It was very cold, windy and raining when we woke up on Monday morning. When we walked across the car park to the Big Texan Steak Ranch for breakfast there were patches of black ice on the ground. We chose the breakfast buffet option at the Big Texan and opted for fruit, cereal, and omelettes, pancakes and French toast made to order. While we were eating our breakfast someone else took on the 72 oz steak challenge! To our surprise, he actually managed to finish the steak and sides in a little over fifty minutes, receiving a t-shirt and certificate for his efforts. He did look kinda sick though towards the end – 72 oz is about 2 kgs and there is no bone!
We checked out of the motel, packed up the car and then had to spend twenty minutes in the freezing wind scraping the ice off the car windows. According to the thermostat in the car it was minus 7°C! Finally we got going and headed West on Interstate Highway 40. We stopped briefly at the Cadillac Ranch to take photos of a line of ten vividly spray-painted Cadillacs planted nose-down in a dusty field right next to the highway.
As we drove into New Mexico, we noticed a marked change of scenery. The flat gold empty plains of Texas were replaced by flat-topped mesas, purple rocky outcrops and plains dotted with green scrub. We arrived in Albuquerque with a spectacular range of mountains in the background highlighted by the setting sun.
We checked into our hotel and had a rest before dinner. It was so cold that we didn't want to walk too far for dinner so we ate at the nearby St Clair Winery & Bistro.
On Tuesday morning, we checked out and packed up the car before walking a few blocks in the crisp air to the Golden Crown Panaderia. We enjoyed the faux adobe houses and structures everywhere. They were all painted in various shades of adobe brown and were all low set giving the town a completely different feel and look. The original adobe was a mud brick used by the native Indians which lasted extremely well in the desert conditions.
The Golden Crown Panaderia was run by a character called Pratt Morales who had been in the army and then had been running the bakery for 35 years. The New Mexican bakery goods were outstanding. Every customer got a free biscochito (traditional New Mexican cinnamon and anise cookie).
After breakfast we walked around Old Town admiring the pottery, jewellery, moccasins and native art. There were miniature sculptures of animals and spirits called fetishes carved from different stones, shells and deer horn. There was a lizard carved from serpentine, eagles with folded wings carved from a sea shell, an Indian spirit carved from deer horn, and a tiny animal carved from a striking rainbow coloured rock. There were exceptional hand-made pottery vases and figures glazed with black from manure and ash with designs etched into the glaze. We also saw some great bear shape pottery and a couple of cow skulls with small turquoise pieces stuck all over the forehead and then sealed with lacquer. We resisted temptation and walked away with nothing.
We checked out the San Felipe de Neri church on the plaza which was established by the first Spanish settlers in 1709. We went back to the Golden Crown Panaderia for lunch to try their pizzas with special New Mexican crusts – we tried a Hawaiian pizza with a blue corn crust and a vegetarian pizza with a green chilli crust.
After lunch we headed for Santa Fe on Interstate Highway 40 with a brief stop at a Mormon monument to a battalion which had participated in the Mexican American War. At Santa Fe, we checked into the Villas de Santa Fe which was part of an international group of timeshare properties called Diamond Resorts. We headed out to walk to the supermarket and grabbed some groceries for breakfasts and chicken and salad for dinner so we could eat in like normal people for a change.
We had shredded wheat, banana and blackberries with a cup of Dilmah tea for breakfast on Wednesday. Even having breakfast in makes a nice change. Only a couple of Dilmah tea bags left but they have lasted us pretty well - all the way from South Africa!
After breakfast, we walked into town. It was a cold sunny day and Santa Fe looked fantastic. There were lots of great shops, art galleries, museums, and sculptures around town, all framed by the low set adobe brown buildings. We walked around the main plaza and took a side street where we ran into a theatre which had Norman arch windows, wrought iron grilles and a white dragon design running around the adobe roof. We found an amazing carpet gallery across the road and gawked at the amazing carpets from Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, and Kazakhstan. This place must have had millions of dollars of stock and they were displayed beautifully on walls and floor with light fittings which were also works of art. Suzie bought a purse on sale from Overland. It wasn't quite as cheap as we thought because tax had to be added. It's a real pain – you think that you are getting a really good deal and then you have to add tax (and in restaurants – a tip)!
We walked down to Tomasita's in the old railway station building for lunch. We wanted to try the New Mexico version of Mexican food. We ordered a jumbo plate between the two of us with a side salad. It had a taco, an enchilada, a tamale, red and green chile sauce, a stuffed chilli, beans and Spanish rice. There was also a sopapilla with butter and New Mexican honey for dessert.
We stumbled across Andrea Fisher Fine Pottery gallery which had a collection of incredible hand-made pottery by Indians from the nearby pueblos. Pueblo pottery is typically made from coiled clay and shaped by hand rather than thrown on a potter's wheel. The pots are usually painted and then polished with a stone before being painted with traditional designs. Each of the pueblos had their own particular style. This store had examples of Hopi (colourful designs on terracotta coloured clay), Acoma (brilliant white clay with black geometric designs), and San Ildefonso (black on black, polished on matte designs) pottery. We stopped by the chilli shop and admired the prints of all the different chillis of the world.
After breakfast on Thursday, we did some preparation for our next few legs, reading the Lonely Planet, our large map book and researching on the net. Our next few legs would take us into the southwest corner of Colorado to the cliff dwellings in the Mesa Verde National Park, then into Utah to the Arches National Park, and down to Monument Valley in Arizona on the Navajo tribal nation territory. From there we hoped to go to the Grand Canyon National Park, Sedona and on to Phoenix. We were excited but slightly nervous about the weather at this time of year.
We finished and walked a circuitous route around town to the Visitor's centre. The lady at the Visitor's Centre gave us some information about our first leg to Mesa Verde National Park and a couple of ideas for things to see in Santa Fe.
We walked to the mission next door which was closed. Apparently it was the earliest church in the USA being established in 1610. We walked past the Loreto Chapel to the Basilica Cathedral San Francis of Assisi with beautiful bronze doors and a modern looking interior. There were colourful painted designs in the arches and ceilings, beautiful stained glass windows, and a large marble baptismal font in centre. Back in the Plaza we walked past a lot of Native Americans selling stone jewellery and some pueblo pottery.
We went to The Shed for lunch. We had a chicken enchilada in a blue corn tortilla with red chilli and green chilli sauce (Christmas) and a pork stew served with a cheese enchilada in a blue corn tortilla with red chilli sauce. It was substantially hotter than yesterday's lunch and we both found ourselves sweating at the end. Northern New Mexican food seems to be more chilli-based than its Tex-Mex neighbour. Tex-Mex food seems to have more smoky flavours and tomato based sauces rather than pure chilli-based sauces.
We spent the afternoon walking around town looking for streets that we hadn't seen and soaking up the atmosphere on our last day in Santa Fe.
After breakfast on Friday, we packed up the car and headed north out of Santa Fe to Cortez, Colorado and the Mesa Verde National Park. We drove past a succession of Indian-run casinos (apparently they get tax breaks) and a series of Indian pueblos, some of which looked very run down with dilapidated trailers. Then the landscape changed to large rock buttes in beautiful hues of yellow, orange and red. It was below freezing and the ground was covered in a thick blanket of snow. We drove past a large lake and there were forests of snow covered conifers. We saw a large brown eagle with white head and neck on one of the trees.
We stopped for lunch in the pretty town of Durango. When we got back to our car after lunch we had a parking ticket! Luckily it was only $9. We paid it at the Council cashier a couple of blocks away and then hit the road again.
We stopped briefly at the entrance to the Mesa Verde National Park but there was no one there so we continued on to Cortez where we found a room at the Baymont Inn. We went to the Visitor Centre in town and saw some great photos of the cliff dwellings in the park.
We'd had a really magical day driving through the white snow in the bright sun. It was also a relief to find that the roads were clear and dry even though there was a lot of snow on the ground.
After breakfast on Saturday, we checked out and then drove to the Mesa Verde National Park. It was a cold crisp morning but there was no wind and the roads had been cleared.
Mesa Verde National Park was made up of canyons, mesas, and red rock formations. It was home to the Ancestral Puebloan people who built whole villages around the mesa tops and on ledges, niches and caves in the canyons. Once in the park, we drove straight past all the lookouts to the Chapin Mesa museum because there was a guided tour starting at 10 am.
At Chapin Mesa, we walked along a bitumen path with Ranger Sean Duffy to the nearby Spruce Tree House, the most well preserved of the cliff dwellings. The buildings built under the massive overhang housed 40-50 people in sandstone and mortar apartments up to three stories high. The buildings were beautifully fashioned with the sandstone bricks forming square or round buildings reaching up to the roof and walls of the cave and moulded to fit the shape of the surrounding cave walls. Tree branches or large flat sandstone slabs were used in the lintels over doorways. The exterior and interiors were painted in adobe reds and ochre. There were public spaces and communal areas for grinding corn making the entire area undercover a small village or pueblo. The buildings were three deep with a lot of smoke blackening on the roof of the cave. Doors were very small as the average height of an adult was five feet. We noticed holes in the floor with ladders sticking out. We descended into one of these kivas or ceremonial rooms built underground. It was a round room with a fireplace in the middle and a ventilation shaft opposite with deflector stones set into the ground in front. There was a smaller hole in the ground near the centre of the room which is the sipapu or opening to the underworld. The Puebloans believed that the cosmos was a series of worlds with devils and witchcraft in the lower worlds and light and good life in the upper worlds (sounds familiar).
After the tour of the Spruce Tree House we walked around the museum where they had an excellent video covering aspects of Puebloan history and culture. They also had great displays of stuffed birds, carved stone/bone tools, textiles, painted ceramics, weapons, jewellery and basket weaving including a large snare. Many of the items were in amazingly good condition, probably preserved in the caves.
We drove out along the six mile long Mesa Loop road and stopped at a series of lookouts and excavations of early mesa top pit dwellings and later above ground constructions. Interestingly they all contained the kiva ceremonial room underground construction. The lookouts were extraordinary because you were looking down into the canyon at points where the cliff dwellings were visible along or across the canyon. The largest cliff dwelling was the Cliff Palace housing approximately 150 people.
We stopped at the Sun Temple for a picnic lunch. This was a huge mesa top construction which was never completed. There was also no evidence of habitation. We enjoyed our lunch in the warm sun looking over the miles of golden canyon walls, white snow and green conifers. It was incredibly quiet and peaceful. We drove out of the park slowly stopping at a couple of viewpoints for photos of the snow covered plains below and mountain ranges in the distance.
We drove north on the highway into Utah where we saw some deer searching for grass in the snow. The landscape changed with large brown buttes, towers and walls rising out of the plain. In the setting sun the brown and red colours were magnificent. We reached Moab as it went dark and checked into our hotel.
On Sunday morning we drove out to Arches National Park for the day. The park is home to the world's greatest concentration of natural sandstone arches. It was also full of other amazing red rock formations – fins, spires, pinnacles and rocks balanced precariously on inadequate looking columns. We spent the day in the park driving around stopping at the view points and where possible hiking to view the formations close up.
Our first stop was the Park Avenue viewpoint which was a canyon lined with large red sandstone blocks reminiscent of skyscrapers. We had a short walk around Balanced Rock (a large balancing rock the size of three school buses), and then a more substantial hike around Turret Arch, North Window and South Window. We took our lunch with us on the next hike to Double Arch and while we were eating our lunch we watched icicles breaking off and crashing underneath the arches as they melted in the sun. After lunch we drove further on into the park stopping at the Fiery Furnace Viewpoint - so named because the rock formations look a fiery red in the afternoon sun. At the Devil's Garden Trailhead which was the end of the road, we went on a hike to the Landscape Arch (an improbably long and slender arch) with short side trips to the Navajo Arch and the Partition Arch. These hikes were a little more challenging because the bitumen path ended and we had to follow a primitive trail of compacted and very slippery ice over some boulders. We both fell over on the ice but nothing was hurt except our pride. Our last stop for the day was the Delicate Arch Viewpoint where it was just a short walk along a muddy slushy path to see the lone standing arch in the sunset which has become a symbol of Utah.
We drove out of the park as it got dark and stopped at Pasta Jays where we had garlic bread with artichoke and spinach ravioli with creamy tomato sauce, and Portobello mushroom stuffed with chicken breast, spinach and ricotta on a bed of spaghetti and tomato sauce. Then we went to the supermarket and bought dessert and some supplies for tomorrow's lunch. We weren't sure where we would be staying tomorrow night so we wanted to try to get an early start and maximise our driving time. We were planning to drive in a big loop and end up close to Monument Valley.
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