Into the Heart of New Mexico

We did a bit of a loop south and back to Tucson in the hope of finding some birds at what were described in Lonely Planet as good birding spots which weren’t.  One was at a lake with an attached lightly wooded campground.  Now those of you who are not familiar with English Caravan Club sites need to be informed that most of them have warning notices about the dangers of rabbit holes.  The aforementioned campground next to lake went a little further, warning that a Mountain Lion had been seen in the campground and a rabid Skunk was on the loose in the vicinity plus some ‘Africanised’ Bees.  These are the so-called killer bees which are rather aggressive.  Not a mention of rabbit holes though.   

Heading eastwards into New Mexico now, where we had just learned that the week long Albuquerque Hot-Air Balloon festival was due to start in a few days.  This is the biggest in the world and we want to see what we can of it.  Despite all those risible and self-declared claims made by a myriad of US towns such as “Watermelon Capital of the World” or “Mosquito Capital of the World” (true, we drove through it once in southern Texas), it is a bit disappointing that Albuquerque doesn’t bill itself as “Hot-Air Capital of the World”.

However, we’d stopped in Silver City, one of those strange small-town America places situated 50 miles off the main Interstate Highway that had become stuck in some sort of time warp of 40, 50 or 60 years ago.  It was a pleasant enough place but so old fashioned it was almost as if it was a deliberate policy.  Anyway, a few days previously we had met the first Brits of our trip at our motel in Tucson.  Several days later, here in Silver City some two hundred miles away and in a different state, we walked out of a restaurant and the same two Brits were just walking in.  Naturally we exchanged only a few words because we’d not been properly introduced.

Having left Silver City on a very quiet and empty scenic road heading further into New Mexico and about halfway along the 70 mile length of it, a gentle curse came from my driver.  We had meant to fill up with fuel in Silver City but had completely forgotten.  The warning light was on.  O, cripes !   The good news was that on the map there were two towns ahead of us, marked in brown.  The bad news was that a brown-marked town meant that it was a ghost town.  O double cripes !  The upshot was that we both knew we were going to run out of fuel somewhere on the route, either climbing up the mountain road or somewhere on the flat desert bit after the mountains.  There was no phone signal either to lighten the atmosphere.  After what seemed like a lot of driving, the first ghost town had one person that we saw (at least I hope it was a person).  He told us it was about 35 miles to the next fuel on the Interstate and now I got to drive.  We were both surprised that we’d got this far and the car was nursed along at 1500 revs while we both waited for the engine to cough.  Dropping and coasting out of the mountains, in the distance we could see another range and so knew that the main road and fuel was on this side of it.  It was a lot tenser than meeting a Black Bear.  Somehow the car kept going across an interminable plain and we eventually turned onto the Interstate to find that there was no station on the main road and no exit for the town.  We should have gone under the main road.  So at the next exit we just left the main road in the middle of nowhere and at the top of the ramp there was an old beat up sign which said ‘Gas – 3 miles’ with an arrow pointing into the desert.  There was no way of knowing if this was still true but really there was no choice but to go on.  Exactly three miles down the road we rolled up to a single pump at an out of the way café.  I’m tensing up just writing about it and am convinced that the car had run of fuel miles earlier but had just not realised.   The garage if I can call it that wasn’t even overcharging for the juice.  Phew, phew.

Just west of our route was the site of the first atomic bomb detonation in 1945, open for visits on only two days a year and this was one of them.  However we decided not to pay a visit ($25 a car) to a site that has ‘only’ ten times the area’s normal radiation level.  You can judge how limited the knowledge was of the power and radiation of the bomb because there are several towns within 15 – 20 miles of the site in various directions.   Limited, or for the really cynical a handy experimental population. 

Later the same day we visited White Sands National Monument, 275 square miles of the whitest sand imaginable (actually powdered Gypsum) and a most beautiful and ethereal place.  It is stunning and constantly moving as the prevailing wind blows the sand to the north east.  Plants and animals are here aplenty but animals in this sort of environment are generally nocturnal.  We saw snake tracks on the sand and the occasional white lizard, a colour adaptation to the whiteness of the surroundings.   Yuccas, a garden plant back home grow longer and longer stems to keep their leaves above the sand even though the plant only looks four or five feet tall.  The stems can be 25 feet long but when as is inevitable the sand blows away, the stems are too weak to support themselves and collapse in a heap.  You feel quite sorry for them really.  We are allowed to drive several miles into the area and dunes are stacked as far as the eye can see in every direction.  Of course these are eyes that have to be wearing sunglasses because of the glare.  Standing out on the dunes waiting for sunset and the reddish tones that the landscape will be bathed in was very odd.  It was still in the high 80s f but I kept thinking I should be cold because it looked so much like snow. 

One of the real highlights of the trip was Santa Fe, the New Mexico capital which at 7000 ft is also the highest US State Capital.   The high 80s to high 90s convert at this altitude to a much more comfortable 70s to 80s and the city has a real centre, is full of restaurants, cafes and Art Galleries.  Everywhere in this part of the world seems to be selling art, some very good, some mediocre and some downright offensively bad.  In many parts of the world we’ve seen subsistence farming but round here it seems to be subsistence art, except that the prices aren’t at subsistence level.  Santa Fe has a central square and an unsurprising Spanish feel.  One surprise was that after over a fortnight of unrelenting baking hot sunshine (someone has to do it) it began to rain and we had to take shelter in a couple of Margaritas.  The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is here and something we’d been looking forward to.  Now I don’t think it unreasonable given the name of the place to expect that it would have a good selection of her paintings but it doesn’t.   A (possible) volunteer in the museum asked me if she could help and having been told that there were no more than about a dozen of her works in the place I expressed my disappointment, especially as it had cost $25 to get in.  She was ultra gushing and enthusiastic, explaining the works present in detail and without us asking went off to the desk and got us a refund.  Apparently I wasn’t the first to point out the disparity of the name of the museum and the lack of said artist’s work present.  As it happens, just down the road was a special exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work in another museum at about $8 with lots of her paintings on show.   

We did visit the balloon festival where the first ones go up at about 6.30, before dawn.  That meant a 4.30am rise to get an hour down the road from Santa Fe to Albuquerque.  Tickets were all gone so we decided we’d see what we could from the Interstate as we drove past.  Well at 6.15 or thereabouts we came to a standstill in the queue trying to get off the Interstate into the balloon site, so we just sat there and watched the show.  When we finally got to the turn off the best part of an hour later we just carried on and stopped on the hard shoulder with dozens of other cars.  A real grandstand view of an incredible show unfolding.   As you might imagine there were balloons of all shapes and sizes.  We saw a Darth Vader, Smoky the Bear, various cartoon characters we didn’t recognise and myriad colours on what were probably 200-300 balloons.   The surprising thing was the control that some of the pilots (?) had.  There must have been gentle breezes in different directions at different heights because we could spot a balloon in a static position, then watch it rising, drifting off to the north and then dropping and drifting back over the site.  Balloons were landing in office car parks or ordinary streets, just touching the ground with the canopy remaining inflated, then taking onboard different passengers and lifting off again.  It was all very skilfully done and very impressive. 

Santa Fe runs a couple of free shuttle bus routes around the town and it was on one of these that Heather realised her bag was not with her.  Nothing really vital in it but an expensive padded jacket and our lonely Planet would certainly been an irritating loss.  I asked the driver to let us off because we thought it was in a chocolate shop but he said he’d just take us around again.  Then we realised that it was on the previous shuttle bus we’d been on.  Our driver phoned the other driver, the bag was there and we met up and collected it.  Good news.  However when we had first got on the second shuttle and were the only passengers, we’d told the driver which was the nearest stop to our hotel and joked about being dropped off at our hotel instead.  Oh, he said, I can always make a wrong turn and we thought no more about it.  By the time we’d collected the bag, there were a dozen or more other passengers as we approached our stop.  “Sorry folks” called out the driver “I’ve made a wrong turn” and he dropped us right outside our hotel as he’d said.

What a nice place Santa Fe was.