Hot dog, jumping frog...

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The great plains of Kansas turn into Colorado and time slips back an hour to 'Mountain time'. It's all low scrub, tough grass and bush. A tawny collection of browns, yellows and reds as far as the eye can see rolling gently up and down. An occasional icy watery hole breaks the monotony with a few water fowl. A river, all but frozen over runs away under us and crooked off into the distance. A tree, a group of trees and a broken down shack passes as we click, clack and rumble along side a dirt road. Telegraph poles count the meter or our tempo which is steady and slow in the misty light of morning.

There is the odd far house and small town with wooden houses low to the ground. Working trucks and old rusty, broken down ones are parked next to each other in the dirt yards. There are water towers and small areas fenced off one of which contains a child's blue plastic slide it's colour faded by the sun in another a small push bike lies lonely on it's side discarded at the end of yesterdays play.

As quickly as we entered the town we are out again and it's more dusty, dirty brown. A few cattle are dotted around and sometimes trees, small and low gather into a leafless wood before thinning out again into the same old plain, quite and still a place where one could truly feel alone.

The terrain begins to get more lumpy. Strange alien looking hillocks jut up and awkwardly towards the sky. A few miles on and the terrain gradually gets more rocky then mountainous. Ever green trees cover the hills and there are patches of snow on the ground. The landscape has become far more dramatic. There are small towns nestled in between the high rocky hills. We pass rusty cars in yards with basket ball hoops and broken fences. The train goes through the Raton tunnel and into New Mexico.


I'm not sure why I picked Albuquerque as the next stop on our Amtrak train journey across America. If was definitely partly due to the Prefab Sprout song 'King of Rock and Roll' as the chorus rather nonsensically mentions Albuquerque - 'Hot dog, jumping frog, Albuquerque'. My decision to go there was also due to location. On the map it appears to be nestled right in the middle of the Rockies surrounded by mountains. I imagined that you could step from the high street onto a trail and hike up a mountain path, that was not the case I am afraid.

We stay at the Hotel Blue which instigates the repeated playing of Blue Hotel by Chris Isaak in my head whenever I am not focused on something in particular. Our room has a Tempurpedic mattress that moulds to your body creating a feeling that the bed has been custom built just for you. It is very comfortable we feel obliged to try it out for a bit before freshening up and heading into town.

It's Monday night and there is only us and a couple of homeless guys on Central Avenue. One asks us for change the other sits on a corner giggling to himself. It's dark and the mountains seem very far away. We are looking for the Artichoke Cafe as recommended in the Lonely Planet and wander down the street perusing other menus and peering into restaurants at the few other people who have ventured out. We fail to locate Artichoke Cafe due to a numbering system that counts buildings down then back up again when Central Avenue North turns into Central Avenue South. We find an 'All you can eat European buffet' for $6.95 a head. We eat salad with orange and cranberries, sunflower seeds and chickpeas, cheese pasta, lasagna and lentil soup and have rice pudding and tinned peaches for pudding washed down with a fine glass of Merlot. We stop in for a Hookah pipe on the way back to the Hotel.

The bed is blissfully comfortable but our sleep is interrupted by a heater that comes on every thirty minutes even though it is switched off. We get up feeling tired and irritable and I take a long time over looking up bus routes and maps trying to plan our day. It's past one in the afternoon and we are yet to eat when we leave the hotel. We walk for twenty five minutes, stopping for coffee and a toasted Brie sandwich on the way to the Albuquerque museum. We are kean to see the historical exhibits so only glance over some paintings by a Mexican artist on the way through. The first historical exhibit attempts to show the development of Spanish, French and English powers in America from when they first arrived. Although it was very interesting in parts the order of the exhibit was not clear and I found myself skipping from 1600 to 1707 then back to 1608 which became very frustrating. A simple numbering on the exhibits in chronological order with perhaps the addition of arrows indicating where to go next would have made a vast improvement. The second exhibit is the History of Albuquerque and far easier to follow as in winds around a corridor. It's very interesting and detailed up until in stalls at the end of the Civil War there is then a very well preserved red Model-T Ford and the exhibit is over. Did Albuquerque stop developing after the Civil War?

We leave the museum and just outside a couple of young men are being arrested after what looks like a car chase ending in their vehicle being run off the road. We try to find the bus stop into town but cannot, the bus runs every thirty minutes and its a twenty minute walk so we walk. We pass many lawyers offices that look just like houses and bail bonds offices including Amigo Bail Bonds before reaching the County Court where we find the 94 bus stop. During the research I had carried out earlier I found that the 94 bus would take us to Tramway. The Tramway is a two and a half mile cable car up the mountain that provides beautiful views of the surrounding area and is Trip advisors number one thing to do in Albuquerque. The bus hasn't arrived after thirty minutes wait. We head off to find a taxi. It is only once we join the freeway that I begin to wonder how far the Tramway is and after further discussion and clarification we establish that the 94 bus goes to Tramway Street and not the Tramway up the mountain. The meeter ticks over $30 as we leave the Freeway and pass a Casino on the left and a Native American Reserve on the right. We are quite a way out of town now and entering a mountain village, there are many interesting buildings in an Art Deco style along side more traditional wooded houses. We arrive at the Tramway $50 poorer and wander in a little winded by the cost but looking forward to the cable car journey and views from the top. There is a sign over the sales desk informing us that the Tramway has been suspended due to high winds. I look at the sign in disbelief. I stare at it, willing it to change. The attendant tells us that it is unlikely that there will be any service today and that there are no buses back into town but we are welcome to visit the gift shop. We head to the bar for a beer. Sitting at the bar I tell anyone who will listen our unfortunate story of misadventure in the hope that they will be heading back to Albuquerque and offer us a lift. Unfortunately for us they are all locals. We feel stranded and decide to eat at the restaurant before calling a cab and paying another $50 to get back into town.

Back at the hotel I sit on the bed annoyed, disappointed and tired wanting to do nothing but go to sleep.

The next day I get up and head to the laundry. I hold the door open for a woman who is struggling in with her washing 'Thank you, there is some gentlemens left in the world' she says and gives me a gappy toothed smile. I drop four quarters into the machine, sit in a plastic chair and munch on my vegetarian sandwich bought from a cafe down the road. I feel very clam in the launderette, trapped by the time it takes for the wash cycle to complete. I am unable to go anywhere or do anything and feel free from any obligation. I am getting something done, the washing, whilst doing nothing. It's great and I enjoy the simple pleasure of it all a welcome tonic after the frustration of yesterday. A girl with a little heart tattoo by the corner of her left eye walks past, a young man sits across from me with a cap and a scowl. A short, plump, middle aged woman with glasses and mousey hair feeds coins into a dryer and a Hispanic woman in stained T-Shirt and hoody decorated with skulls sips on her can of coke. My washing dried I walk back towards the hotel under a blue sky with the mountains in the distance along dusty streets the scene a pallet of blue, brown and grey.

We check our bags onto the train and wonder into town to by some lunch for the train. There is not a food shop to be found along the high street or off any of it's side roads. Everyone must drive out of town to a supermarket for the groceries. We settle with a half a Subway foot long each and no booze for the eleven hour train journey. We wait another hour for the train before we escape Albuquerque.

We needed a car in Albuquerque and could have hired for for the cost of the taxi journey to the Tramway. I didn't really enjoy my time in this small place. It's funny how first impressions can colour the experience of somewhere. Perhaps if we arrived on a Friday night when Central Avenue was alive and bustling with drinkers, if we had hired a car and been able to travel more widely in the surrounding area, if the Tramway had been running and we were able to take in the magnificent views from the mountain top I would have loved my time in Albuquerque. Unfortunately this was not the case and I was glad to move on.

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Comments

[Ian Kenworthy]

I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.
Greetings from across the pond. Firstly, thanks for the cards, Vernon was really excited and amazed that he got a card that had been delivered on an aeroplane, and the post card made my day even if it did suggest I was dead inside. You were right you had drunkenly agreed to send me stuff, but not a postcard. You were supposed to send me tat. Costing under a pound, displaying the name of the place it was bought in, and utterly useless i.e. no key rings, fridge magnets etc. Remember the heady days of the tat shelf heaving with painted pebbles and freeze dried fish. Now only a few oddments remain the rest having been ruthlessly culled by the nicknack nazi that is my wife. You were supposed to breathe life back into my collection, but no too busy enjoying yourself. Secondly, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, where are the goddam photos? I'm sensing money has become a bit of an issue on your travels. You seem to have compiled an exhaustive list of public transport costs, museum entry fees, and subsistence rates in middle America. It's changed the feel of the blog from 'wish you were here' to 'down and out in London and Paris'. It seems to suit the places you've seen and stayed in and has made absorbing reading. I've really enjoyed the last few entries, and this will confirm your impression of me as being heartless, but I still find it easier to picture you with some tension in your life. Your frustration, and more importantly your need to share your suggestions for improvements to the Albuquerque museum genuinely made me laugh out loud. There does still seem to be an ounce of compassion left in me though as the Tramway fiasco made me wince. I can appreciate that the less you pay the more places you get to see, but your tactic of staying in out of town motels in a society dominated by the car seems to have added an expeditionary element to your travels, and seems a far cry from your time on the boat in the Galapagos. I'm not sure if you watched the Alan Partridge series, but I can't help picturing the episode with him tramping up the side of a dual carriageway to a service station each time you mention venturing out to look for food. The big news over here is it's snowed. The press have had a field day. As you can imagine there has been 'travel chaos', schools closed and public outrage. It started on Sunday night and the BBC ten o'clock news has several reporters in different locations who, one after another, confirmed that it was indeed snowing where they were, and then showed live footage of snow falling. Monday night after London had ground to a standstill questions were asked as to why we couldn't cope with a few inches of snow. We were then treated to a feature on how the people of Moscow dealt with snow including special machines to clean the snow of the roads, cars with snow tyres, and unbelievably screenwash that worked at sub zero temperatures. Some bloke did point out that this happened once every ten years and it made more sense just to put up with a bit of disruption rather than invest millions in the same sort of equipment used in a country that spent most of it's time under snow, but he only got 5 seconds at the end. Keep enjoying the ride. K xxx