Old Butte Phoenix

Tucson to Phoenix. It’s a short hop. An easy day in the world of road trips.

We’re going back to Phoenix as a sentimental journey. We stayed at the Marriott at the Buttes in Tempe some years ago in the midst of a vicious heat wave and we just loved it.

Of course, we also have loved the glorious saguaro city of Tucson.

It’s the only city I’ve visited where even the trailer parks are ritzy - avenues of tall palms and high walls.

It has roads with names like Sweetwater and Silverbell.

It has a deficit of architectural vulgarity.

It has the Santa Catalina Mountains.

And, whenever it rains, it rainbows.

We don’t hurry our departure. We linger around the pool first.

Oddly, I seem to have a touch of sunburn on my back. I have an olive skin and never have had sunburn and I can’t understand how I have it now, since I have not overexposed myself. Yet my back burns. I put on aloe vera and we drag ourselves away from this world of saguaros. Tucson is one of those low-rise cities which does not seem to have a CBD as a structural core. It sprawls in a big, wide easy way. It is big. It takes a while to get across it.

We decide we’ll have lunch at a Panera Bread. I love this chain. I have wonton soup.

Eventually we are on the road past mesquite scrub and lush, ripe corn crops on big, big flat land. It has been a while since I saw corn which was so much a part of the daily drives across the north of the country. We saw the crops young and watched their development right across the land. I have missed them.

The desert stretches out with craggy mountains ahead.

There’s a huge air base out there with lots of planes. It is clearly not commercial.

Oh, bee hives in the desert. Desert honey. Wish I had tried it.

A sign announces Red Rock. There are quite a few candidates out there. I Google and find Picacho Peak.

Another sign confirms Picacho Peak and yet another one invites us to visit its roadside Bird Farm and Feed The Lorikeets.

Good grief. You never know what you’ll find in the American desert. Caged Australian birds, no less.

Ironically, I spot raptors in the sky. Now, they belong here.

And so do goods trains. There they are out there, pushing their miles of loads overland. This one is Union Pacific. It has three engines at the front, two at the back. Even the graffiti artists can’t handle the volume of rail cargo. Only a couple of carriages show their multicoloured art.

The road is beautiful and wide. Six lanes. Flat and straight.

Sign: Blowing Dust Area.

Crops and shrubs adorn the land. A few cacti.

Hah. Here comes the town of Picacho. A long, long livestock train waits empty on the outskirts.

Police have sidelined an open-top sports car at the roadside.

A sign indicates Casa Grande Ruins National Monument.

The landscape has changed since those Pueblo days. What we’re seeing now is pecan orchards. Huge orchards with lovely lush trees. Fallow fields, Orchards.

And heavy traffic.

We are in another great cluster of trans-continental trucks and big rigs. I catch the eye of a driver as we pass. He is so high up. My father had a romantic notion about the loneliness of the long-distance truck driver. He saw an existential beauty in the somewhere nowhere nature of that life. I wonder what the trucker is thinking.

Billboards dot the roadside. They're mainly for food, delicious chicken wings. One asks: Do You Have Lyme Disease?

Now I spot four planes flying in formation quite low and slow over the desert. Planes and trains and automobiles. Yay!

And, suddenly, eek. There are always a few morons out there who can’t read the road. One such has just swerved past us to speed ahead and veer in front of the next car and tailgate the one ahead. Is he on drugs? Is he in a bad mood? Is he just plain stupid?

One often wonders about who are the other people on the road, where they are going and why.

Cactus seem to have vanished from the landscape. It is dry and dusty. Huge powerlines.

Cotton crops and fallow fields. Horses.

The town of Casa Grande turns up, big and dusty, malls and commerce.

And back to crops. Sorghum and cotton. Some acreage bright green with new growth. Some ploughed and brown.

Sign: Blowing Dust Area.

Mesquite and tufty saltbush plants. Dusty farms.

Another cop car has picked someone up.

We’re on the Gila River Indian Reservation - and cactus is suddenly back on the landscape.

It’s a wide old world out there, broad, flat with mountains on the horizons.

But the land is divided into patchwork irrigated crops. The deserts bloom these days and act as food bowls.

The police whizz by in pursuit of someone up ahead. We hope it is that hoon. We catch up as two cars pull over to the verge ahead of the police car. Hah. They have got that hoon. Oh, no. The hoon is not their target, though his pulling over indicates his guilt. He swings back into the stream of traffic ahead of us. Pfft.

We cross the Gilo River. It is bone dry. Pale, dusty mountains with slopes covered in cactus are around us now and feeder roads bring more traffic into our steady stream. We are nearing Phoenix.

Yep, industrial outlyings, reduced speed limit, mega storage, a racetrack, overpasses, A new line of mountains manifests, its ridges prickled with communication towers.

And hillsides covered in cactus. Here they are again in all their exotic beauty.

A big outlet mall. Very neat and handsome. Through the township of Chandler. Very sleek, tidy, busy, affluent with a big city efficiency to it, complete with traffic jams…

It is an upmarket Phoenix satellite - and here comes the big smoke itself, complete with its spectacular mesas and buttes.

That butte over there complete with ancient saguaros is our destination.

Hello Tempe at the Buttes Marriott.

Albuquerque new and old

I think we may be addicted to hotels now. All these pristine, quality beds. Lovely fresh quilts.

There have been only a couple of really disappointing hotels on this epic trip. Mainly it has been a luxury.

In Albuquerque, we are in a Marriott. We have become very fond of them.

In this case, we are assigned a 17th floor corner room with a fabulous view which includes mountains, city roads and sprawl and, what’s that down there, a ritzy brand new super modern mall?

I’m in deep need of retail therapy.

We unpack, check out the pool and hotel layout and then stroll out on a shopping mission. Patient Bruce sits on pleasant shady benches while I dart in and out of chic stores -

Anthropologie, Bebe, Chico’s, Gap, Michael Kors. I love to shop but I am a terrible shopper. I don’t buy anything.

We do, however, go to the mega wine store. It covers just about a city block and it is sensational in its extraordinary range and layout. It not only puts wines in their grape varieties and countries, it also sets them out in moods and flavours. Truly. There are whole sections under Crisp & Clean, Elegant &

Refined, Sweet & Decadent, Big & Robust.. They have tastings going in all directions. We did not try anything. Moscato ain’t our thing. Nor sweet liqueurs. We just wander around with our jaws dropping at the scale.

Our jaws drop again when we are leaving.

The checkout girl has been experimenting with zombie makeup for Halloween. Gruesome doesn’t begin to cover it. Her face is enough to turn a person to drink.

Perhaps that is the idea.

We hit the bar at our hotel for a drink and a decent feed of prawns. There are people in Halloween costumes all over the place. This country goes nuts with it. Pirates and pumpkin people, scarecrows, ghosts, butchers, characters from TV and cartoons.

We retreat to our divine room and the city lights.

In the morning, Bruce asks the room service girl why she is not in costume. She is most offended. Apparently she does not ordinarily wear red shorts and white leggings with her hair in upright pigtails. She is a TV character of which we’ve never heard.

It’s just a pitstop in Albuquerque, After a simply luscious swim in the hotel pool and an hour of lovely morning sun, we pack the car and go to explore the city before continuing our journey.

We find Historic Albuquerque and are in seventh heaven. I have never see so many chilies. There are chilies in great, fat strands adorning gates and doors and verandah posts. There are chilies in great big beautiful wreaths. There are dry chilies and fresh chilies. And there are chili everything else, from earrings and ornaments to every sort of sauce imaginable.

What divine irony. All those

fancypants designer retail stores could not thrill me. Now the humble chili vendors with their huge wreaths of fresh chilis have me hot with lust to own. And I am not able to buy. Well, I could, but I could never bring them home.

So I loiter and swoon and yearn.

Old Albuquerque also has a lineup of Native

American craftspeople sitting in the shade of a cloistered walkway with their creations. More wonderful turquoise. The longer one is in New Mexico, the more one seems to come to love that stone. The Native American artisans certainly do. They find character in every stone. And it is important to them whence each stone comes. There are many mines.

The little town square also brags a glorious old mission-style church. Lots of tourists are coming and going in group tours. A band is setting up for a concert in the rotunda. It is quite a happening place, in a low-key gentle way.

We find a marvellous Mexican restaurant and settle down for lunch at

a sidewalk table. I have a salad in a big taco shell thingie. I am not an aficionado of Mexican food. In fact I never liked it. Bruce long has said that New Mexico and Arizona would change this - and it has. My Mexican salad lunch is fantastic, albeit way more than one could eat.

We drive around Albuquerque some more to get a sense of the city as a whole and then, with a nudge from Siri Google, find the old Route 66 and hit the travelling road again.

Las Cruces, here we come.

Tomb it concerns

It had been another lovely meal of mega salad and seafood with the odd pineapple mojito on the beachside balcony of Dukes. We’d eaten early to get a good table and were feeling just a bit guilty at having succumbed to a dessert of Dukes’s sensational sorbet cake.

Since we had some daylight left, we decided to explore a corner of the hotel mentioned in the hotel information pack. It seemed to be a pavilion with rest rooms for the public by the public beach beneath our balcony. It had a lift to “the lagoon”, Bruce reported. Let’s check it out.

And thus we went past the conveniences down a long corridor stepped into the mountainside. There was strange artwork on the walls. It felt a bit like the entrance to a tomb with an art deco influence. At the end were the doors to the lift.

Hmm. Is this a computer game?

The lift opened promptly. It was rather world-worn inside. The faded dials gave us a choice of UL or LL. We pressed UL and the doors closed. It was quite a long ride up. We shuddered to a stop and stepped out onto a narrow walled parapet which looked steeply down on some very scruffy foliage. No view. A cement path went around what turned out to be a rather grand and lonely lift tower.

There was no sign of lagoons.

We crossed a road to some steps and thus into the first of a series of very long colonnades. There were highly groomed gardens on one side and at the other, a broad expanse of aged asphalt tennis courts, unfenced, weed-lined and long abandoned, their lines just visible. How odd, we thought.

At the end of this colonnade was a stridently-illuminatad laughing buddha. White as white in the bright downlight, he sat in vast obesity enjoying some private joke. Beyond him were a couple of working tennis courts with some fit young men having a hit.

The colonnade turned left and led to another junction in which stood a huge rooster statue. Beside it was a rope and a sign saying “Stairs Closed”. Some very overgrown stairs led down to a roadway below.

Another long stretch of colonnade beckoned.

This was strange. Apart from the two tennis players, we had seen no one.

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There, beside us to the left was another tennis court - not just a tennis court but a whole tennis stadium sunken into the hillside. The tennis stadium that time forgot.

Weeds straggled out from among the tiers of dirty, abandoned seating. Grass peeped from cracks in the court surface. Creepers festooned the fences. The back wall was gouged and ragged.

It was a strange and melancholy sight. A huge question mark.

Clearly tennis had enjoyed an opulent heyday once upon a time.

Why had it died?

The colonnade continued. There was a sense of somewhere nowhere. Still a suspicion that we had walked into a computer game. Lara Croft might leap out at any minute.

Feeling decidedly disconcerted, if not just a bit weirded out, we followed the colonnade. It made another turn marked by another sculpture.

This time it led towards what seemed to be a formal garden.

And, there a very grand scene opened up. A very beautiful round swimming pool lay behind a “Swimming Pool Closed” sign.

On close inspection, it did look a bit crumbly and in need of care.

But our attention was seduced by the very grand building at the far end of the garden.

Steps and levels of lawns led up to a magnificent marble terrace.

Wicker arm chairs and tables were tucked behind grand columns.

Lights were on inside.

There was the faint sound of music.

Timidly we approached the great glass doors, expecting at an minute someone to come and tell us to go away. The doors opened. There were more lights on through glass doors at either side of a very grand foyer with huge chandelier, lounge chairs and coffee tables upon which large picture books lay open, showing Hawaiian landscapes.

But, no signs of life, apart from the hauntingly quiet music.

Centrepiece to the foyer was a tall glass display table wherein rather enigmatic design plans were set out.

We poked about curiously, ever more haunted by the feeling that we had stepped into some other dimension. There were signs of golfing paraphernalia in an illuminated side room.

Was this some sort of golf club?

Where were the golfers?

Through large doors on the other side there lay a lake and beyond that, yes, golf links.

Immense white fish sculptures rose from the water but the little promontory was closed off, a deserted work site.

Skeletal remains of huge unfinished buildings stood on the horizon. An giant crane stood there, idle, bowed over in such a way that it looked genuinely crestfallen.

Still no signs of human life.

But we found a big placard which invited interest in a fabulous new development.

“This could be your view,” it offered.

“Go into the Club House and we will tell you more."

There was a photograph of a luscious resort-like development. The photo was fading.

Obviously it had been there a long time.

We were getting a strong feeling that we were being watched.

We had stepped into, not a computer game but a massive broken dream.

This was an ambitious golfer’s heaven that had turned into hell.

We were wandering around in a mire of millions of lost dollars.

It was a very strange ghost world.

We retraced our steps down the long, once-proud colonnades whence we had come and back to that strange old lift which, thank heavens, took us back into the sanctuary of our lovely hotel.

Marvellous Marriott - and spook meets spook

The Marriott is massive, nestled by the soft, golden-sanded strand of Kalapaki Beach on beautiful Nawiliwili Bay. There are dramatically-contoured green volcanic mountains in all directions, lush in some lights, dramatic in others and occasionally garlanded in streamers of cloud.

It is not as breathtaking as the St Regis at Hanelei Bay, where we stayed last time we were here. I thought I could never in the world better that extravagant old place and I yearned to return to it. But the news feeds of Expedia firmly warned that the old girl had gone downhill while her exorbitant prices had risen. I exchanged sentiment for economy as I sat in my Norwood bed surfing the travel sites in the depths of an insomniac night and, after much trawling, settled on the Marriott at Lihue which, it turns out, was what our Flight Centre girl, Nicolette, had suggested in the first place. Good call, Nicolette.

This resort is spectacular and just huge, huge, huge, with endless beautifully-cultivated gardens and some sort of engineering miracle of complicated waterfalls and features. The pool is immense with a scalloped perimeter and it has an island. Swimming the full circumference of the pool is a pretty good little workout. And, under a series of fantastical water-spouting statues, rabbit and elephant among them, it is fun.

Unlike most hotels, people here are encouraged to bring water toys into the pool. I have never seen the like. A giant inflatable stingray turned up yesterday, alongside a blowup swan the size of a small dinghy.

Our room 2125 is a suite. It is on a corner with two balconies giving us both a mountain view and a pool view. It is the stunning reality of the views I perused from my sleepless bed in Australia. Oh, the wonders of the Internet. I pinch myself over and over again. Luxury. Love it. I was born for this.

I was hanging out for a mai tai and was rather peeved that on our first night here, the assorted restaurants and bars were so full of happy, rowdy holidaymakers that there was nowhere to have one!!! Nowhere! There was just one bar stool in the whole place.

We gave up, booked a table for 8pm, and went up drinkless, to change for dinner.

Long, broad paths run from the hotel down the bay to a series of restaurants and, further along, water sports facilities and quaint little tourist shops and a bar. The beaches in Hawaii, as in Australia, are public so there are lots of locals enjoying the landscape. The hotel pops colored wrist bands on us every day as we collect our beach towels. These entitle us to all the sun lounges. The public have to bring their own. They tend to come for the gentle surf or just the pleasure of paddle boarding around the bay. There is quite a congregation of them out there, some being schooled in the art.

We chose the Italian restaurant, Portofino - upstairs on a broad open deck with palm and bay views. Out of habit, I ordered a New Zealand savvy. For the sheer cultural incongruity of it all, I also ordered escargot.

Oh, dear. I have never had snails swimming in a creamy soup before. They sat upon little beds of a piquant tomato and herb paste. They were deliriously good.

I had hoped to have a less rich main course in the veal piccante. You know, the old lemon and caper treatment. But this one was heavy and creamy, an onslaught of kilojoules. Damn it. Delicious with it.

By this time, we’d become chatty with the waitress, Lana. American wait staff tend to work hard at connecting with diners because their tips depend on good impressions. Lana hit paydirt with us.

This is one of the ultimate stories of the small world.

Lana is fair skinned with long blonde hair, neatly in a pony tail. She is definitely not Hawaiian. Where was she from, I asked.

Siberia, said she.

“Krasnoyarsk?" suggested Bruce casually, for no good reason I could detect.

Lana’s eyes almost popped out of her head.

“Yes!” she exclaimed.

“How do you know of Krasnoyarsk? It is a little place. It is mostly underground. No one has ever heard of it here.”

“Ah,” said Bruce wisely. “It has the radar facility, a cold-war magnet for spooks.”

“Oh, my god. You know about this? I was a radio technician there!” Lana exclaimed.

“We used to spy on the USA.”

Bruce chuckled.

“In my job once upon a time, we used to spy on you, too.”

“What? We were spying on each other? This is so amazing.”

Yes it was.

And here we were in Hawaii.

Both Lana, whose proper name is Svetlana, and the Bruce said their work once upon a time was secret and still is. They were not going into detail. Just the strange nature of co-incidence.

Lana had found and married an American and escaped a cold life in Russia for tropical Hawaii. When they moved to the mainland where there were winters, she baulked and left her husband to return to Hawaii. Years ago now. She had no intention of ever living anywhere else again.

I don't blame her.