South West

We left in the morning and headed into Las Cruces for breakfast. They tried to recruit us for the Obama campaign again and then we moved on northwards. For some strange reason they had a border patrol checkpoint in the middle of I-10. We then proceeded up a long straight road which went 70 miles without even one curve. In the small town of Baynard we passed the McCain-Palin straight talk express. I thought we should have stopped as we may have missed a chance to meet one of the candidates (Later on we checked their schedules and it wasn't McCain. it could still have been Palin though). We travelled along route 15 to the Gila Cliff Dwellings. Now I was under the impression that this was where we would find the fabled Gila Monster lizards. It turned out to be the longest 45 mile road ever as it was full of 'tree works ahead' and was so winding with only the one lane the whole way. it took us between 2-3 hours to make the length of the road as it was dangerous to take it at any kind of speed. At the end of this odyssey we took a one mile hike up to the ancient cliff dwellings that noone could really account for. It made for a pleasant walk and a cool experience as we got chatting with a couple of rangers. The first one gave us some tips on stuff we needed to see in New Mexico. We ascended the cliff side and the second guy gave us the ranger's best guesses on what actually happened here. It seems noone really knows what these rock dwellings were really for, but boy were they going to guess randomly anyway. At one point you can descend a dodgy wooden ladder down the side of the cliff and the fact I achieved this feat convinced me that maybe my vertigo was fading. At the end of this we headed back down the windy road, only to be caught and passed by a mental UPS driver. He was taking this road at about twice the speed of any sane man and boy do they take some serious risks to deliver their promises on delivery times. It was insane, sort of like watching Colin McCrae deliver parcels for people. Further on down the road we ended up in a face off with a Bull and his cows. That resulted in some rather rural waiting as we weren't willing to take him on. New Mexico has some very pretty scenery but it is rather arid and being the lover of green, mountains and water it didn't quite suit my tastes. We stopped off in Emory Pass and because these roads were so bloody sloe wna windy we ended up getting to Alburquerque really late. With time constraints an issue (The Santa Fe hostel would not allow guests to check in after 11pm), we got dinner in Frontiers on historic route 66 before blazing north. After much driving back and forth we eventually found the hostel at 10.55pm and checked in. We were informed that we would have to pay 10 dollars extra to avoid having to do the chores in the hostel. Being the gypos that I am, we elected to do the chores and would have fun in the morning working out what they would be. Then we died from lack of sleep.



We awoke in the morning and headed down to choose our chores. Ollie opted for cleaning a shower and was done relatively quickly. I picked up a card (the chores are on cards so you can choose which one you want to take on) which had sweeping a hallway as an option. Seemed easy enough, but then the woman on the hostel informed me that card had been laid out in error and I could have this other one instead. This other one involved sweeping and mopping all the social rooms and cleaning the front map. I felt this was a shit swap and the chore took me a reasonable amount of time. On the plus side the rooms are good, the buildings are adobe style and internet is two dollars for the whole day. We headed into town and paid the speeding fine. It was at this point my mum called me and informed me that I had been defrauding the UK government for four years. Not your everyday occurance. Apparently I had been operating on the wrong national insurance number for this time period and so they required details of everywhere I had worked before they could consider refunding me the 890 quid they owed me. I had been a student for some of this time and virtually all my work was declared to the tax office as somebody. I just don't know who. Bugger. Its difficult enough dealing with the arseholes at the tax office when you are in the UK. It was going to be impossible while travelling. They wanted me to sign a declaratory letter, even though the idiots knew I had emigrated. I had luckily left some blank bits of paper with my signature at home for this occassion but noone in my family was happy forging my signature. I suppose I will have to wait and see how quickly I get my tax, whether I owe them any more than I think I do and whether they are competent enough to sort it out. Can't get too angry when I have been the one working illegally, but it was a frustrating turn of events. AIB eventually got round to selling my shares as well and due to their immense efficiency they had managed to sell them at the base of the market and got me a whole 13 quid. Back in actual Santa Fe we headed to the cathedral and around a really posh hotel. The town is really pretty and the Adobe architecture makes it look very different to every other town in the States. The Georgia O'Keefe museum was sadly shut (she is my favourite modern artist). We managed to pick up some lunch from a really cool chicken vendor in the square who had been featured in a documentary by The Two Fat Ladies. After this busy morning we decided to head out to the 10,000 waves Japanese water baths.



Only it turned out it is a spa. Neither of us had ever been to a spa before and were not exactly sure what to expect. We wandered in, paid our $20 and headed upstairs to the random public pools that were full of naked old men. One of them looked like the Austrian guy who locked his daughter up in his basement and another was a fat naked man with a weird belly button thing. Everyone was at least slightly odd. The open air pools were really cool however. They had a sauna set to 90 odd degrees, a cold plunge pool set to 28 and a jacuzzi pool, as well as a cold water shower. We moved cyclically between these pools and came out feeling incredibly cleansed and with great feeling skin. At the end we even got some refreshing cucumber water. It was an odd experience, but besides the weird naked old men it was really beneficial for our health. Afterwards we drove down to borders where Ollie experienced his first Quiznos Sub and then we illegally took pictures of maps from the Indonesian Lonely Planet. Ollie had just found out that the flight he had been sold by STA travel from Bali to Singapore did not exist and he had to find an alternative route (I suggested overland through Borneo after a stop off at Komodo). We managed to listen to some 'underground' God music on the radio. Surely that is just a euphemism for the music of the devil. We headed off into town for some quiet drinks and stupidly I had opted to wear all white. I had to suffer one stupid bint taking the piss because she thought I was a gym instructor and then Ollie picked an underground rock bar for us to sit in with my all white clothes. Needless to say I stood out a little in that bar and noone was willing to chat with the odd 'gym instructor' and his 'buddy'. The place played really cool music like Fine Young Cannibals and some early 90s hip hop. (Totally out of context but I just remembered somewhere in South Carolina there was a preacher with a notice telling his congragation to come and watch him walk on water. So watch that space). The Bell Tower bar shut at 8pm so we sadly didnt' manage to get a rooftop drinking session in. We shot some pool and on the way back were battered with some sprinkler systems that we had to run the gauntlet on. Obama was doing a rally the next day in Northern New Mexico, but sadly it was sold out so that cut our options down.



The next day we were up and doing chores again. I opted to clean a toilet, because it seemed faster than doing all the recycling or emptying every bin. Ollie took the option of cleaning our room which counts apparently as a cleaning task. I think I was coming off with the short end of the stick in these deals. Just as we were leaving some old man accosted us and proceeded to ask where we were headed. We gave him the skeleton itinerary and he proceeded to take it apart as being completely unfeasible. Despite being annoying and wasting some of the time we had to complete our 'impossible' itinerary, he did leave us with some interesting information. He let us know that the original route 66 before 1937 had actually passed through Santa Fe. The governor of New Mexico at the time was from Alburquerque and he had been hassled by the Santa Fe leaders during his governership. In order to spite them he decided to build a freeway to cut off that part of the loop and Santa Fe was removed from route 66. So we had actually driven along new route 66, old route 66 and also pre-1937 route 66. Eventually escpaing the old man's useful anecdotes and pointless wind, we set off up towards Taos. It was at this point we realised the additional sprint up to Canada was going to leave us very tight for time and reliant upon some very fast movement between all our destinations. The road up to Taos was very picturesque as we swooped in and out of mountainous desert like scenery. As we descended out of the mountains we saw a sign for a runaway truck lane. They had appeared all over America and left you feeling a sense of unease at truck drivers inability to keep their vehicles on the road. Perhaps at some point we would be faced with a Duel style scenario where a raging truck descended onto the rear of our little Toyota Highlander.

We arrived in Taos and headed for the Taos Pueblo, which is the oldest continuously occupied dwelling in North America. It costs a lot to enter and you have to pay seperately for photos. Ollie chose to ignore this and snap away inside the dwelling regardless. It was interesting to wander around the buildings, but sadly their primary focus nowadays appeared to be to sell whatever they could to as many tourists as possible. I can't imagine in its ancient functional status there was quite so much of a demand for 1/3 of the villagers to make easily transportable sized jewelry and pottery. Without the time to do the Taos scenic drive the Michelin road map implored us to do, we left Taos to the north west and headed up to the bridge over the Rio Grande gorge. This is a breathtakingly beautiful scenic bridge, towering over a gorgeous gorge. The river cut like a slither between the great cliffs and you can get a much greater view from over the middle of this gorge than you can from the Grand Canyon, because you can literally get right on top of it. Beyond the bridge is the area that is home to the Earthships. These strange pod like structures that jut out of the landscape like organic world war two shelters are constructed entirely from recyclable materials and are fully functioning off of the main national grid. As we drove through this weird urban landscape I was thumbing through the USA today. They had a feature on a housing estate that had been built on top of an old bomb range. They had had to disarm 200 munitions in the last year including one that was under the long jump landing pit. That would have made for an explosive athletics day, but seriously who decides to built housing projects on that kind of terrain. I am certain that their housing prices will be suffering even more than the rest of the country in this slump.

We rolled out of New Mexico through a mountain pass and headed into Colorado for the first time. As we pulled around the corner the barren and dying landscape gave way to a mountainous valley of greens, trees and rivers. It was like that bit in Land Before Time when the dinosaurs descend into the Great Valley. Colorado is a state all to itself in terms of beauty and it would continue to draw gasps of wanderment long after other areas would inspire scenic overload. We made it to Durango (a small former mining town in the mountains, that had now become a funky ski retreat and the starting point for the mountain railway to Silverton). We had originally planned to head to Silverton, as it is apparently a really cool one road town in the mountains and has some excellent 4wd'ing that we wanted to put the Highlander through. Again we were short of time and had to push on towards Monument Valley for dusk. Having stopped briefly in Cortez for petrol and been stuck in a queue with an apparent ZZ top convention we realised we were running low on time. We began to hurtle down the freeway, the sun dropping ominously on our right, until we ran smack into a traffic jam. It did not appear to be one of those random American jams where everyone is forced to slow to 15mph for roadworks (a speed that the speedometer does not even register). Everyone was milling out of their vehicles so we got out to see what the fuss was about. Walking round the car we saw a really long truck stuck horizontally in the road, with the cab slightly in a ditch and the end sticking across the road. We tried to work out what happened. Maybe he'd skidded (but the back wouldn't have slid out so far), could he have tried to avoid an accident (the angle was too weird) or had he tried a U-turn (could this idiot be so moronic as to try to U-turn a huge truck on a four lane road). Ollie reckoned no, but we concluded that was the only excuse for this moron's predicament. I can't drive and I could see he could not have made that turn. Fucking idiot from 'Knight Transportation' (name and shame) cost us our sunset. As the only alternative route was not really an alternative, we sat and waited for a rescue truck to hoist his cab out of the ditch. We motored past and arrived just too late for four corners. This is an area of land that borders Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. So you can stand with one limb in each state and is the only place in the US where four boundaries come together. On the way along we hit some sort of giant insect and as we had just been discussing Cheney, we wondered if it was him out on one of his night flights. Needing a piss but having nowhere to go, we pulled to the side and had a slash while the hazard lights were on. It was a weird experience having a piss in strobe lighting. Now I know what that weird muscley dude in 'I Love Techno' must have felt like when he had a slash in the corner of the dance tent in Belgium. We arrived in Monument Valley too late to camp, as we could not find the campsite and ended up staying in Goosenecks State Park campsite just north of Mexican Hat. It was free, so we couldn't complain and there was a bus of schoolkids discussing their college choices. We pitched a tent on the edge of a massive ravine and packed in for the night.

The next morning we awoke early and set off for Monument Valley to catch the sunrise. It was a beautiful vista as the sun rose above the monuments, but I was dying from the wind so headed back to the car while Ollie tried to get a good shot. We had managed to get in and out before the park rangers arrived and so we did not pay. You can do ranger led horseback rides into the Valley, but again we were short on time. This would prove to be the biggest difficulty with our expanded Western route. We grabbed some breakfast at Tuba City and headed on to the Grand Canyon. Now the Grand Canyon is fairly spectacular, but has been ruined by the large number of photographs you have seen of the place. It is hard to be too awed with a place you have seen many times before and through the photography of a man who handles his lense better than we handle our eyelids. It looked so dull and lifeless. Impressively grand, but at the same time impersonal because of it. Where was the green. Where was the life. Where was the intimacy. It felt like you could get close to the edge, but not really get a feel for it. Still it was well worth the visit and there had been some bikers saying how Zion was more impressive. I was getting more excited for Zion by the day.

Leaving the Grand Canyon we took the largest surviving original section of route 66 between Seligman and Kingman. It proved to be a very long and boring road (how I imagined the rest of the Route would be). Ollie defended it as the great road trip and I read the Lonely Planet's route 66 sections as my defence that it would be dull and gimmicky. Now Ollie loves the gimmicky, so that wasn't going to wash and it was difficult to assert that it would be dull because I had not been. I did however find about 5 freeways that actually crossed all of America from east to west (not half of it like Route 66) that looked like they would pass more interesting places than the dustbowl towns on that antiquated route. On the way into Vegas there was a police checkpoint (Again I don't know why they have these places internally, but Ollie reckons it is to protect the Hoover Dam from terrorists). The Hoover Dam is an impressive feat of engineering and there was a very pretty blue lake that had been produced from damming the Colorado. They had also begun to build one of those typically insane American engineering projects. It appeared they were building a freeway over the top of the dam to allow trucks, that currently can't cross, to take the shorter route into Vegas. As we made our way to our hotel we passed a van made into a ghetto blaster and we realised then that it was 'Welcome to Vegas, baby' (Ollie was excited, I was luke warm at best).

Now Vegas lacks the glitz and the glam that you would associate with the place. Somehow I expected everything on the strip to be so much bigger and so much more larger than life. Another trick of the lens I imagine. It was also a lot less seedy than I had expected, but I think that is because America is traditionally more conservative than Europe. What they see as seedy would be tame in places like Amsterdam and Prague. Although to give it its due, it is only the second place I have seen with good looking prostitutes (the other being Madrid). The ones in Paris would have to pay you a lot of money themselves as you see them decrepit as I cycled south from Gare du Nord. Overall we went to 13 casios on the first night. I became a tiny bit addicted to the Blackjack machines and went on a marathon to see all of the casinos. I was up on the first three casinos and having never been beaten by one I figured this was easy. Then I lost money by accidentally pressing bet all, chased it with more money in anger and suddenly this game was not so fun anymore. Originally we had started off betting small and I was about $60 down. Then Ollie suggested with the odds you may as well bet maximum each time, so I started playing for $20 a hand. My luck swung dramatically and from $60 down I ended up leaving about $30 up. If you take into account all your drinks are free, Vegas was effectively paying me to have a night out. Ollie's luck was nowhere near as good and I think he was getting sick of losing $20 in one bet, while I was watching my money rocket. Overall I beat the Sahara, Circus Circus, Wynn (the new multi billion casino), Casers Palace, Bellagios, Paris, MGM and the Mandalay. I tied with Treasure Island and lost to Excalibvur, Mirage, the Venetian and the Palazzo. Not bad. I had still never had a night of gambling end in a loss (I love my luck). Some woman won $2000 next to us on Poker in the Palazzo which was cool for her. They had new virtual blackjack machines, but playing at the tables was more fun. Chip bets were often a little too high though and a lot of people were badly cained in the money and from the drink. We watched the Sirens Cove Pirate Show which was not bad and you can tell the variations of clients. The Wynn has stunning people wandering through the artificial internal gardens past the Ferrari show, where you have to own one to get in at a reasonable price. Its a decadent town, but at the same time you have some casinos that have a distinctive Butlins feel about them. Full of old grannies and down and outers. One thing you quickly notice though is how every casino is identical inside from the decor to the machines. The outside may wow you, with the Venetian's full scale Venice replicas impressive and the Bellagios large lake immensely pretty, but the insides are just efficient money strippers. The exception being Paris (possibly the best of them) where they have created an articially blue sky effect inside that makes you feel as if you are outdoors in the day. It fooled me initially even though I knew it was night outside. Thats how good it is or how stupid I am. The barmaids were also depressingly despondent as well. Older, but generously proportioned I posited to Ollie that they are most likely older strippers no longer able to profit from their primary job and discarded into the trash heap of offering free drinks for meager tips. Reminded me of LA a bit. Still the city was fun for what it was and I enjoyed both nights we had here. I think Ollie was more disappointed as he had come in with higher expectations than I had.

The next afternoon when we got up, we drove out to Death Valley for the day. It was very hot down there and at one point we were concerned that we were going to tun out of petrol again. We really needed to sort this out given the number of times it had almost happened to us. We hiked up Zabriskie point to get a good view of the utter barrenness of the surrounding landscapes. It was an impressive vista of nothingness. As foreboding as it was barren. We descended down to Badwater (The lowest point in North America and the site of the Badwater Ultrmarathon, an insane 200 odd mile run through the desert). It was cool to walk out on the salt plains at the bottom of this barren land and there were even small pool of water that had risen from beneath the surface. For some reason this salt plain was like a catwalk as well. There was a remarkable number of good looking people wandering this barren plain. Probably more than in some towns we had passed through. On our way out we passed a sign saying 'danger of flooding' and figured the Yankee caution had even gone too far in an area where it almost never rains. We took the shortcut back to Vegas through a town called Pahrump, which appeared to only have one tourist attraction. Albeit it was a brothel museum, but then again perhaps that was just a front. We hit the town again that evening, but Ollie had got sick of gambling and I didn't want to spent too much as we had an early drive the next day. I smashed Sahara again, turning $6 into $70 and came out on top again. This casino lark was getting easy. Ollie headed up Stratosphere but I didn't want to spend any more money. I ended up leaving Vegas with more money than I entered it with, minus the petrol to Death Valley. Back in the hotel I turned on the TV to get a hilarious spoof of Barrack Obama on Fox's Mad TV. At first it did breaking coverage that Obama is not really an optimist. It had a scene where someone offered him coffee and he said ok as his glass was half empty. They then ran a diagnostic piss take like CSI that showed the glass was actually 52% full and so he had lied and been pessimistic. They then ran a skit on him not really wanting change. This had him going to pay for the coffee. The woman said 'what about your quarter'. He said 'keep the change' and she replied 'you don't want change'. The final one had them saying Obama had had an affair. It said all throughout December to April he had been spotted with a mysterious woman and whatever state he was in, so was she. Obviously they were spoofing the Clinton-Obama race but it was funny none-the-less. Apologies to anyone reading who doesn't care or doesn't follow politics. Ollie came back a little later complaining that he'd just bought a shitty super strength beer that they handed to him in a brown paper bag. Ah good to see every country still has wino drinks.

We set off early in the morning for Zion National Park. Any description I give it will be inadequate and my advice is to not look at any photos. Just go. Like a green valley running through a cliff desert it is sensational. You can see how it earned its name. We parked up (you can't take your car in as it ruins the local system and took the shuttle bus out to a walk that climbed the cliff edges ever higher to three Emerald pools in the rock. It was a good hike and at the highest pool there were a group of Christians (I suspected Mormons as we were in Utah) who were jumping and playing around the rocks. I left Ollie at the top and descended with them, listening to them discuss the last few sermons at the end of the season. I was unaware that Christianity had seasons. Do they have off season trades as well. As I descended down I realised I had gone to the wrong ground station (thought it seemed a long walk) and had to take a bus back over to meet Ollie and get some food. We then took the bus down to the end and here is a really cool river snaking through an ever narrowing canyon that you can wade or canyon up. Originally I set off in just my socks, but my feet were cut up so we switched to shoes knowing they would get destroyed. It was un wading about a couple of miles through knee deep water as you explore deeper into the canyon. We did not have enough time to make the end, but if you have a day I would advise doing that as its so much fun. Having made it back we excited up the canyon walls through a tunnel while I cut my toe nails out of the car window. We pushed on out of Zion (having stayed there longer than we anticipated) and sprinted for Bryce Canyon before dark. The sign when we got there said 'moderate risk of fire', but a bit further along the pathway we saw one saying 'forest on fire, please remain in vehicles'. We drove one past this forest fire, which was not too large and saw the sunset from the final landing. Bryce is like a jagged teeth of a canyon and quite impressive, though not as cool as Zion. On our way out Ollie was still speeding as we wanted to get to Moab (we would miss it and Dead Horse Point due to time) and when he realised someone was tailgating him he pulled over to let them through. Then on came the sirens. It was a park ranger and we had been done for doing 60 in a 35. Another court date loomed it seemed. Only Officer Jackson was a pleasant kind of guy and informed us you have to be doing 30mph over the limit in Utah to end up in court. So we could expect a fine. Only Officer Jackson also decided to let us off with just a warning and a stern rebuke as we could have killed a deer. Breathing a huge sigh of relief we shot off across Utah. We would pass the Big Roick Candy Mountain (which we could not see in the dark, but presumed was the same one from O Brother Where Art Thou fame, which I thought was cool). We found some goddamn spearmint altoids (all was well) and ended up walking into a Wendys drive thru because we were too lazy to go and get the car, almost getting run over by a huge monster truck thing. That night we camped up in Green River. In the morning I was up early and restless. Being the cock I can be when tired I proceeded to strip the tent while Ollie was still in it as he wasn't getting up. Not the smartest of my decisions and it didn't endear me to him that morning. The pace we were running was beginning to tell and we managed to sneak out eventually without paying and it was off into the Rockies. The next ten days were all originally not in the trip plans.