Wednesday, September 20, 2000
Tuesday, September 19, 2000
Monday, September 18, 2000
An extract from Full Circle
"Full Circle is the book which accompanied the BBC TV series. I saw the episode in question on television on Boxing Day and was absolutely enchanted with his experiences. Days 178 to 181 really captured my imagination and made me want to follow in his footsteps - perhaps when you read the following text you will understand why!" [Angela]
An Extract From "Full Circle".
The following text is taken from Michael Palin's "Full Circle" which was first published in 1997 and has been reprinted five times.
ARICA, Day 178.
At the port of Arica, only 12 miles from the Peruvian border, it is Army Day. Which is quite suitable really as it was through military action that Chile acquired Arica in the first place. In the War of the Pacific, between 1789 and 1883, Chile seized Arica and Tarapaca province from Peru as well as a large chunk of Bolivia, including all her coastline.
The sound of a twenty-one gun salute early this morning and the presence of General Pinochet in town reinforces my impression that the traditional hierarchy of Chile - rich landowners and old families in alliance with conservative and highly trained armed forces - is still firmly in place.
Stir myself for an early morning run by the Pacific. The sea must be rich here for there are sea birds everywhere. Great gangling pelicans, storm-petrels, boobys, skuas and shearwaters skim the waves while red-beaked oystercatchers scuttle up and down the foreshore and forbidding red-headed turkey vultures glare balefully from the rocks. The clouds are low, thick and depressing. The cold, offshore current which bears the name of its nineteenth century discoverer, Humboldt, condenses the warm desert air into a low and formless mist which blots out the sun and envelops the Pacific coast as far north as Panama for eight months of the year. It looks like rain-cloud, but it never rains here. Odd to think that the world's most abundant source of water and its driest desert can exist side by side.
Day 179.
Roger has made the sensational discovery that General Pinochet was beneath our roof last night, being feted at an Army Day banquet. Just to prove it, he got out his rarely-seen camera and took his first photographs on the entire Pacific Rim journey - twenty four views of General Pinochet leaving the El Paso Hotel, Arica. "They are for history", he says, modestly.
Instead of following the fog-bound Pacific coast, we have decided to travel by rail and river from Bolivia into the Peruvian interior, across the Altiplano (the high plains of the Andes) and down into the river system which leads eventually to the Amazon and the remote southern reaches of Colombia. It is potentially by far the most difficult and dangerous stretch of our journey. "No gain without pain" will be the motto of the next few weeks. When, and if, we emerge from the Colombian jungle, the reward will be the prospect of North America and a relatively "civilised" race to the finish.
Arica's tiny station is only a few hundred yards from the ocean, where hefty breakers smash onto the rocks with lazy, effortless strength. We needn't have hurried. There is no sign of the eight o'clock departure for La Paz. A half dozen mangy cats lope off behind the bushes as we unload our bags. On the tiny platform there is a memorial to one "John Roberts Jones, Ingeniero, who oversaw construction of the line into Arica and died of malaria on the 18th of February 1911." My mind goes back to Pringle Stokes of the Beagle, whose memorial lies two and a half thousand miles away, beside a snow-covered beach at the other end of Chile, and I wonder what it was that induced both men to come so far from home and risk their lives in such pitiless climates. They didn't even have the BBC as an excuse.
A single ticket to La Paz costs 52 dollars, "in clean US bills only," my guidebook adds. Once paid, there is nothing to do but wait. When the train that is to take us over the Andes finally arrives there is a palpable sense of anti-climax amongst the sprinkling of mainly foreign travellers who have been checking their watches with increasing anxiety for the past hour. All that stands between us and Bolivia is a single dusty, silver-grey railbus, designed and built in Germany thirty years ago to potter around the suburbs of Munich. Like Pringle Stokes and John Roberts Jones it seems destined to end its life far from home. And, from the look of it, quite soon.
Every item of heavy baggage, and we have forty-eight, is hoisted onto the roof by the stationmaster assisted by his wife, and endlessly cheerful lady in a beige cardigan. Vitaliano, the driver, helps from time to time. He has been driving the Ferrobus since 1992, he says, and adds proudly: "I have been filmed four times." (Not exactly what we want to hear.)
We leave precisely on the hour, although not the hour we were meant to leave precisely on. We have a driver, an assistant driver, a steward and twenty-five passengers on board, including Linda, the big American we last saw on the MV Puerto Eden and her boyfriend who today sports a "Name your Poison" T-shirt with a death's head on it. No one dares ask when we might reach La Paz. The word "nightfall" is vaguely mentioned.
This could be optimistic, at the rate we're going. The first stop is not for a station, but to change the points, a cumbersome business which requires the assistant driver to climb out, walk up the line, unlock a pad-locked lever, change the points and repeat the whole process in reverse after the train has passed.
About 20 miles out of Arica we ride a long left hand bend over the river and are suddenly and dramatically into the desert. The orchards, pastures and maize fields of the Lluta Valley recede below us like a thin, green glacier. The last remnants of the coastal fog are burnt away: The sun glares down. Our little coach, reduced to a speck in a mighty landscape, climbs slowly, and with frightening gear changes. We seem to hang on the mountainside in a perilous limbo, as the cogs struggle to sort themselves out. And it is steep. Within a distance of 25 miles we climb 7500 feet.
A thin plastic water pipe runs beside the line. Without it we probably wouldn't get across the Andes. Wherever there is a spigot the driver stops the train, fills a red plastic bucket and refreshes the engine cooling system, which is working harder as the air gets thinner.
I'm beginning to feel light-headed myself. We've all been warned of the effects of altitude sickness, but all I feel at the moment is a curious elation, a kind of couldn't-care-less contentment. Now I know why they call it being high.
Six and a half hours after leaving Arica we have reached the Chilean frontier. A faded sign shows the official altitude to be 13,305 feet. There is not much here. A few derelict sheds, some stone buildings from more prosperous time which now provide little more than walls to urinate behind and shade for those getting off the train for a smoke (not allowed on board). All around us stretches the altiplano, a wide, treeless plateau of boggy grassland in shades from rich emerald to lemon green, bordered by the implacable white peaks - Putre, 19,102 feet, Larrancagua, 17,712 feet and the mighty volcano Sajama, its cone rising 21,500 feet. The air is clean and pure and the sunshine quite blinding. I stride off up the line to get the best view. Feel giddy after a few steps and have to slow down. I notice too that the ink flows more thinly from my pen as I try to make a note of what happened.
A mile further on, across a no-man's land, populated only by grazing llamas, is the Bolivian border town of Charana. It's pretty clear from the look of the people and the condition of the buildings that we have crossed more than just a line on the map. Chile has a per capita GNP of 2730 dollars. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, with a per capita GNP of 680 dollars. Most Chileans are mestizos, of mixed Spanish and Indian blood, sixty per cent of Bolivians are pure Indian. No one in Chile wears a bowler hat. In Charana all the women seem to have them. The military in Chile are always immaculate. The soldiers on the Bolivian frontier wear shapeless baggy trousers, tight, creased jackets and cotton forage hats.
The only sign of any investment in Charana is a gleaming new set of Banos Publicos, certainly the finest public conveniences I've seen since Santiago. I find them firmly locked. I suppose it makes sense; the public would only make a mess of them.
Linda, the American, is taking the altitude badly. She says she had been told there was oxygen on the train and there wasn't and she had mimed to the steward that she badly needed to sniff something and he had said rather huffily, "No, that is Colombia, we do not have that here." In the end they sorted it out and they gave her a large mug of coca leaf tea, which he was not allowed to serve in Chile. Coca leaves contain cocaine, and are chewed by the people of the Andes as commonly as we smoke tobacco.
We are now over the watershed and rattling downhill. The driver bounce up and down on his seat like a man on a pogo stick, and the coca tea is flying everywhere. This does wonders for conradeship and soon the two New Zealand girls who are travelling with their mother, "to all try and get to know each other", are talking to the German with the Peruvian wife and nineteen-month-old baby, Linda and the Dutch backpackers are comparing altitude sickness and the two Norwegians who were robbed in Ecuador are chatting up two heavily tanned girls from Brisbane. Outside it grows dark and very cold. The cold stops everyone talking and after we've eaten our chicken and chips we try to sleep as the little rail-car bumps and grinds precariously towards La Paz.
It seems wholly predictable when, shortly after our twelfth hour on the train and within an ace of La Paz, there is a jarring whine, a lurch and silence. We are derailed. The driver reaches for a torch and climbs down. Voices are raised, a small crowd of people emerge from the darkness. The front wheels are off, and the baggage mountain on top of the train is tilted at a dangerously jaunty angle. Opinions are passed round. The driver disappears into the darkness with a shovel. He comes back with a pile of earth and stones which he tips into the space between the line and the unclosed point. Others dig around for stones and throw them on as well.
There are two small children among the crowd of locals which has gathered. I ask them if they have ever seen anyone try to put a train back on the line like this before. They nod cheerfully. This is how they always do it. I shouldn't worry, they say, it only takes half an hour. Sure enough, half an hour later, after some frenzied throttling, the whirring wheels catch the rubble and climb back on the line.
Cold and tired we may be but our adventures are not over yet. The approach to La Paz is dramatic. The city is built in an enormous canyon into which we descend in a series of corkscrew spirals. The glittering lights of the city below promise excitement and glamour but the closer view is depressing. The line is unfenced and neglected. At times the track disappears from sight beneath sand, dirt and stones. Packs of bony dogs prowl ahead of us, picking at the scattered piles of rubbish. Two drunks are caught in the headlamps walking alone the line, balancing shakily on the rail and laughing. Perhaps the final indignity, as we wind our way down into the city, is finding two tall iron gates closed against us. The drivers, whose patience has been saintly, grab torches and climb down yet again. Eventually a lady in a red shawl and a billowing pink dress emerges from a shed, takes out a key and carefully unlocks the gates. The drivers remount only to find that, while they were out, a passing drunk has climbed into the train. He's mistaken us for his bus home and is quite confused. The driver ejects him and we edge forward through the gates, which the lady in the pink dress locks after us, only to find ourselves in the middle of a city street. The driver hoots back at cars, themselves indignant at finding a train from Chile in the middle of their traffic jam. It is a wondrous, surreal finale to a journey which comes to an end a few minutes later at a deserted, unexpectedly handsome station, fourteen hours after leaving Arica.
We've covered the distance at an average speed of 16.4 miles an hour. But no one's complaining. There were many times during this momentous day when we thought we'd be lucky to get here at all.
La Paz, Day 180.
Seroche. That's what I'm suffering from. It's a Spanish word, and has a glamorous ring to it that the English counterpart, "altitude sickness", sadly lacks.
All of us, in varying degrees, "soroched", and we shall spend two days here retuning our systems for a further week of high altitude travel that lies ahead.
La Paz, or La Cuidad de Nuestra Senora De La Paz as it was was named by Alonzo de Mendoza, its Spanish founder, in 1548, is a strange place. The highest capital in the world at 12,000 feet, but at the bottom of a hole. The rich live at the foot of the hill and the poor at the top. Mud-walled houses are piled up the walls of the canyon, while a modern high-rise city occupies the centre. Between the two is a labyrinth of steep streets that tempt the eye but test the unacclimatised walker.
Street traders seem to have taken over the centre of La Paz. The pavements groan beneath the sackfuls of socks, piles of shoes, mountains of embroidered brassieres and hectares of Stayprest trousers. Beside them sit Indian men and women, known as cholos or cholas, in from the country. The women are particularly distinctive, wearing felt bowlers perched on top of dark, centrally parted, often plaited hair and carrying their worldly goods in fat cloth bundles. Their dresses are made from various combinations of bright, shiny material and worn wide and full over multiple petticoats. Apparently the whole outfit was foisted on the Indians by Spanish law over two hundred years ago.
Despite, or maybe because of this, the Indians resolutely refused to take Spanish as their first language and even today mostly speak only the Indian languages of Aymara or Quechua. And they don't like being photographed. Basil has had water flicked at him by several ladies and aspersions cast on his legitimacy, In Aymara and Quechua.
Higher up the hills behind the find stone facade of the Basilica of San Francisco I find very odd things for sale, including dried llama foetuses. Apparently they bring good luck. I'm told that no self-respecting new building goes up in La Paz without a llama foetus in the foundations. (Other bits of llama are put to good use as well. La Paz was the first capital in South America to have its own electricity supply. It was powered in those early days by llama dung.)
Minibuses squeeze past me through the streets with children at their open doorways shouting a list of destinations in a lilting monotone, like a priest absolving sins. Shoe blacks who can't be more than eight or nine years old, shout "Blanco!" and point accusingly at my travel-worn trainers. It's a disorderly entertaining city and I return to the sober, more expensive anonymity of the commercial district tired but happy, in time to watch the sun slip behind the surrounding hills and the canyon walls turn into a carpet of sparkling lights.
An Extract From "Full Circle".
The following text is taken from Michael Palin's "Full Circle" which was first published in 1997 and has been reprinted five times.
ARICA, Day 178.
At the port of Arica, only 12 miles from the Peruvian border, it is Army Day. Which is quite suitable really as it was through military action that Chile acquired Arica in the first place. In the War of the Pacific, between 1789 and 1883, Chile seized Arica and Tarapaca province from Peru as well as a large chunk of Bolivia, including all her coastline.
The sound of a twenty-one gun salute early this morning and the presence of General Pinochet in town reinforces my impression that the traditional hierarchy of Chile - rich landowners and old families in alliance with conservative and highly trained armed forces - is still firmly in place.
Stir myself for an early morning run by the Pacific. The sea must be rich here for there are sea birds everywhere. Great gangling pelicans, storm-petrels, boobys, skuas and shearwaters skim the waves while red-beaked oystercatchers scuttle up and down the foreshore and forbidding red-headed turkey vultures glare balefully from the rocks. The clouds are low, thick and depressing. The cold, offshore current which bears the name of its nineteenth century discoverer, Humboldt, condenses the warm desert air into a low and formless mist which blots out the sun and envelops the Pacific coast as far north as Panama for eight months of the year. It looks like rain-cloud, but it never rains here. Odd to think that the world's most abundant source of water and its driest desert can exist side by side.
Day 179.
Roger has made the sensational discovery that General Pinochet was beneath our roof last night, being feted at an Army Day banquet. Just to prove it, he got out his rarely-seen camera and took his first photographs on the entire Pacific Rim journey - twenty four views of General Pinochet leaving the El Paso Hotel, Arica. "They are for history", he says, modestly.
Instead of following the fog-bound Pacific coast, we have decided to travel by rail and river from Bolivia into the Peruvian interior, across the Altiplano (the high plains of the Andes) and down into the river system which leads eventually to the Amazon and the remote southern reaches of Colombia. It is potentially by far the most difficult and dangerous stretch of our journey. "No gain without pain" will be the motto of the next few weeks. When, and if, we emerge from the Colombian jungle, the reward will be the prospect of North America and a relatively "civilised" race to the finish.
Arica's tiny station is only a few hundred yards from the ocean, where hefty breakers smash onto the rocks with lazy, effortless strength. We needn't have hurried. There is no sign of the eight o'clock departure for La Paz. A half dozen mangy cats lope off behind the bushes as we unload our bags. On the tiny platform there is a memorial to one "John Roberts Jones, Ingeniero, who oversaw construction of the line into Arica and died of malaria on the 18th of February 1911." My mind goes back to Pringle Stokes of the Beagle, whose memorial lies two and a half thousand miles away, beside a snow-covered beach at the other end of Chile, and I wonder what it was that induced both men to come so far from home and risk their lives in such pitiless climates. They didn't even have the BBC as an excuse.
A single ticket to La Paz costs 52 dollars, "in clean US bills only," my guidebook adds. Once paid, there is nothing to do but wait. When the train that is to take us over the Andes finally arrives there is a palpable sense of anti-climax amongst the sprinkling of mainly foreign travellers who have been checking their watches with increasing anxiety for the past hour. All that stands between us and Bolivia is a single dusty, silver-grey railbus, designed and built in Germany thirty years ago to potter around the suburbs of Munich. Like Pringle Stokes and John Roberts Jones it seems destined to end its life far from home. And, from the look of it, quite soon.
Every item of heavy baggage, and we have forty-eight, is hoisted onto the roof by the stationmaster assisted by his wife, and endlessly cheerful lady in a beige cardigan. Vitaliano, the driver, helps from time to time. He has been driving the Ferrobus since 1992, he says, and adds proudly: "I have been filmed four times." (Not exactly what we want to hear.)
We leave precisely on the hour, although not the hour we were meant to leave precisely on. We have a driver, an assistant driver, a steward and twenty-five passengers on board, including Linda, the big American we last saw on the MV Puerto Eden and her boyfriend who today sports a "Name your Poison" T-shirt with a death's head on it. No one dares ask when we might reach La Paz. The word "nightfall" is vaguely mentioned.
This could be optimistic, at the rate we're going. The first stop is not for a station, but to change the points, a cumbersome business which requires the assistant driver to climb out, walk up the line, unlock a pad-locked lever, change the points and repeat the whole process in reverse after the train has passed.
About 20 miles out of Arica we ride a long left hand bend over the river and are suddenly and dramatically into the desert. The orchards, pastures and maize fields of the Lluta Valley recede below us like a thin, green glacier. The last remnants of the coastal fog are burnt away: The sun glares down. Our little coach, reduced to a speck in a mighty landscape, climbs slowly, and with frightening gear changes. We seem to hang on the mountainside in a perilous limbo, as the cogs struggle to sort themselves out. And it is steep. Within a distance of 25 miles we climb 7500 feet.
A thin plastic water pipe runs beside the line. Without it we probably wouldn't get across the Andes. Wherever there is a spigot the driver stops the train, fills a red plastic bucket and refreshes the engine cooling system, which is working harder as the air gets thinner.
I'm beginning to feel light-headed myself. We've all been warned of the effects of altitude sickness, but all I feel at the moment is a curious elation, a kind of couldn't-care-less contentment. Now I know why they call it being high.
Six and a half hours after leaving Arica we have reached the Chilean frontier. A faded sign shows the official altitude to be 13,305 feet. There is not much here. A few derelict sheds, some stone buildings from more prosperous time which now provide little more than walls to urinate behind and shade for those getting off the train for a smoke (not allowed on board). All around us stretches the altiplano, a wide, treeless plateau of boggy grassland in shades from rich emerald to lemon green, bordered by the implacable white peaks - Putre, 19,102 feet, Larrancagua, 17,712 feet and the mighty volcano Sajama, its cone rising 21,500 feet. The air is clean and pure and the sunshine quite blinding. I stride off up the line to get the best view. Feel giddy after a few steps and have to slow down. I notice too that the ink flows more thinly from my pen as I try to make a note of what happened.
A mile further on, across a no-man's land, populated only by grazing llamas, is the Bolivian border town of Charana. It's pretty clear from the look of the people and the condition of the buildings that we have crossed more than just a line on the map. Chile has a per capita GNP of 2730 dollars. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, with a per capita GNP of 680 dollars. Most Chileans are mestizos, of mixed Spanish and Indian blood, sixty per cent of Bolivians are pure Indian. No one in Chile wears a bowler hat. In Charana all the women seem to have them. The military in Chile are always immaculate. The soldiers on the Bolivian frontier wear shapeless baggy trousers, tight, creased jackets and cotton forage hats.
The only sign of any investment in Charana is a gleaming new set of Banos Publicos, certainly the finest public conveniences I've seen since Santiago. I find them firmly locked. I suppose it makes sense; the public would only make a mess of them.
Linda, the American, is taking the altitude badly. She says she had been told there was oxygen on the train and there wasn't and she had mimed to the steward that she badly needed to sniff something and he had said rather huffily, "No, that is Colombia, we do not have that here." In the end they sorted it out and they gave her a large mug of coca leaf tea, which he was not allowed to serve in Chile. Coca leaves contain cocaine, and are chewed by the people of the Andes as commonly as we smoke tobacco.
We are now over the watershed and rattling downhill. The driver bounce up and down on his seat like a man on a pogo stick, and the coca tea is flying everywhere. This does wonders for conradeship and soon the two New Zealand girls who are travelling with their mother, "to all try and get to know each other", are talking to the German with the Peruvian wife and nineteen-month-old baby, Linda and the Dutch backpackers are comparing altitude sickness and the two Norwegians who were robbed in Ecuador are chatting up two heavily tanned girls from Brisbane. Outside it grows dark and very cold. The cold stops everyone talking and after we've eaten our chicken and chips we try to sleep as the little rail-car bumps and grinds precariously towards La Paz.
It seems wholly predictable when, shortly after our twelfth hour on the train and within an ace of La Paz, there is a jarring whine, a lurch and silence. We are derailed. The driver reaches for a torch and climbs down. Voices are raised, a small crowd of people emerge from the darkness. The front wheels are off, and the baggage mountain on top of the train is tilted at a dangerously jaunty angle. Opinions are passed round. The driver disappears into the darkness with a shovel. He comes back with a pile of earth and stones which he tips into the space between the line and the unclosed point. Others dig around for stones and throw them on as well.
There are two small children among the crowd of locals which has gathered. I ask them if they have ever seen anyone try to put a train back on the line like this before. They nod cheerfully. This is how they always do it. I shouldn't worry, they say, it only takes half an hour. Sure enough, half an hour later, after some frenzied throttling, the whirring wheels catch the rubble and climb back on the line.
Cold and tired we may be but our adventures are not over yet. The approach to La Paz is dramatic. The city is built in an enormous canyon into which we descend in a series of corkscrew spirals. The glittering lights of the city below promise excitement and glamour but the closer view is depressing. The line is unfenced and neglected. At times the track disappears from sight beneath sand, dirt and stones. Packs of bony dogs prowl ahead of us, picking at the scattered piles of rubbish. Two drunks are caught in the headlamps walking alone the line, balancing shakily on the rail and laughing. Perhaps the final indignity, as we wind our way down into the city, is finding two tall iron gates closed against us. The drivers, whose patience has been saintly, grab torches and climb down yet again. Eventually a lady in a red shawl and a billowing pink dress emerges from a shed, takes out a key and carefully unlocks the gates. The drivers remount only to find that, while they were out, a passing drunk has climbed into the train. He's mistaken us for his bus home and is quite confused. The driver ejects him and we edge forward through the gates, which the lady in the pink dress locks after us, only to find ourselves in the middle of a city street. The driver hoots back at cars, themselves indignant at finding a train from Chile in the middle of their traffic jam. It is a wondrous, surreal finale to a journey which comes to an end a few minutes later at a deserted, unexpectedly handsome station, fourteen hours after leaving Arica.
We've covered the distance at an average speed of 16.4 miles an hour. But no one's complaining. There were many times during this momentous day when we thought we'd be lucky to get here at all.
La Paz, Day 180.
Seroche. That's what I'm suffering from. It's a Spanish word, and has a glamorous ring to it that the English counterpart, "altitude sickness", sadly lacks.
All of us, in varying degrees, "soroched", and we shall spend two days here retuning our systems for a further week of high altitude travel that lies ahead.
La Paz, or La Cuidad de Nuestra Senora De La Paz as it was was named by Alonzo de Mendoza, its Spanish founder, in 1548, is a strange place. The highest capital in the world at 12,000 feet, but at the bottom of a hole. The rich live at the foot of the hill and the poor at the top. Mud-walled houses are piled up the walls of the canyon, while a modern high-rise city occupies the centre. Between the two is a labyrinth of steep streets that tempt the eye but test the unacclimatised walker.
Street traders seem to have taken over the centre of La Paz. The pavements groan beneath the sackfuls of socks, piles of shoes, mountains of embroidered brassieres and hectares of Stayprest trousers. Beside them sit Indian men and women, known as cholos or cholas, in from the country. The women are particularly distinctive, wearing felt bowlers perched on top of dark, centrally parted, often plaited hair and carrying their worldly goods in fat cloth bundles. Their dresses are made from various combinations of bright, shiny material and worn wide and full over multiple petticoats. Apparently the whole outfit was foisted on the Indians by Spanish law over two hundred years ago.
Despite, or maybe because of this, the Indians resolutely refused to take Spanish as their first language and even today mostly speak only the Indian languages of Aymara or Quechua. And they don't like being photographed. Basil has had water flicked at him by several ladies and aspersions cast on his legitimacy, In Aymara and Quechua.
Higher up the hills behind the find stone facade of the Basilica of San Francisco I find very odd things for sale, including dried llama foetuses. Apparently they bring good luck. I'm told that no self-respecting new building goes up in La Paz without a llama foetus in the foundations. (Other bits of llama are put to good use as well. La Paz was the first capital in South America to have its own electricity supply. It was powered in those early days by llama dung.)
Minibuses squeeze past me through the streets with children at their open doorways shouting a list of destinations in a lilting monotone, like a priest absolving sins. Shoe blacks who can't be more than eight or nine years old, shout "Blanco!" and point accusingly at my travel-worn trainers. It's a disorderly entertaining city and I return to the sober, more expensive anonymity of the commercial district tired but happy, in time to watch the sun slip behind the surrounding hills and the canyon walls turn into a carpet of sparkling lights.
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