Touchdown in Chihuahua airport. Sunrise’s pale glow; dry jagged cliffs; a valley of assembly lines, steel chimneys, turbines, smoky arms reaching into the sky; man-made ugliness; grids of empty lots waiting for something, anything to happen. It had to happen here, in this leaden town, renting automobiles impossible, the freaky black doll with red polka dots, the twisty ancient arcade machine that for five pesos engraves a chihuahua onto a coin. It had to happen here because this was Chihuahua and it was a barren place.

The city itself was just as miserable from the ground as it was from the air, with its faded trademarks, derelict store fronts, boarded-up beauty parlors. For a historic city, the heart of the Mexican revolution and a hotbed of dissent, it seemed hastily constructed. A queue of morose men lined up in front of the bank with grimy hands in their pockets, heads bent low, storm clouds over their heads and stares fixed desolately to the ground, a poster of the Great Depression. Let’s go join the queue.

The car was finally loaded up and our journey began. Our companions on the road were parades of factory trucks carrying tractors and mining machines twice their own weight, awkward walruses with steel arms. Straight roads. You could accelerate to 170 km/h without thinking twice and only gusts of tornado wind would remind you to slow down please. The grass by the highway was beautiful. Thin dry hay turned ashen, silver, ivory and chalk, emerging into green fields of argon trees and orchards of walnuts. Behind the fields rose the valley’s surface like sanded over shark fins. Spring flowers of yellow pinky milk were growing right alongside the road, and sprouting out were thorny stalks with glossy scarlet flowers perched atop. It’s the desert; the prettiest flower has a barbed spine.

Hours later, a left turn to Mata Ortiz. We’ve arrived.

In the middle of the town there’s an abandoned train station painted myrtle and Brunswick green. It’s one of those relics that points to a prosperity long gone, a lonely town on an unfrequented route where train tracks end at infinity and five tragic artisans try to sell their wares by the roadside. The station was wistful; chipped paint revealed layers of faded color; an old net door swung open and closed in the invisible winds and the desert just stared on.

In Mexico you’ll find pockets of cuentos, tales of surrealist magic. A shoe-less young man working in the fields sees a sealed off cave and knows something is inside; he breaks in and discovers two withered bodies entangled and mummified on the ground, surrounding them dozens of clay pots. Not one destined for mundanity, the young man inspires himself from the ancient patterns he sees and teaches himself his own art of ceramics, with time refining his skill so precisely that he gains recognition, pot by pot. His works are being sold in the US, a short leap across the border. They keep coming back for more. They keep paying more. More keep coming. And his business, but I really shouldn’t call it that because it is a true art, is born.

The ceramic vases are perfectly kilned; uniform sheens, shades deep and glossy. Up close, it’s difficult to see where their patterns end and begin as they morph into eagle heads and serpents with gaping mouths and flickering tongues, the designs swirling around the pots and back into themselves in solid chunks of delicate color. And their creator, in a cowboy hat, faded jeans and tucked-in chequered shirt, stands behind them.

That’s the cool thing about the open road – you trust your gut to take you to where you need to be. We wanted to sit and look out at the desert and munch on some chocolates but every stop was not-quite-there-yet give-me-five-minutes, and you’ve got to trust that. So on and on, until a sign turned right for Huella de la Olla and it was back to stony dirt roads through trees. At a certain point, there was a spot to park by the road and we left the car tucked away, rolled under a barbed wire fence and into the vastness beyond it.

Forests have moods; they have patches of character and different masks. The entrance to this wood was a rough outer shell of pinecones and pine trees with gleaming silky points that tickled shimmering in the breeze. The boughs bent and wound around each other, tortured and spiny, the sky overhead thick with branches.

And the questions you ask yourself when you’re away from everything – the curiosity brought on by a simple rock, an etching in the bark, a how-did-this-happen and a smile shared at the silliness and purity of the question. It’s a quest. You want to notice each detail, each surprise of nature, you leave your other body behind. Like little children you run around a field and shout to each other to come look! Your heart picks up on that. It smiles on you and thanks you.

We found a glade in the middle of the forest. We paused in reverence at the mere sight of it. Something was there. It was a circular clearing, the ghost of a stream which now overgrown with the same thin frosted grass as down in the valley, but brighter, thinner, clearer. I was filled with peace. The sun was close to setting and its rays were barely brushing the surface; they left a light coral glow everywhere they touched. A tree trunk had been spun into a corkscrew like a unicorn’s curved horn. All the while the half-cup moon gazed brightly overhead.

Words rarely do justice to these types of moments. You’re in awe, you’re a little scared, strange noises crackle out of nowhere, each step brings you deeper into the soul of something which you’re part of and yet don’t know. It’s a strange, overwhelming feeling, and its closer to the reality of life than most things. We entered a fairytale land only meters away from a barbed fence. What is that?

It pulls you into it, too. It tells you to take one more step, to get closer, to look behind this and that rock and keep going deeper. At a certain point, you begin wonder what force is telling you to keep going and if you should keep listening to it – sirens sing a magnetic song laced with darkness.

Quick hasty steps back to our makeshift basecamp. An unrolled blue sleeping bag, tepid beer bottles and dorsal fin chunks of wood. Silence, closed lids, lungs breathing in the crisp mountain air and again that raw feeling of awe. You talk about how these moments are all to rare, that we forget their essence and therefore our own essence, that we surround ourselves with so much fluff, but once you’re back in it the rest melts away in significance. I’m gazing at the sunset light, now bright deep apricot and clear shades of blue.

A caterpillar rolled up in a sleeping bag. A bright spot in the sky that slowly drops and vanishes into thin air. Its not a star. Its desert magic.