As much as I would like to give them some, I unfortunately have to confess that I am breaking my number 1 rule of the trip! "Always carry enough candy" got abandoned in the past few weeks in Mexico. Fruit and especially Bananas are so cheap here [and will even get cheaper the more south I get], that I basically decided to "Always carry enough Bananas" for a while instead.

Bananas obviously take more space than candy but since I don't have to carry enormous amounts of food anymore, it works well for me. The kids disagree. Not very impressed by bananas... I am also disappointed since this would feel as a fair trade for taking a picture of them. I don't really take pictures of the people yet as it feels inappropriate. I hope I will get there...

In the afternoon Steve and his family finally catch up with me. To be honest I kept drinking conservatively. After riding [or pushing along] this road and knowing that their Jeep just has broken down yesterday I decided to not fully count on it. When I heard the sound of a car behind me, though, I knew it was them. I simply didn't see a single car yet. Some drinks were handed, some nice chats were had and of they went again. Thanks again, guys and look forward to see you tonight in Batopilas.

I reach my next downhill into the Canyon of Batopilas. I'll loose all the elevation gained yesterday and today again into yet another deep, deep canyon. Long story short, it is a terrible, terrible downhill. Every few minutes I stop to relax my hands and arms realizing that I just came 1km further since I've last stopped. The procedure takes more than 90 minutes until I finally reach the Batopilas River on the canyon floor.

After crossing the river on a rather interesting "bridge" [it is basically a concrete path that goes through the river and the water is flowing over it] I finally reach the "carraterra" the farmer mentioned yesterday. After 10 easy paved kilometers I finally reach Batopilas around sunset. First real adventure in the canyons accomplished!

I check into a beautiful little hotel at the plaza of the town, hotel Juanita, and meet Steve, Maryora and Luna for dinner [and one too many beers! Cheers guys!]