Mazatlán Moto Week

As the dying echoes of thundering motorcycles fall silent we can all count ourselves lucky that another spectacular show that the Mexicans are so good at organising in that characteristic haphazard way has livened up our expat lives once more.

We can put away our spectator folding chairs, our portable beer insulators, our leather waistcoats, skull and cross bone do-rags and chaps and go back to our lives of folding chairs on the beach and beer insulators and our uniform of baggy vests and shorts to the knees and flip flop shoes and grey ponytails daydreaming that we were the guy riding the Victory bike whilst a glamorous Latina in tight leather was perched on back with her arms wrapped around our jiggling beer belly.

Moto Week and the sound of heavy rock and rumbling exhaust pipes has swept through and out of town for another year along with its cast of characters and clowns and village idiots and female accessory pillion passengers.

We generally think of motorcycle gangs as being like something out of the movie Mad Max 2; roving leather clad unwashed evil sons of bitches terrorising small towns, gang raping women, chain whipping grannies whilst their equally greasy abused female pillion poseurs look on smiling through rotten teeth. However this gang of thousands that tore up the malecón were pussycats by comparison and would rather crash and burn than knock an old lady or even a diminutive Chihuahua over on a pedestrian crossing.

These participants, equally leather clad and in gangs – Los Halcones, Los Dragones, Los Butres del Desierto, MC Vikings, Murcielagos, Moto Brothers all get together on this day and drink cheerfully together, slapping backs, ruffling kiddies hair all conducted in a spirit of jolly bonhomie.

However who knows what happens after they hit the open roads of Sinaloa? Maybe a truce is established for this one-day of the year and the rest of the time they get back to dealing in drugs and weapons and slaughtering one another? But to our worldly trained eyes we feel that most of these guys are dentists, doctors, mechanics and even maybe Seventh Day Adventists who like posing in leather and pretending to treat their women as goods and chattels sitting uncomfortably with their ass in the air on the seat of a large dangerous rumbling hunk of steel and chrome.

We sent our world famous documentary photographer out to mingle and risk his life lying in the path of Harley Davidsons and Victorys to get that icon shot and capture the feel of the day.