Taos - like nowhere else

Taos, New Mexico. It’s high up on a plateau in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. 6964 feet which may not be La Paz high but can make one just a bit puffy with exertion. As with Santa Fe, we take to it immediately. It is a sprawl of adobe buildings, traffic, and quaint historic precincts. It’s a funny little town. Its history goes back to 1615 Spanish colonisation and, so far as the Native Americans are concerned, millenia. It is to offer us an extraordinary range of remarkable experiences. Profound, really.

First of all, I am astounded at the hotel. El Monte Segrado. It’s not a hotel at all. It’s a stunning resort tucked within view of imposing great mountains. We are to come to love this hotel a lot, despite its mad chandeliers made from endless faux antlers.

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Initially we are allocated a ground floor disability room with no view but when the management SMSes me to ask if everything is good, a courtesy I have encountered nowhere else, I say that although the arid garden is excellent, I am disappointed I can’t see any mountains. Pronto we are moved to an

upstairs rear room looking onto a handsome stand of trees with a backdrop of mountains. Not only but also, someone in the hotel had mown beautiful designs through the autumn leaves on the large expanse of park-like lawn below. Swirling paths, like crop circles. Pure playful art, capitalising on the carpet of autumn leaves. I love that person.

This peaceful and beautiful aspect gives us immense pleasure from our comfortable balcony where we sip coffee, read papers, and sun and nature watch. We get to study the American magpies, for they are the meadow birds which inhabit this magic piece of world. They are splendid birds, different from ours (which are not really

magpies at all but butcher birds), The American magpie is the only songbird with a tail longer than its body. They have the most splendid sheeny blue hue to their long tail feathers.

The room is striking with equine art and, um, is that brown and white pony-hide upholstery on the large wardrobe? Large wooden shutters

divide the bathroom from the spacious bedroom. And, what a bathroom! It has a huge spa tub, walk-in shower, expansive vanity and sink area, and a very private little loo with door and fantastic extractor fan, something rather lacking in far too many hotels, may I say. Bruce will tell you about the perfumes and air fresheners in my travel

kit.

This is about the 55th hotel we’ve stayed in on this trip. We know a good room when we hit one and, oh, a good bed. This place gets a lot a ticks. Our exploratory walk reveals a vast park-like square enclosed by a lovely community of high-walled adobe suites with character names. It looks rather Balinese and I’m surprised to find one of the suites is called Bali.

And let me rave about the pool.

The 10ft deep lagoon pool is set in a conservatory of tropical plants with a running waterfall. The pool has a ledge and cliff-like steps which gives the sense of stepping off into the deep blue. It is the best pool I have ever met.

Lots of excellent margaritas at the bar and fine meals from the restaurant; am I raving too much about this hotel?

The main great lawn down the middle of the property sets off the huge feature mountain and there is a large statue of an elk as a centrepiece. The place is gorgeous in all directions and I just wish we had allocated a whole week to it.

The only odd negative is the compulsory valet parking with the huge carpark right there at the front of the hotel. Valet parking is one of Bruce’s hates and the valet running 20 metres to drive the car back to him 20 metres away just had his blood boiling.

While the town of Taos is fairly scrappy with little streets going here and there and shops set in places where it seems impossible to park, there is a classic and historic little town square which provides a quadrangle of souvenir shops, jewellery shops and galleries. I find myself drawn to the t-shirt work of local artist Leandro Rodriguez. He is an elegant man with a quietly upmarket gallery shop and, among other things, does some excellent decorative tributes to Frida Kahlo. Of course, I buy one.

The big drawcard of Taos is the Taos Pueblo - a community of multi-storey adobe buildings which have been occupied by Native Americans for 1000 years. It is now a World Heritage site. One has to pay to go in and there are lots of rules for etiquette while visiting because one is meandering about right in the midst of a living village.

People are cooking and housekeeping their little homes and, for this reason, many areas are

restricted. Other people are running little businesses from their homes or from tables in the shade of the grand pueblo building. It is mainly jewellery, of course. I try to buy a little something from as many of these home vendors as I can - and it makes for delightful interactions on each occasion. These are welcoming, interesting and interested people. I love them.

I also love all the dogs padding about the place. These Native Americans are doggy bods. I love that, too.

We don’t take an official tour but talk to people we meet. They are keen to impart. We learn that archaeologists have never been able to confirm the age of the site since people have always been living in it.

I was born and grew up in that second level on the left over there and my husband was born over here on the other side of the creek, explains the Laughing Hummingbird lady, proudly adding that their daughter was off at college studying business and heritage and would come back to the Pueblo for her career.

The Martinez Hacienda is set a bit out of town beside a rushing creek with cottonwoods in their bright autumn colours. It is an adobe fortress of sorts, a big square windowless structure enclosing two cloistered quadrangles off which are set lots of rooms for lots of purposes. It was built at the time of Spanish colonisation. Its owner, Severino Martinez, was a successful trader and also Mayor of Taos in his

day. The hacienda has been restored allowing one to step back into that rough, rustic, and hard-working era.

Through the low, strong doors we go, given a floor plan and invited to self-guide. We go from door to door, each one revealing wonderful, mysterious, cool and dark surprises. There are spinner and weavers’ quarters, blacksmiths rooms, an amazing earthy old kitchen with large shelving coming from the corner oven where people could sometimes sleep to keep warm...

There are crude bedrooms with the odd bed but the information plates say that most people slept on the floor.

But, above and beyond the practical logistics of life at the time, there is the haunt of the religion which was so dominant among the people and the remarkable art they produced to honour it. There is a room devoted to this religious art - including some very scary naif Dia De Los Muertos creations. There are gruesome puppets, brides and grooms, ghouls... There are countless carved crucifixions

and some simply delicious little saintly paintings. A I adore this naif religious art. It is somehow so profound in its timeless innocence. It seems alive despite the centuries.

There is a big trade display room showing all the things Martinez traded from Mexico. It made him very wealthy. There is also a lot of information on the Mexican crypto-Jews - Jews who were forcibly

converted to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition. I am intrigued by this and end up in extensive conversation with the woman hosting this incredible heritage site who notes that many Jewish rites are still observed by Hispanics - such as covering mirrors when a death has occurred.

This hacienda offers a wonderful enlightenment, nay enrichment for wide-eyed visitors like me. I leave it on a high.

Among other things we do in our time in darling little Taos is to drive out to the Rio Grande Gorge. There is a big strong bridge over it. It is very deep. There are lots of signs telling people not to throw things down there because they might hit rafters. No rafters today. There is just a trickle of water. I think.

Of course, I can’t actually look down.

If there is one thing I hate, it is huge drops. I cling to the railing and pretend to be impressed. Truth is, I would rather go and look at the jewellery and crafts being offered by the itinerant Native American traders on the roadside pull-off. Theirs are folksy creations, Indian knives and arrowheads, hand-tooled jewellery, rough turquoise, and fossils. I engage with a young girl from Pinion Reservation in the mountains. She mounts pieces of

turquoise by bending silver wire around them. She has a map and shows me the different characteristics of turquoise from the various mines in New Mexico and the neighbouring states. I buy a small local piece from her.

We love eating at our gorgeous hotel. We take to going down to the bar for pre-dinner margaritas and eating either at the bar or in the formal restaurant. The food is just lovely. One fish dish I order comes on a base of oyster mushroom - not a bit like our oyster mushroom.

These are Phoenix oyster mushrooms and they have me in a complete swoon. I later order them alone as a side dish in the bar. Not the usual accompaniment to a margarita, but ahhh.

We find Martyr’s Restaurant for lunches. It has a courtyard area where we can watch the traffic and the landscape and eat interesting salads. I so love the spiced char-grilled lamb salad that I have it two days in a row.

And so the time flies in this lovely place.

But we must keep moving...