Imagine a whisky-soaked motorcycle ride to Bourbonville, U.S.A. or a snowy voyage to Vodkagrad in Russia. The Jose Cuervo Express is the Mexican equivalent, but this is no mere fantasy.
It sounds like an imbiber’s dream: a tequila-drenched, high-speed ride to a hangover. Could the reality live up to such hedonistic promise? As altruistic as ever in its dedication to investigative journalism, the Reporter set off to find out.
Billed as the only train that actually takes passengers to Tequila, one of Mexico’s fabled pueblo magicos, the Jose Cuervo ride opened only last month. It is a rival to the Tequila Express, which for 14 years has been transporting visitors to the Herradura distillery in nearby Amatitan.
Part of its ongoing efforts to boost tourism in Tequila, Casa Cuervo purchased a locomotive and carriages from the now-defunct Maya Express, which used to circulate the ancient ruins of south-east Mexico. It is only the third passenger train now running in the country, after Herradura’s Tequila Express and the “El Chepe” train that navigates Chihuahua’s majestic Copper Canyon.
The leisurely 60-kilometer journey from Guadalajara to Tequila lasts exactly two hours and the seven-carriage train set off with unnerving punctuality, almost prompting an existentialist crisis: “This is still Mexico isn’t it?”
The train holds up to 395 passengers, but the absence of any gringo tourists was surely a consequence of this being Super Bowl Sunday.
It rumbled along at a gentle pace, passing the immigrants who live beside the railroad tracks and winding through the city outskirts into the rugged Jalisco countryside. Glancing out the windows of the finely furnished cabins revealed the Tequila Volcano and row upon row of the spiky blue agave plants that are so emblematic of the state.
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