Santa Fe

Road Trip: Day Five. Miles travelled: 1548

States visited: 5. Time zones covered: 2.

We left Kayenta at 8am this morning and hit the road to Santa Fe. Kayenta is a funny old place. The juxtaposition of its down-at-heelness with the curious mounds of Monument Valley piled up in the background, looking like a Disney ride, is a hugely curious sight.

Petrol here is mercifully cheap for a group of slightly hard-up men going on a road trip. It's usually in the region of $2.28 per gallon, which is a third of the cost of petrol in the UK.

A few miles out of Kayenta, we crossed another state line, which takes the total number of states visited so far to five. California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah (for about five minutes) and, now, New Mexico.

Crossing into New Mexico was rather special for me. As a twelve-year old lad I became obsessed with the idea of visiting this particular state, I'm ashamed to say as a result of watching an episode of Murder She Wrote where Jessica Fletcher goes to an archeological dig which is being haunted by the apparition of a Native American who chants on a hillside, cursing the dig and all those who dig in it! I was really drawn in by the intriguing desert-like landscape, which, when I think about it, was probably more likely to have been filmed somewhere near LA! I was somewhat disappointed to learn recently that Jessica's home in Cabot Cove, Maine, was actually filmed in up-state California!

On the way to Santa Fe you pass through nothing but Indian reservations. The Hopi Reservation. The Navajo Nation Reservation... It turns out that you can tell an area of reservation by the miles and miles of fence which run along the sides of the long, entirely straight highways. My assumption is that the major roads have remained state owned and controlled. You Indians can have the land... except the bits we want!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, what seems to be lacking from the Indian Reservations are the sorts of roadside diners I expected to find in abundance on this road trip. Perhaps it was the dreamer in me who expected to happen upon a plethora of over-friendly, family-run cafes by the side of the road specialising in Mama-made apple pie. If I'm honest I haven't found the native Indian people particularly friendly or warm. That's probably based on years of justifiable mistrust of the white man. My sense is that there's an inward-lookingness within the community. Take Kayenta, for example, which is right on the edge of one of the great wonders of the natural world, and yet nothing there is geared towards tourism. There are no native art centres, or homely-looking diners, or museums about Navajo life. It strikes me that they're just not that fussed about having outsiders to stay, which seems odd when you consider how much wealth tourism is likely to bring into an area which seems so poor. Every town we've passed through seems to have at least six pawn shops.

Everywhere you go in the US, billboards claim that shops and diners are "world-famous." What on earth constitutes world famous?

We passed "Something Sexy - the adult couple's megastore." It strikes me that the shop's name is fairly indicative of a society which can only justify advertising sex shops by making them for "couples only." A quick look at an online gay chat app last night revealed that the nearest gay person to Kayanda using the app was 90 km away! In San Francisco, there were forty seven people within a kilometre!

We had lunch in a little town called Cuba, where we finally found a road side diner approaching the kind I was hoping for. It was called "Bobby and Margie's Cuban Cafe" and it had a huge retro 1960s neon sign with an arrow. The walls of the diner were lined with shelves which were filled with toy trucks of all sizes.

The omelettes came with a choice of toast or something they called "biscuit and gravy." It turns out biscuit and gravy is a plain scone with a dipping sauce which our waitress described as "white and peppery." It was plainly a little bit bacony as well. One sniff of it told me that. I'd also hazard a guess that my hash browns had been cooked in bacon fat. I'm not sure the mountainous regions of the States are going to cater that well for vegetarians!

As we drove on the freeway towards Santa Fe, we started to see some worryingly backward billboards. One advertised creationism. The famous image of a series of apes slowly straightening themselves and becoming man had a red diagonal line painted through it. Another billboard said, "abortion stops a beating heart." Those kind of images don't exactly warm a wet liberal to a place...

Santa Fe itself is nice enough. Most of the houses are adobe-walled, or faux adobe walled, which gives everything a soft, somewhat Spanish quality. The houses are often washed in terracotta and dusty pinks, and many have sky blue windows and doors, which look really rather pretty. If I'm brutally honest, I'm not sure I entirely got along with the place. Everything was clean and tidy and terribly neat, but I tend to like a place with a bit of grit. Santa Fe feels like it's "doing" cute. It is, however, known as a very liberal place, and there's a wonderful classical music scene here. There's a chamber music festival on at the moment.

I think it's probably a great place to visit if you've got a bit of money in your back pocket for some nice jewellery or a charming painting in vivid colours. For me, however, almost every shop sold the same thing - and almost everything was geared towards women. Women outnumber men on the streets by two to one. It's all artsy-crafty, flowing bohemian garb, massive statement necklaces made from turquoise, healing crystals and non-specific ethnic plates and pottery served up at hugely-inflated prices. Many of the items claim to have Native American authenticity, but scratch the surface and most of what you're looking at is made in China and India. The streets were literally humming with the sorts of women the shops were aimed at. The sorts of women who marry wealthy businessmen and take up pottery and painting in their middle age because they're bored. They try ever so hard to present themselves as bohemian, but the idea of living as penniless artists would be utterly unacceptable for them. Their husbands humour them. There's one shop specifically for men which is full of the types of clothes that certain type of woman would buy her certain type of male husband to make him look "really trendy and colourful." He dutifully buys them, wears them... and feels like a tit!

I think I expected it to be filled with vintage shops and thrift stores and be a little rough around the edges. It really wasn't for me. It felt like a theme park.

We went to the San Miguel mission, which, built in 1610, is the oldest church in the US. A church built in 1610 is never going to overwhelm a Brit. Neither would the oldest house in the US, which, built in 1646, is probably about the age of my parents house in Thaxted! Said house has become a museum. It's tiny. We went in. I instantly got claustrophobic and ran outside again. I think I've been spoilt by all these glorious open spaces we've been visiting.

All that said, we did sit in a hugely charming cafe-cum-bookshop called Iconik, where I bought a book about Route 66 and we sat, drinking tea whilst watching the good folk of Santa Fe doing their thing. One man, with cool hair, talked obsessively on the phone about gravlax and another was writing letters on huge pieces of hand-made paper with a quill and ink pot!

Adobe bricks, I learned today, are made of straw, mud and cow manure. Fact.