Moo's Mid Life Crisis: Monument Valley

Apologies for the few days delay in posting. It's been a busy few days and by the time I'd gone through and cut down and edited photos for each day I was just too pooped to actually write up the blog for it too. The end of this tour is approaching and I have a few days downtime in Las Vegas so have been planning on doing more writeup there. At the moment we are in the van heading for Route 66 which will take us to Vegas ... and as I continue I am now in my lovely B&B in Vegas a day later. Too much to see out of the window of the bus to stare at a computer screen!

Anyway - back to the blogging about Monument Valley.

Driving to Monument Valley we stopped briefly at '4 Corners' (not 4 Candles), the only place in the US where 4 different states meet at a single point. It's on one of the Indian reservations and is basically a small tourist trap with very little to look at other than a cross on the ground where the four corners meet. I was unimpressed (hence no photos of it), but I have passed through quite a few states so far, and am in a foreign country, so it wasn't really a big thing for me.

Next we passed 'Mexican Hat Rock', presumably named because it looks a bit like an upside down sombrero. Not far past that we stopped for lunch at this cheekily named cafe for a lunch of Navajo Tacos, with proper Navajo Fry Bread, which was very tasty.

Monument Valley itself is in the Navajo reservation, where federal and state laws are superseded by tribal law. It's pretty darn flat in general, but with large buttes scattered all over the place. Buttes are like small mesas (and hoodoos are like small buttes - see Bryce Canyon post), so basically all this stuff is the same geology, just at different sizes.

We took a dusty jeep ride with a native Navajo guide out into the reservation. He was fun, but often unintelligible when speaking over the loudspeaker to us in the back. He did sing to us in Navajo while we were at a Navajo ritual site - a large cave with a hole in the roof. It is used for meetings, rites of passage and storytelling apparently.