Concealing the Canyon

For myself, the pulling power of the North America lies not in its cities, characterised by highrise and grid like streets layouts, but by natural landscapes that sprawl across several rail routes linking one side of the sub-continent to the other. I say rail routes, as this is the mode of travel through which I have viewed these expanses in the past – the Rockies, the Prairies and the Pacific coast, to name but three. Of course this is just my opinion, my own stereotypical view, informed by a couple of mammoth treks in the 1990s.

A different breath taking perspective of these landscapes might be viewed from the air, possibly one of the few occasions when the sprawl and height of metropolitan sky-scrapers looks spectacular, as its vast spread opens up beneath you. But of course being able to get a prolonged view from an aircraft is dependent on cloud scarcity and a fair bit of luck.

My luck was certainly in when I last flew to the USA, en-route to Mexico. We flew across the Atlantic, and kept going before turning left at Winnipeg and heading all the way down to San Diego at the tip of California. On leaving Winnipeg, the transparent view down to the ground was uninterrupted for the rest of the flight. For three hours cities, towns and wildernesses appeared unhindered beneath; a bird’s eye view from one side of the USA to the other.

There was a slight complication though. In fact it was infuriating. The best view will always be had by those passengers with window seats, but this should not normally restrict too much the view of those sitting in the middle or the aisle seats, just a case of them having to lean over a bit extra to look outside – a bit of give and take between neighbours.

On this flight though, my surly neighbour in the window seat had a strange kind of aversion to daylight. The amount of time that his shutter was up during the ten-hour flight could be measured in minutes. Events usually went something like this:

Neighbour decides to visit the gents. No need to ask his fellow passengers to move. No need to communicate with them. Rather he uses the occasion to demonstrate his nimbleness. So with a sudden jerk, he positions one foot on his arm rest, moving the other foot onto the next arm rest, and then the next, until with a hop, skip and a jump, he lands in the aisle.

I quite came to look forward to his regular visits for a tinkle, not because I was amused by his unorthodox manner of getting there, but because it at least presented a chance to flick up the blind and absorb the clear view down below. Alas, five minutes later Mr. Selfish Git (for this is what I had now named him) would land back in his seat. I would continue to stare hard out of the window, just to let him know that some of us actually did like day light. He would grimace and hold a hand up to the side of his face, as though to block out any rays of sun shine, expecting me to say, ‘Oh dear I am terribly sorry, I did not mean to dazzle you with some natural light. Well why don’t I just hand back complete control of the window shutter to you (you selfish git). After all, it must be your exclusive right.’

And with each passing minute, following his return from the loo, he would continue to grimace, hold up a hand to shield the light, and gradually move the shutter down a couple of inches at a time, until the thing was closed.

It felt like the clear views on offer , which covered hundreds of miles, could only occur on a tiny proportion of flights that I might make in a lifetime. So who was this kill-joy?

I just put it down to bad luck. But then things started to really grate inside me. You see on Selfish Git’s penultimate visit to the loo, up went the shutter, and the glowing sand stone colour of the rock formations below made me gasp.

Surely it couldn’t be. Surely if it was, the pilot would have drawn the attention of passengers to it. Not that they were likely to have missed it. What apparently lay several thousand feet below was a segment of the natural phenomenon known as the Grand Canyon. Meanwhile Selfish Git returns to his seat and in no time has pulled down the blind.

Oh well, I thought, you must have been mistaken. It was probably just another set of rather nice rocks. However, a couple of minutes later, the lights were turned full on, awakening a section of passengers from their siesta. The pilot announced, ‘For those of you on the right hand side of the plane, you can see a fantastic view of Los Vegas in a minute’s time’. The interest the announcement generated was considerable, lots of people leaning over to peer out of the windows – sharing views, just like one should. But surely if we had just passed over a section of the Grand Canyon, the pilot would have made a similar  announcement shortly before, even if people were having a snooze.

And then I looked at the route map on the TV screen in front, which alternated between grand scale (view of the entire USA, with a handful of principle cities indicated) and micro scale (zoomed up map indicating the local features over which we were passing). There on the screen was evidence enough of what I had just missed. Our current position was indicated by the words Los Vegas and a couple of millimetres away from this label was a further one that read Grand Canyon. I was furious that I should be denied an aerial view of this natural wonder. And how could Selfish Git (although by now, I wanted to call him something much worse) fail to have been impressed by the view he surely saw as he came back from the loo, unless he flew over it every week.

There was also something telling about the way in which other passengers had made much more of an effort to get a view of glitzy Los Vegas than of the Grand Canyon – money doesn’t talk, it swears.

Ten years earlier, Pacific coast bound, I had stepped off the overnight California Zephyr Express from Denver to Los Angeles, onto a Los Vegas platform, having already travelled a thousand miles. A large proportion of passengers made their exit here. Equally, I am sure they could have said to me, ‘What? Here is Los Vegas and you ain’t even gonna spend half a day looking around.’ I got back on and continued onto more natural land and seascapes. Still each to their own.

But back to my current flight. Selfish Git, with one hour to touch down, summonsed an air hostess by snapping his fingers. He demanded that she obtain for him some shaving gear, the likes of which are only included in Club Class kits and off she toddled. Journey’s end, and as passengers started to exit the plane, he remonstrated with her,  ‘You did not even bother asking,’ he barked.

‘Perhaps you should fly Club Class next time,’ I wanted to interject.

At immigration, I found myself at the back of a rather slow moving queue of passengers. Fortunately so did Selfish Git. I derived some satisfaction from thinking that maybe he loathed queues to the same extent as myself.

Borders

I strolled around San Diego’s Gas Light Quarter. The place bustled with Saturday night revellers. Everywhere was awash with the swirl of neon lighting advertising sports bars, pavement cafes and take aways, steak bars, Latin American cuisine and deep fried Louisiana or Chinese chicken.

Cycle rickshaws ferried people from establishment to establishment.

I pottered around Fifth Street’s Classic Cars show room and stroked a bonnet or two of collector’s items from decades before. I compared the asking prices of a 1965 Mercedes Benz, a 1955 Ford Thunderbird and  a 1956 pink Cadillac Deville (all engineless and priced at around $9,500) with that of a more modern 2000 silver Aston Martin at a cool $126,000.

Next door, in a sports bar, giant screens showing baseball, basketball and American football games surrounded me. I drank a pitcher of beer, played a short game of guess whether entrants to the establishment would get asked for their ID (strictly only 21s across the USA), ate a complementary bar snack of corn chips with salsa and went to sleep off some of the looming jet lack.

I thought that my night in San Diego was going to give me a taste of what lay in wait the other side of the Mexican border, just half an hour away by trolley bus. I could not envisage life being much different. The globally all pervading culture of the USA was not going to come to a sudden halt, once I crossed over one of the busiest border points in the world into Tijuana. The influence of the Yankee Dollar would, I’m sure, seep down a lot further south into the Americas.

At Tijuana airport I bought a ticket, for the three hour trip to Guadalajara. I priced the flights at several different airline desks, where the only language spoken was Spanish. The food in the restaurant did not resemble anything like the fast food from the previous night, it was, well traditional Mexican. Perhaps equally as telling, the restaurant TV carried a transmission of a football game from Mexico City – not American football, but good old soccer. The omens were good.

The plane followed the coastal path down the Baja peninsula for a couple of hours. Beaches and sandstone coloured mountains dominated. However, apart from occasional small fishing village, populated areas of any note were non-existent.

I realised before entering Mexico that it was a vast country. But viewed from the atlas, the way in which its long tail sweeps around to the right can be deceptive. And of course there are not may countries which have internal flights of four hours (you could fly from London to Moscow in this time). So staring out of the window at the barren mass of land provided a strong reminder that the majority of the population only occupied a small proportion of the country’s land mass.

Indeed, I was to spend many hours over the next month travelling by land or air, across wilderness, witnessing little more than sporadic settlements. But then, on reaching the top of the rim of a volcanic basin, voila, over the edge, down in the crater below would be a vast city.

Going to Guadalajara.

At the end of the Baja peninsula, the plane turned left and headed in land towards Guadalajara, Mexico’s second city. As we started our descent, the ground below changed from glowing sandstone to a murky colour. The roads were water logged. A torrent was raging – the tail end of a recent typhoon.

Most of the time, when arriving in a new country, walking across the ground from plane to airport building, breathing in the fresh air, feels preferable to being marched through some steel tubing which connects the plane directly to immigration. Unfortunately, this evening wasn’t most of the time. With the remnants of the typhoon blowing up my trouser leg, whatever I muttered, as I received a good drenching at the bottom of the aircraft steps, it certainly wasn’t ‘Well hello, Guadalajara.’

I sat dripping on a bus that ploughed it’s way through deep puddles and sprayed anyone who was unfortunate enough to be on the footpath. For several miles ahead, along a straight road into the city centre, through the torrents and a misted up windscreen, I could make out a trail of red rear lights that formed a bumper to bumper convey of vehicles edging ever closer to the city limits. The driver dropped me at a cross roads before turning off for the station which, as with most Mexican cities, was several miles outside the centre.

Standing on a dark crossroads in this weather, trying to focus on a map, was not really an option. As a matter of urgency I hailed a taxi and sat on a cellophane covered seat. My sodden trousers added to the small pool of water that was already on its surface.

I checked in at Hotel Jorgeo Alejandro, a former convent. Undeterred by the elements, I showered, changed, put on some water proofs and headed back out for a spot of exploring. The neighbourhood was a short walk away from the historic core of Guadalajara old town, which surrounds the Plaza de Armas. On one side of this square, I paused by a flower seller’s market, stall holders huddled under canvas. On another side, the silhouette of the city’s fifteenth-century cathedral dome loomed large, flanked on either side by blue and yellow tiled spires. These landmarks were to provide a frequent reference point for me over the next couple of days.

I continued searching for a restaurant. However, as I was to find throughout my Mexican travels, in old colonial town centres, finding an eating and drinking hole, which is open after 8 pm is a rare feat indeed. Anything that might be called nightlife tends to be some distance away in residential districts. Not that the streets of Old Guadalajara were deserted as the cathedral bell chimed midnight. Legions of municipal road cleaners made their way down boulevards and side roads, diligently clearing the ground of refuse.

The rain still fell heavily. I walked down narrow back streets, frequently having cause to prostrate myself against a wall, at the sound of an approaching vehicle, which fifteen seconds later would cascade a shower of water over me.

Back at the hotel, giant crucifixes tentatively clung to the four walls of my room, looking like they might fall down in the middle of the night. I moved my bed away from the cross which looked down onto it, not willing to put my faith in divine intervention.