It's been such a crazy ten days. I am back at the Green Tortoise Hostel now but I will be moving to Micah's, one of my travel buddies on the Canyons of the West tour, for tonight. Yay to saving money on accommodation!
Tomorrow the bus for the Burning Man leaves at 10am, and to tell the truth, I am quite knackered and not really in the frame of mind to go. We just arrived back from the trip yesterday, reluctant goodbyes and all, and I'm really not in the mood to get used to a new set of travel buddies so quickly.
Let's see. What we did this past week. I'm just going to list stuff that I remember, things were happening so quickly that I find my short term memory being overwritten to make room for new stuff. This computer that I'm using does not have a memory card reader so I shall just steal pictures from all over to illustrate the scenery that I'm talking about.
- In the span of ten days I took a grand total of two showers and swam twice in lakes. Baby wipes did wonders for the rest.
- I hiked this really steep and nerve-wracking trail at Zion National Park called the Angel's Landing (see the peak of this orange black mountain thing, photo credit to David Pettit), at the beginning of the trip, and was really proud of myself.
- I owned a horse called Harry Killer for two hours. The guide told me that his name was Killer at first, for whatever reason he had in mind, and later decided to tell me that it was Harry instead =_=. Since I had been going "Good boy, Killer, good Killer" for most of the trip, and I named him Harry Killer instead. He was gentle and patient, but fast. We galloped and I bruised my butt and thighs. It was painful but fun. This was where I went horseback riding at, at Monument Valley. Photo credits go here.
- I contemplated about the insignificance of my existence at the Gooseneck State Park, overlooking the Horseshoe Bend, right at the U-shape that you see in this following picture (photo credit). I don't know why this site had this effect on me, when Bryce National Park was much more impressive looking (see next picture, I couldn't find a good photo that would illustrate the sheer beauty of what I saw, but photo credit anyway), but I guess you can't really explain stuff like that.
- I was bathing in the hot springs while looking at a night sky full of stars.
- We were camping at Gold Bar Campsite, next to the Colorado river, and I woke up to scenery similar to this, but imagine the mountains being a terracota orange, the sky being blue, cloudless and clear, the fence being behind me and me holding a mug of hot chocolate + coffee with my feet tucked into my sleeping bag. (photo credit)
- Me and four other buddies (Polish Kasia, American Micah, Italian Michael and Spanish Vanessa) spent the night at the Bright Angel Campground, which is at the base of the Grand Canyon. We reached there past sundown, so we didn't really get to see much of the Bright Angel Campground nor the Phantom Ranch where I sent a postcard home to (the mail is delivered up by mules). What we did see were wee scorpions scuttling on the ground, a family of deer and the ringtailed cat, shown in the picture below (photo credit).
To give you an idea, the Grand Canyon is about a mile deep, i.e. 1.6km vertical distance. The guide, Lucas, said that we were doing 8 miles per vertical mile, if you understand what that means. The heat is intense when you hike down the Grand Canyon, and mostly rangers advise people not to hike between 10am and 3pm, because that is when the sun is the deadliest. The day when we were hiking up, the max temperature was at 105F (i.e. 40.5 deg C). Thing is, early in the morning, the temperature drops to about 16C, and because we didn't bring anything down besides sleeping pads, we ended up huddling together because of the cold.
The interesting thing about hiking the Grand Canyon is that the first half is going down, not up. So you do one vertical mile down, feeling proud of your accomplishment of being at the base of the Grand Canyon, and the second day you are faced with the spirit-breaking prospect of having to hike up, the way you came down, one vertical mile. In total I think we accomplished around 20 miles (plus side trails) in two days, half of it being downhill and half of it being up. When me and Kasia made it to the top, we were so happy that we were just hugging each other with huge smiles on our faces! - Right after the Grand Canyon, our last night was spent at Las Vegas. It was the most mindfucking thing ever. To build things up a little bit we had alcohol in the bus, so when we got off the bus I was slightly tipsy and laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of everything that was in Las Vegas, such as Disney castles and Egyptian buildings and pimps handing out calling cards on the streets, but then the novelty wore out and the heat set in, Vegas being in the middle of the desert and all, and I started to be really glum.
It's a little like eating a really great meal with a wonderful aftertaste, and suddenly someone forces coriander into your mouth and ruins the whole moment. I mean, after about 9 days of nature and breathtaking views of nature's works of art, you get doused with a ridiculously concentrated dose of city. It's not one city. It's one city that has the Eiffel Tower, a pyramid, Statue of Liberty, a replica of Venice by day in the Venetian... and so on and so forth... all rolled into one. God that was dispiriting. I wish we didn't have to end the trip that way.
