Hotel Cascada Inn

Clean

The bed was too saggy and the shower had mould in the corners

Central location and good breakfast.

Installations are a bit tired but all right.

Very centrally located. It had a nice restaurant area. The breakfasts were buffet style and offered great value with papaya / melon with yogurt, various kinds of scrambled egg, fried potatoes, chilaquiles, frijoles, bread and sweet buns, coffee, juices etc. Excellent for setting you up for a day’s fun. The rooms were rather basic but perfectly adequate and very clean. The shower was a bit weird, as although you could get the temperature right, it varied continually from strong to weak pressure and back again, but fine really.

The pool didn’t look very attractive, as per the photos in booking.com. The water was a little on the cool side, and rather opaque - it looked a bit unclean but perhaps that was just mineral content? Anyway, we all decided to give it a miss for that reason. As with most of the hotels it seems, there is a tour agent in the lobby. He was friendly as one would expect, however we quickly found that the tours on offer did not give us what we were looking for and in that sense did not represent good value for money. For example, for an all day tour to a local park to see rock formations (Ranas, ongos, elefante) and then on to a lake, the tour guide charged 1850 pesos for 5 people, which on the face of it would not seem unreasonable. However, we explained we had had a bad experience previously where we were “taken for a ride” with a previous tour guide ,and he admitted that it was perfectly possible to walk past all the attractions without the need for a guide. We asked for the guide to drop us off and pick us up at the end of the day instead, for which he reduced the charge to a “very special price” of 900 pesos. We subsequently found that a taxi ride to do exactly the same was 250 pesos return. I wish we had checked that before we committed to the tour. After this experience we decided to work with local taxis instead, using the taxi stand in the square near the train station. We happened across a fabulous guy called Luciano, a genuine Tarahumaran and part of the local community who charged us very reasonable prices for all day tours (more around the 1000 peso mark despite more distant destinations). He seemed to know (or be related to!) many of the people we met along the way and was absolutely outstanding as a guide. We really appreciated his candour, local knowledge, and friendliness. Many thanks, Luciano, for a great two days of excursions.