UFOs, Ghost Towns and Death Valley

Spot the UFO here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=157354&id=510568119&l=3e38bfa7fb

The next phase of our travels needed to put us in Las Vegas by December 21, and so several weeks previously we set about wondering how we might get there. When I say "wondering," what I of course mean is finding out which buses leave from San Francisco travelling in the general direction of Las Vegas, where we would need to make connections in order to eventually end up in Las Vegas, what time the various buses leave, how much each bus costs and which route is cheapest, how we would get to and from the relevant bus stations, how long each journey would take etc, etc. Then doing the same thing for trains. Then doing the same thing for flights. Then finding out how much it would cost to rent a car. Then doing it all over again, but this time with various bus/train/plane/car combinations until we eventually come up with a plan which we can afford, doesn't take 3 months and doesn't require us to paddle downstream in a canoe in order to make one of our connections.

And so it was that at 4.30am one morning we walked to the BART station to catch a train to the airport to catch a flight to Los Angeles to catch a bus to the rental car office to pick up a hire car to drive to Las Vegas. And so it also was that we ended up sitting bleary-eyed outside a cafe in Venice Beach at 8am that same day wondering where the ridiculously hot sunshine had come from and trying not to fall asleep into our breakfast veggie burgers. After realising that a trip to downtown LA or Universal Studios might be the end of us in our current state we decided instead to hover on the periphery of the city, taking in the view from Mulholland Drive, the pier at Santa Monica and the wonderful LA traffic. Thanks to some covert-carpark-wi-fi-purloining we then located the nearest, cheapest motel, checked in and managed to order in and eat a pizza before passing out.

Next day we struck out for the town of Lone Pine, en route to Death Valley and Vegas. As soon as we left LA we noticed how dramatically different the scenery was from anywhere we'd visited so far. Mile upon mile of desert highway and distant horizons flanked on all sides by barren tawny mountain ranges and punctuated only by the occasional cactus or telegraph pole oddly disguised as a tree. Not the sort of landscape I'm used to looking at in the run up to Christmas.



Somewhere along one of the aforementioned desert highways we turned off at a sign which simply said "Ghost Town." I'd heard of American ghost towns from the Gold Rush era which could, with the right degree of squinting, resemble the dilapidated sets of old Westerns, but this one was much more recent. Smashed up TV sets, sofas and suitcases littered a handful of gutted trailers and bungalows, and what used to be streets were scattered with rusting bed frames, splintered wood and broken glass. We couldn't find any reference to the settlement on the map, and in the absence of further signage we left the eerie scene non the wiser about its origins or its mysterious demise.

As evening closed in we stopped to check out a couple of likely looking sleeping establishments. Unfortunately they turned out to be deserted, surrounded by the bones of long dead animals and eerily reminiscent of the Bates motel. Moving swiftly on, we arrived at the infinitely more welcoming town of Lone Pine, and checked into the kitsch but comfy Trails Motel. We soon noticed that the town had a distinctly Wild West feel to it, largely, it transpired, due to the fact that the nearby Alabama Hills were the setting for over 300 Westerns and TV shows. Upon further exploration we discovered the Museum of Lone Pine Movie History and that everyone from Clint Eastwood to John Wayne to Erroll Flynn had filmed in "them thar hills." We spent a happy evening watching the Western B movie "Riders from Tuscon" in the museum's wild west theater before heading down Movie Road the next morning to see where all the action took place and to re-enact scenes from The Lone Ranger (see photos).

Later that day, many desert highway miles later, we arrived at the entrance to Death Valley. Fortunately for us, we were visiting at a time of year that didn't put us at risk of destroying the car's air conditioning and dying of heat exhaustion, but we still found ourselves surrounded by an impressively dry, hot and arid wilderness. We passed through desolate canyons which unexpectedly transformed into golden sand dunes before arriving at Badwater Basin - a salt flat 282 feet below sea level. As dusk fell the evening shadows gave the valley the appearance of a lunar landscape, with nothing but rocks and mountain ridges as far as the eye could see. We left Death Valley surprised by the bizarre variety of landscapes we'd encountered, impressed by the majestic unearthliness of the place and definitely glad we stopped by.