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Published: December 16th 2006
Horseshoe bend
This is the middle shot of a panorama. I'll stitch it sometime soon...WARNING! It's been a long time since my last entry, so this will be a long one. In fact I'm pretty sure this blog will be the meat and potaters of the road trip: I'm in New Mexico and I have less than two weeks to get across Texas, have Christmas, and then burn up the Mississippi to end up at last in New York - alot of driving, not a lot of tourism. As last time the photos are also on
Photobucket It'll also be a long entry because I have seen and done a huge amount since Vegas, and I have finally parted company with Richard, my dutch travelling companion. I have a bit of time to be a bit more descriptive now...
Starting from Vegas, we woke up late and walked out of Circus Circus through the happytime chiming of the slot machines and the guffawing of the drunk rodeo fans who were still busy playing blackjack. We drove down Industrial Blvd, lined with huge, shiny brass signs saying "employee parking only" - even two blocks off the strip, there's alot of glitz in Vegas! We saw Hoover Dam about an hour out of town. Hard
to photograph, but very impressive. If you can imagine an art-deco hydroelectric dam with polished brass doors everywhere, absolutely spotless and unsympathetically rammed into the red canyon walls.
We set our clock to Arizona time and drove to Williams Arizona, where we had our first experience of drilling every last penny out of the poor bastard behind the counter at the Best Western. $78 became $55 including "the managers' special and AAA rewards" for a 2-bed room including breakfast - not bad!
The next day we went to Grand Canyon. I took alot of photos of this, but it's hardly something you can actually photograph. We went to the Imax movie. The movie provided the catch call for the rest of our tour through the National Parks - "muy grande!!". The grand canyon is as much a spectacle as a great metaphor for the american way as I've seen it in the national parks. You can always drive to within about 400m of the greatest attractions - but the Grand Canyon, you can't do anything. It's too damn big! You can't bridge it, put a road through the middle, build a town at the bottom, I think part
of the reason it's so incredible is that it's almost an affront in a country where land is the one thing no-one seems to be in short supply of.
Across most of the states, whatever you do with a chunk of land, there's still some more around the corner if you muck up this bit, just drive another mile. But the Grand Canyon is just too big and steep. You can't do anything with it but look at it and say "that is one massive hole in the ground. How can we do anything with this???".
We then drove on to Page, Arizona, another motel, and one crazy night out at the local pub, called Gunsmoke. Hefeweizen beer is a bad way to lose a day. We dragged ourselves as far as Bryce Canyon National Park (another best western) and crashed out. We were at about 2,300m and it was COLD - about -7 overnight and snowing.
It was clear in the morning so we got up to Bryce Canyon and took some photos in the morning light. Beautiful place, especially in the snow, but we were sort of jinxed by the weather. There was no-one else
around which was nice, but it was too cold to even think about going for a walk. At the actual canyon, we were closer to 2,700m up.
After Bryce we drove to Zion National Park, also at high elevation and pretty chilly. The scenery outranks Grand Canyon here. It was stunning, almost as vast as Yosemite, but with pink and red walls on every angle. There were alot of deer around too, and again not many people. A picture tells a thousand words...
Then on small town no. 3, Kanab Utah. Not much going on there, though I'm sure it's a nice place when it's not -5.
We woke up, drove to Page where I picked up the Taurus, then headed for Monument Valley. We got a hint from the motel in Kanab that just outside page was a canyon worth seeing. It turned out to be one of the best things we'd seen on the whole trip, a canyon called Horseshoe Bend. As soon as I get my panorama programme working again I'll post the full picture. Anyone who remembers Lucky Luke, or the typecast American Desert, Monument Valley is full of impossibly steep and remote
Buttes standing free in the middle of the high desert. The road has to be another one of the great drives. It's like a moonscape. We got there latish hoping for an intense sunset but the clouds on the horizon didn't play the game our way. We paid our $5 each to the Indians and went for a bit of a hoon around the dirt roads at the foot of the Buttes.
We wound up in another unremarkable town called Cortez. Well, OK, the barbeque chicken at the Homesteader was great. It also had great access to Mesa Verde National Park, the last on our list.
It's up high, about 2,500m on a flat mesa with a series of canyons. Many of the canyons have incredibly well preserved remains of houses built by the puebloen people between 600ad and 1300ad. The built their houses with mud bricks into the canyon walls, sometimes as much as four storeys tall. There are all sorts of theories about where the people disappeared to. There was no sign of war or famine, just vacant houses. Some people even thought aliens took them away. Though it's boring compared to the alien theory, the
puebloen people to the south picked up the architecture of the Mesa Verde dwellers at the time of their "disappearance", and a range of myths about exodus from stripped farmland land appeared in the southern cultures.
The Mesa Verdeans most likely farmed the soil barren, cut down all the trees, and then peacefully left their villages to the elements rather than kill each other in a lolly scramble for the last crumbs - that's the theory I back anyway.
I stayed at another motel that night (this time it was the "econo-lodge") with Richard in Durango, Colorado. Durango is a college town which is also pretty wealthy. We went out and met a few locals at a pub called "el rancho". A guy at the pub had just sold a celebrity's jacket for $2000, and he was feeling generous so we didn't end up buying more than one drink all night. What I learnt in Durango: a jacket once worn by one of the cast of Star Trek can create enough residual value to fund a night at El Rancho for about 8 punters.
The following morning, Richard and I sadly enough had to part ways. I
have to say I've had some great luck with travelling partners. First Stacy as an up-for-it passenger and then Richard with whom everything went SO smoothly. Thanks!
So yesterday, I arrived in Santa Fe, which is the state capitol of New Mexico. 60,000 odd people and about 10 times the area of Wellington. At this stage I ended up putting away my camera, as the nature of the road trip has changed away from National Parks and incredible vistas. I'm now pretty deep in the south-southeast USA about 250 miles above Mexico, and for better or worse, some of the places that I'm now seeing that most deserve a photo would be ruined by the presence of a camera!
The middle of Santa Fe is overidden with wealthy white art dealers and their associated professional hangers-on. The general feeling around the rest of the town was that you wouldn't want to spend too much time in the over-gentrified centre. I hold this view also. I guess the city is quite stratified. In the centre, $25 mains, great coffee, and tourist traps everywhere! Some nice art though... and a good cafe called Aztec which seemed to be the second
home to alot of the actual artists.
The rest of Santa Fe is actually pretty nice. All the buildings are adobe, even the gas stations and the strip malls. I went to one of the malls to see a movie, and the place was all closed when we got out. Everyone in my showing got a ride in a security guard's pickup around the car park to our cars. About a dozen hispanic guys had their lowered out, chromed up rides on the lot doing burnouts and trying to blow up their stereos; American Graffiti!
I dropped my laptop while picking up my bag and wrote off the hard drive last night, so I was forced to replace the drive and have Windows reinstalled this morning. That turned out to be a good thing as it was great to meet a bunch of Santa Fe people my age to hang out with for the morning. I found a cruisy, co-owned IT business just outside central. Sort of a beanbags, IT, sofas and weird posture-promoting chairs type of a place.
Right now I'm in a small town in central New Mexico called Santa Rosa, which sits on Route
66. Billy the Kid's grave is about 50 miles south of here, he's said to have killed 21 men (but they reckon it's actually only 9). The drive here was great. Decrepit roadside billboards, wide open plains with nothing at all anywhere all the way to the horizon and about three other cars in total.
I'm staying at a motel called La Loma, $23.99 a night. It has pink neon lights, a railroad right behind it (the trains shake the whole building), it's motorcycle but not pet friendly, and unbelievably, it has wireless internet. The proprietor (said prow - prai - a - taw) has a pretty impressive drawl; "tips is greatly apreeshiaded, but they aint expected". Big sentence!
I had enchiladas for dinner. The restaurant next door has pink and baby blue formica tables with chrome trim, license plates everywhere from everywhere, a screenprinted cardboard budweiser stand from the 50's and a menu that doubles as a local news rag. I'm repeatedly advised by the neon signs that I am expected to get my kicks on route 66 in this place. I'm not sure any of the other guests were, but make your own assessment: a swaggering
middle aged cowboy with too-tight blue jeans, a massive belt buckle and a ragged stetson, a giggling high school girl's basketball team, a cackling, overweight couple of elderly ladies, and three american indian guys who just finished work and are getting a steak. One other solo guy who looked like a tourist was sitting there awkwardly contemplating his chicken fried steak. The enchiladas were a distant second behind the people watching.
Tomorrow, I'll take 66 through a few ghost towns to Fort Sumner and the fabled grave of Billy the Kid. Then it's on to Texas!
Phew. That was one way to spend an evening! A chocolate fish for anyone who got this far!
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