November 12, On The Amtrak

I'm back on the Amtrak bounded for Chicago. That means a bed, lunch, dinner, breakfast and a last lunch before arriving at Chicago Union Station. This time I'm on the Southwest Chief that runs daily from Los Angeles to Chicago. At Albuquerque where I board it, the train stopped long enough for the passengers to get off and look at the Navajo art set up right beside its opening doors. While the artists where setting up, I went to check it out, had a chat with 2 sisters selling hand made jewellery and bought 2 pairs of ear rings for my daughters in Canada knowing that they would never wear them. One doesn't even have her ears pierced. I ended up wearing them myself, sometimes 2 in one ear lobe, it looks very Indian.

The trip on the night bus from Las Vegas to Albuquerque took 14 hours; the crowd on the bus was not unlike the one I had already experienced: 2 extremely annoying girls talking and swearing all night long, lonely men, mostly black a couple of young people that looked like tourists. I suspect we drove through nothing but desert because when light came and I woke up after having slept a little, we drove through a desert for another 3 hours. Which one was this? I suspect one of the most impressive desert in the US, the Painted Desert with its beautiful, red cliffs. Albuquerque seams to be at the end of the desert, yellow city, buildings made out of sand stone, a very practical Greyhound/Amtrak station with super friendly staff. I was tempted to stay and check out Santa Fe, but when I realized that the train bounded for greener fields was just an hour away, I decided that maybe I had seen enough desert for the time being!

The train has just stopped at Raton, the last stop in the state of New Mexico. About half an hour ago the sun set in a cloudy sky behind the Rocky Mountains to the West. We are way East of the Rockies but they look beautiful in the distance. Here too the pattern is familiar: boarded up homes, humongous junk jards. One town in particular caught my attention. It was surrounded by junk: old cars, scrap iron, mountains of tires, lumber. But the train stopped to let out a very pretty girl, high heels and all!

After Las Vegas, NM the train heads into the Great Plains, yellow grass as far as the eye can see, and as a young man sitting in the Sightseeing car explains: "Yep, all the way to Mexico." I can't help but repeat to myself what I just heard. "All the way to Mexico... and of course all the way to Canada". But where is the water? This land is so dry, does it ever rain? Bison country. Lonely farms, some abandoned, one or two cows here and there looking sometimes just like little specks on the horizon. Among the passengers taking in the sights before it gets dark are an elderly Amish couple. For a while I listen to their old German, I can make out a few words. "Guck mal", says the woman, "an lonely kuh". That's how empty the American Prairies are!