The Mazatlan Malecon from radio tower hill

Fred chatting with youngsters on the malecon.
Fred was easy with children. He was on his way to a graduate degree in education.
Beyond is the radio tower hill, from which we later took photos of the city.

The Malecon (waterside walk) in Mazatlan

The only high-rise was unfinished.

Camp on the beach at Mazatlan. Keys in the trunk. Radio tower hill in the
background. Cathedral towers near the center. This great beach had nothing on it.
The "Gerry Cans," from army surplus, were to carry drinking water
that we begged from Pepsi bottling plants along the way, a reliable source
of distilled water. We were not free from dysentery, but it came from another
source we soon found here in Mazatlan.

A toddler in the village

We are heading south toward Culiacan. The highway is still dirt.

We go by a village of pilapas.

Sugar cane fields plowed under outside of Los Mochis.

Dr. Chapman has dropped us off to get on our way, and heads out for more fishing in the Sea of Cortes.

Dr. Avendaro clears hooks. He was an associate in Dr. Chapman's clinic.

Topolobampo seen from Dr. Chapman's boat

The cannery in Topolobampo, owned by former President Miguel Aleman.
Nothing else was happening here, but the one business was owned
by the last President. The railroad ended here so the shrimp
could easily be shipped north.

Dr. Chapman on his boat in Topolobampo.
He had lived here since the twenties. I told him I had seen red-headed Mexicans in the towns between Guaymas and Los Mochis. He said that they were the descendents of an Irish priest who came to Mexico to preach in the mountains to the east that separate the state of Chihuahua from Sonora and Sinaloa. The priest’s offspring were a western diaspora.

I have seen upscale bars named Topolobampo in America.
Perhaps it is a stylish place now. It was a tiny poor village of fisher people then.

Next morning, Dr. Chapman invited us fishing on his boat, which he kept in the
nearby fishing village of Topolobampo. Being well rested,
we could leave bright and early.

Roger with Mr. Hympleton, United Sugar Factory, Los Mochis. Like some other
Americans whose companies were nationalized, his family stayed to run the mill for the new owners. He told us of a Dr. Chapman who came down with the Southern Pacific Railroad to open a clinic and had also stayed on after Mexico nationalized the railroad. Perhaps he introduced us. Dr. Chapman said we could spend the night in his clinic, since it was not busy then. We did. We spent the night on hospital beds. Nice Mexican nurses kept sticking their heads in to ask if we needed anything. The doctor had probably told them to take care of the boys. We were too naive to know what they meant. We slept a quiet night.

The sugar mill at Los Mochis, said to be the biggest on that coast. And the 1948 Frazer. Not the brightest choice. No one in Mexico had parts for it when it broke down. But the Mexican mechanics were as ingenious as Cuban mechanics fifty years later. They kept it running. I recall the car as a Frazer. Fred recalls it as a Kaiser. It was his car, but I still say Frazer. A slab-sided Frazer, famous in its day.

A drink stand in Los Mochis, a sugar mill town developed by an American from Virginia named Johnston, who built a mill here in the 1920s. The mill had been nationalized after the Mexican revolution, like the railroad that served it. The line ran through the Copper Canyon to El Paso.

We camped off the highway in cots by our car, usually in the dark. In the morning we sometimes found ourselves near people and their animals or homes. (There are homes to the left and right above.) Most steered clear of us; a few came by to sell us goats’ milk for our coffee and cereal. I developed a taste for goats’ milk, rich and salty, probably from the salt brush the goats ate.

The ferry at Rio del Fuerte could take just two vehicles at a time,
and followed a cable across the river.

The west coast highway: unpaved.
We felt anxious as darkness fell, since we knew there were rivers to cross
with no bridges yet completed. These western states of Mexico north of Nayarit were mostly undeveloped and unvisited, and the west coast highway was planned to change that.

A village of shacks on the highway to Los Mochis from Guaymas.
Clouds hang over the Sierra Madre Occidental