Not a small world after all

Explore, Gulf News, January 11, 2008 [Layout view]

Pictures by Gautam Raja

It was 10pm in Williams, Arizona, and just below freezing. Everything was either closed or closing, and we didn't have a bed for a night. Shivering on the street outside our darkened B&B, we tried again, in vain, to reach the proprietor.

We had planned to leave Los Angeles at noon, since check-in at the Red Garter Bed and Bakery was strictly between 4 and 8pm. After leaving an hour late, we were caught in holiday traffic, crawling in first gear for another hour. We were going to have to drive like the Santa Ana winds to check-in on time, and that we did, with only the briefest of stops along the way. Just after 7pm, after hurtling across California and Arizona for five hours, we realised with surprise we were going to make it with 10 minutes to spare. We decided to call ahead and ask them to wait, just in case.

To our horror, we learned that Arizona is on Mountain Time in winter: it was already past 8pm. "Call when you get in," said the proprietor, on his way home. "You'll be given instructions."

Williams, with a non-tourist population of… oh I don't know, five?, is a two-street town about an hour south of Grand Canyon National Park. The historic Route 66 loops through, trailing a motley collection of restaurants and shops. The Grand Canyon train chuffs out of here, and in winter, the themed "Polar Express" runs most nights, making Williams a lively family stop.

It is also the home of the Red Garter, a restored former saloon and bordello, built in 1897 and said to be haunted. But that night, it was the proprietor who gave up the ghost on us… we finally had to check into a faceless motel with a 24-hour desk, cynically deciding that "full of character" was just a euphemism for "bad service".

We'd made one gaffe with the time zone, but luckily our near-afterthought on Weather.com saved us a second one. Many tourists assume that Arizona doesn't get cold in winter, not realising the Grand Canyon region is at an average elevation of 5,000 feet (the southern rim of the canyon is at 6,850 feet). The temperature on our first morning was -7°C and hovered around 0°C for the rest of the day.

And so, the first thing we did was have a fortifying all-American breakfast at a Route 66 café, after which we accepted the Red Garter's apologies (a problem with phone forwarding). Anyway, all was forgiven when we saw the room, and once checked in, it was time to visit the canyon. One of the first stops is Mather Point, and frankly, unless you plan to hike down into the canyon, other viewing areas offer only minor variations on a theme.

But what a theme it is. The Grand Canyon is, in fact, a collection of hundreds of canyons, and some of these, such as the Abyss, would be wonders of the world all by themselves. But this is Arizona and even that isn't enough, for there's much to see even in the vicinity. Not far from here, for example, are the Sunset Crater Volcano and Wupatki National Monuments. This region was settled by Hopi farmers in the 1100s before the area was devastated by a volcano. Cinder cones are visible everywhere, as well as the tortured shapes of two lava flows. The best way to describe the landscape? NASA used the area to train astronauts for the moon landing.

The drive between Sunset and Wupatki quickly goes from lunar to stellar as a series of pastel bands leading to the horizon come into view: vistas of the famous Painted Desert. It is against this soft banner that the Wupatki park offsets a harsh landscape dotted with the remains of masonry pueblos, or villages. One of these, the Wupatki Pueblo, stood three storeys high in some places, surprisingly sophisticated for a land that looks as if it wouldn't support anything but cactus. But the Hopi people thrived here, and preserve their culture even today.

Travelling south, the plateau gathers itself up and closes in on the descending road. The Oak Creek Canyon is the first of many surprises on the way. Steep, rocky and covered with trees, it is impressive enough to hold its own even to visitors fresh from a trip to its big brother. The road goes down a series of hairpin bends and leads along the valley to the town of Sedona, with its background of enormous red rock formations. The Red Rock State Park is here, but almost any stop allows pictures that scream "Arizona": blazing red rocks against an intensely blue sky, a tribute to the earth's immensity. This is why a visit to the "Grand Canyon State" is a powerful experience; it's a much-needed antidote to a time that keeps insisting we live in a "small world". GR

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