Hmmm, I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque

The day dawned bright, clear, and decidedly crisp in Holbrook.

After going through the usual process of mad confusion as we packed and loaded the car, we headed downstairs for the now customary breakfast of waffles and bad coffee before setting off back to Painted Desert/Petrified Forest National Park, around 30 miles east.

A few miles from the Painted Desert or northern entrance to the park sits the Painted Desert Inn, a sensational adobe style building designed back in the 1930s by NPS architect Lyle E Bennett, which has sadly had a bit of a chequered history. At one stage, the entire inn was going to be demolished but thankfully wiser heads prevailed, the building was restored, and is now run as part-museum, part-souvenir shop.

It is, without a doubt, one of the most sensational houses I’ve ever been lucky enough to visit. It’s almost impossible to put into words, at least for me, but it somehow feels like a sanctuary – cool, serene, and calm. It’s an oasis of adobe, full of timber, rendered walls, detailed ceilings, skylights, pillars, unusual tin lanterns and light. My only regret is that it’s no longer an inn, as I’d love to spend a night or two there. Of course, the view out over Painted Desert doesn’t hurt, but in truth the house would work just as well whether it were in the wilds of Arizona or on a suburban block. I have no idea who Lyle E Bennett was, or what his other work was like, but he totally nailed it with this place.

After firing off the requisite insane number of shots we headed across route 66 to the ruins of Puerco Pueblo and a small cluster of slowly weathering petroglyphs  above the Rio Puerco and a myriad of interlaced washes, turned north once more, and returned to I-40 to travel ever eastward along the old Route 66.

Interstates are usually pretty soulless experiences, and I-40 is no exception, although the relative boredom is moderated by a degree of sadness. Everywhere you look remain fragments of a long gone era of Route 66 travel, when road trips were glamorous and exciting rather than functional and to be dispensed with in the most efficient manner possible. Delaminated, flapping plywood signboards, interminable numbers of Indian Trading Posts, and – occasionally – complete townships of only a few buildings, lost to time, rusting, rotting and decaying back into the earth intermittently punctuate the journey through this wide, wild, unforgiving landscape. We passed through Grants yawning, stretching and trying to keep focus on the interstate before finally, and with great relief, taking the turn off to Acoma Pueblo some 30 miles south.

First catching sight of the pueblo is a jaw-dropping experience. Having travelled through a landscape of plateaus, buttes and valleys you finally notice, squinting through the bug-encrusted windscreen, what looks like a series of adobe houses clustered ramshackle and gravity defying on the top of a distant mesa and mesas. Welcome to Acoma Pueblo, one of the oldest villages in the United States, settled around 1100AD and continuously lived in to this day.

We passed through unusually hinged, hand carved timber doors of a scale more appropriate for Andre the Giant than a visitors centre, and booked in for a ‘condensed’ tour of the pueblo. Although it’s a functioning village, the locals are understandably less than thrilled about having hordes of day-trippers gawk at their unique lifestyle and in doing so turning it into a theme park. Instead you have to book a tour, pay for a camera permit (you’re still restricted in what you can and can’t photograph, and you’re not allowed to videotape anything), and ride a bus up an impossibly steep single-lane access road to the top of the mesa, where the pueblo tour commences.

Much as I’d like to float around the entire place unaccompanied, the real reason most people visit is to see the awesome San Esteban del Rey Mission. It’s a gigantic, adobe church with rammed earth floors, walls 12 feet thick (and 7 feet thick at the windows), some 60 feet high, 120 feet long and 40 feet wide. The numbers all have significance, to both the Spanish seeking to convert savages to the merits of Christianity, and the Acoma Indians – many numbers are multiples of 3, representing the Acoma beliefs of creation as being sun, moon and stars. The occasional Christian reference was also slotted in, to keep the Spanish happy.

The church may well be one of the most truly spiritual places I've ever visited. I loved it. The dirt floor was authentic, raw, and a world away from the gilded, overly detailed excesses of most churches. It felt like a place of worship people would have gone to before gothic and baroque cathedrals were even dreamed of, alive, soulful and moving.

As was typically the case of the era, the Spanish were brutal, barbaric and ruthless in their attempts to convert Indians to Christianity (oh, and, if possible, get their hands on a whole bunch of gold, for the, ahem, glory of God).

To quote my good friend Wikipedia:

In 1598, Spanish conquistador Don Juan De Oñate, under orders from the King of Spain, invaded New Mexico, and began staging raids on Native American pueblos in the area, taking anything of value. Upon reaching San Juan Pueblo, Oñate had all the Native Americans who were living there removed from their homes and used it as a base to stage more raids on other Native American pueblos in the area. In response, the Acoma fought back, and several Spaniards were killed in the battle to re-take the pueblo from the Spaniards. During the battle, the Spaniards brought a small cannon up the back of Acoma Mesa, and began firing into the village.

According to Acoma oral traditions, the average Spaniard at the time weighed much more than the average Acoma, and the Spaniards also brought with them attack dogs, which were believed to be fed on human flesh and trained to eat humans alive. The Acoma people lost the Battle of Acoma, and the indigenous population of the pueblo, which had been approximataly 2,000 people before the Spanish attacked, was reduced to approximately 250 survivors; as women, children, and elders were killed by the Spaniards in that battle as well.

After the survivors were herded to Santo Domingo Pueblo, all the surviving children under the age of 12 were taken from their parents, and given to Spanish missionaries to raise; but most of them and the other survivors were sold into slavery. Of the few dozen Acoma men of fighting age still alive after the battle, Oñate ordered the right foot chopped off of each one. Oñate was later tried and convicted of cruelty to Indians and colonists, and was banished from New Mexico. However, he was cleared of all charges on appeal and lived out the rest of his life in Spain.

Well, that's good news for Oñate, I'm sure you'll agree. Tough shit for the Acoma.

My guide freely conceded that he wasn’t a practicing Christian, and still followed Acoma traditions, as did most of his people. In essence, the Acoma people had learned to pay lip service to the Spanish and to Christianity, and to simply continue doing what they’d done for centuries before, and would continue to do for centuries after. Most amazingly, at least to my mind, was the lack of bitterness our guide had toward the occupiers of his ancestor’s lands. I don’t know if this was to avoid upsetting any Christians in his group, or whether it was a genuine acceptance of the past. Given previous experiences I’ve had of both Serbian and Croatian friends hating each other’s guts for the centuries of in-fighting between their two ethnic groups, I found it both refreshing and sobering.

After purchasing a small Acoma bowl at the top of the mesa, and a couple of odds and sods at the bottom, we returned to I-40 with the intent of driving onto Santa Fe, but finally acknowledging defeat in Albuquerque.

As is often the case, I didn’t get to know the town. It seemed fine to me, and not what I expected – I’d half expected it to be on a weathered plain, studded with cactus and with dust storms and the occasional tumble-weed rolling past. Instead, it was in the shadows of a massive mountain, and seemed modern and cosmopolitan.

Despite not getting to know the town, however, I can – hand on heart – say I know Furr’s, a “family restaurant” near our hotel. I can only imagine it is called Furr’s because that’s what you’re eating, along with skins, hairs, bones and innards. Ruff’s would have been a more suitable name. Truth is, the food isn’t truly, shockingly awful, but at the same time an $8 a person buffet positively screams “you won’t get anything good here”. There was, as is usually the case at these places, plenty of volume, but not much you’d go out of your way for… except to avoid. My ever discerning kids just picked at their plates of limp, pallid, bain-marie exterminated veggies, crumbed mystery meat and industrial strength jelly, then pushed the plates away. My lemon meringue plate didn’t taste of lemon, or meringue for that matter. It just tasted of sweet, sweet, something or other. Somewhat handily, you can buy their delicious pies for only $7.99, but even that price is an insult when I remember the sensational flaky apple pie we had back in Julian for only two dollars more.

Tip to the reader – hit up Denny’s over the road instead. I haven't been there, but it's got to be better.