36 hours, thirty-six hours... that’s how long a bus trip on Greyhound takes from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Flagstaff, Arizona. Remembering that a 2-hour car journey to Suffolk when I was little, I’m somewhat surprised that 36 hours didn’t have me running up and down the aisle and sprinting around the intervening stations. Perhaps I’ve grown up (*ah*).
Even though I did survive the trip, my legs could have received a health insurance claim from my rear on the basis that long legs like mine make it extremely awkward to sleep on a bus: to be comfortable, there needs to be good blood flow and that means actually having room to extend my legs and that’s just not gonna happen. Also, I like to tuck my legs up or brace them against something when I’m on my side... when I’m sitting up, all that does is give me cramps in my legs and a numb bum.
Once we got there, close to 11 PM we were presented with the single most unpleasant person we had yet met. The attendant at the hostel refused to accept the deposit we’d paid online, refused to change the room or the fee as we’d discussed on the phone and when I made my case in what I’d describe as logical terms she said she didn’t have time for us... complaints letters and an inquiry from the attorney general are forthcoming. Don’t stay at the Downtown Roadway Inn in Flagstaff, that’s all I can say. I’m still waiting to see whether the payment that she took from the debit account at the same time I was paying the same fee with cash will reverse itself. Somewhat pissed off, we went to bed disgruntled.
There seems to be no end to the meteorological buffet that has been battering my journey round the states. Earthquake, hurricane, hail storm, wildfire, thunder and lightning and a tornado. Actually, the wildfire was up and down the route we took into Texas and we never saw it, and the tornado appeared ten miles south of the Grand Canyon while we were there and never made it up... still, the warning dampened the already rain-drenched compound even further.
The shuttle bus from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon was $25 each way, with a $6 for the entry fee to the park. Compared to the price of tours ($60+) it was easily worth it, but we were so close to being left behind. We got there a little late, and missed out on all but one seat... splitting up wasn’t an option so we resigned ourselves to taking the later bus (1 PM rather than 8 AM). However, the angel of mercy descended upon the travellers in the form of the driver, who had made great intercession to the powers that be such that two more persons could fit in the bus.
The Grand Canyon is probably the most dwarfing sight I’ll see in a while. Not content with being so deep that it looks unreal – no amount of depth perception difficulties could negate the sheer size, but the lack somehow removed my vertigo near-completely – the width and length made me think about what the first explorers would have thought... northern Arizona is largely flat, a plain of dry grasses and sparse trees with mountains away in the distances. Then, all of a sudden, a crack like the biggest Earth wrinkle you could imagine severs the link between north and south, the only means to cross being by air or by foot. Airplane and helicopter tours are expensive and there wasn’t the time for climbing down and camping in the canyon, we were only there for the day, leaving on the 6:15 PM shuttle.
What the 8 hours afforded was a trip up to Yaki point on the complimentary shuttle buses within the park itself, a walk around a few miles of the rim and an hour or so on the Bright Angel Trail. Yaki point is the most easterly drop-off on the orange shuttle route, a cliff edge that sharpens to a point overlooking a vast expanse of the canyon... the poor weather, light rain and that got heavier as the lightning approached, had encumbered the canyon with a light-scattering mist, occluding the brilliance of the stratified pillars and walls on the opposite side. There were layers of red and yellow, a dressing of green from the trees clinging to the inclines, some growing slanted at the rocks beneath had shifted over time. Larger groupings of layers were separated by mini cliffs and ridges part way down the walls of the canyon with large shifts of colour as they approached the harmless trickle of the Colorado River – a brown dirt-ridden ghost of the leviathan that in time prehistoric must have carved the chasm to begin with.
Walking along the rim provided endless new viewpoints on the gully’s passive beauty. In contrast to the roaring might of the Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon is a silent screaming mouth in the Earth. Sound is eaten by those lips as you throw your voice over the edge, dulled by the inhuman vastness. It wasn’t until we attempted to descend the canyon that the scale became tangible. Walking down for a good forty minutes, we barely made it down the first ridge below the rim. From the path – lined with stones and branches to make safe what could easily be deadly – we could see how little we could see. The path wound back and forth, hugging tight to the drop, scouting through arches and swift bends. The time we had left was too little to go more than maybe a tenth of the way down, as much as I wanted to see how the mouth would close around me at the bottom I was grateful for the relenting sun, setting away from the clouds: as we climbed again, the light chased us along the wall, threatening to lift the damp cool that made the climb easy, and along the floor of the canyon, finally, the vibrant brilliance of the drying rock spawned a rainbow that radiated up and out of the canyon itself – the canyon was sticking out its tongue.
Departing before sunset (something I will have to see in the future), we had a Thai dinner with some excellent plum wine and waited at the station for the bus out for Vegas.
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