Scenic America: The Four Corners

by Sean McLachlan on

When you’re figuring out where to go for vacation, you might want beautiful vistas, clean air, ancient ruins, and traditional cultures. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they have to go to some remote country to find all that. You don’t. Head over to the Four Corners region and you’ll get all that and more.

The Four Corners, where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet, is home to several national monuments and parks as well as some of the most stunning scenery in the country. Much of the area is taken up by various Native American reservations, including the Navajo Nation, which is the largest. This region has been a center of native culture for thousands of years, and includes several well-preserved pueblos, adobe villages preserved by the elements and their builders’ natural ingenuity. The best are Canyon de Chelly and Mesa Verde.

“Awe inspiring” is a hackneyed phrase in travel writing, but you’d have to be a robot not to be moved by the vast open spaces, rugged mountains, and varied colors of the landscape. The desert has a subtle beauty to it that grows on you the longer you stay. Sometimes it’s not so subtle, like when you pass through the massive buttes of Monument Valley or watch the sunset change the sky from pink to crimson to purple over the course of a quiet half hour.

While the region seems remote, it’s quite easy to get to. One scenic route is to fly into Phoenix (definitely not a scenic start, but it gets better), drive a rental car up to the old logging town of Flagstaff in the mountains, stop at the Grand Canyon and Painted Desert, and continue on to the Four Corners. You can see a lot in a long weekend, but you might want to consider staying a whole week and exploring some of the more untrod areas.

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Lost city found in Ethiopia

by Sean McLachlan on

One of Africa’s most interesting countries has just got a new site to visit.

An ancient Muslim city thought lost for a thousand years has recently been discovered. A team of French archaeologists have found the location of the medieval trading center of Gendebelo.

While Ethiopia is famous for being the second oldest Christian country in the world (after Armenia), about half of the population is Muslim and the two communities have lived side by side for centuries, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not.

Gendebelo was part of the more peaceful exchange, acting as a focus for trade between the two cultures.

The archaeologists puzzled out the location of the city with the help of an old manuscript that an earlier researcher had found in the Muslim city of Harar, where it was being used for wrapping sugar. The manuscript told the tale of a 16th century Venetian explorer who had found the ruins of Gendebelo in the desert and gave vague references to the city being “the place where mules are to be unloaded and camels take over.”

That was enough for the archaeologists, who realized the explorer meant the escarpment that marks the borderland between the rough highlands and the arid Danakil Depression. It was here that merchants who used mules (the Christians) and those who used camels (the Muslims) met for mutual profit.

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The French team was able to pinpoint the site as being a medieval city now known as Nora. It’s been abandoned for years except for the mosque, which is still used by local farmers. Legends say that in ancient times the people of Nora were so rich that on his wedding day one young man paved the road to his bride’s town with injera bread. Allah grew so angry at this conspicuous consumption that he destroyed the town with a rain of ash.

The ruins of Nora are a bit out of the way for modern travel, but planned excavations will almost certainly reveal some fine remains, and the town may become a new tourist sight. In the meantime, one great Muslim center of civilization, Harar, is still very much in use. The city is in the eastern part of Ethiopia and is considered the fourth holiest sight for Muslims after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The people of Harar are majority Muslim, but there’s a large Christian population too. Both speak Harari, a Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew. Jews also used to live in the area, but they fled to Israel and other countries during Ethiopia’s civil war in the 1980s.

Harar was founded more than a thousand years ago and is still enclosed by a city wall, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Besides the walls, there are three mosques dating to the tenth century, and the house of the French poet Rimbaud, who lived here when we was working as a gun runner and hanging out with the local governor, who was the father of Haile Selassie. Another weird sight is the nightly feeding of the hyenas.

Have you been to Ethiopia? Tell us about your experiences in the comments section. I’m taking my wife there for our tenth anniversary and I’m open to suggestions of places to go!

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Peace brings tourists back to Lebanon

by Sean McLachlan on

Even by the standards of the Middle East, Lebanon has had a rough time of it. A bitter civil war and periodic Israeli invasions have left much of the country in ruins, but now that order appears to be restored, the country’s tourism ministry is wooing visitors back.

Lebanon has a lot going for it–beautiful beaches, good skiing, fine dining, fantastic historical sights, and cheap accommodation. There are World Heritage Sites such as Qadisha Valley (pictured here), a lush region sheltering ancient Christian communities. Unlike much of the Middle East, alcohol is legal and there’s good nightlife. There once was a time when Beirut was the party town of the Mediterranean. Of course that was before Ford was president, but there’s always hope that it can be so again. Hey, why not?

According to a BBC report, hundreds of thousands of tourists have visited Lebanon this year and officials are hoping for two million tourists before the end of the summer. Not bad for a country with a population of only four million.

The country has been relatively stable recently, and if they can keep Hezbollah in line and avoid getting attacked by Israel again, travelers looking for a bargain will have another stop on their agenda.

I’ve seen Lebanon, but only from across the border in Syria! Have you been to Lebanon? Post your experiences in the Comments section.

Have you seen. . .The Thing?

by Sean McLachlan on

As you drive through the desert along I-10 you see them–garish signs beckoning you to explore the mystery of “The Thing?” The signs are everywhere, 247 of them stretching from Arizona to Texas. The journey is long and boring, punctuated only by bad country music and Born-Again preachers on the radio. Finally you make it to Exit 322 at Dragoon, Arizona, and see the cheap yellow, red, and blue facade inviting you to stop and see The Thing? itself.

How could you say no? I couldn’t. A long, long time ago, a much younger Museum Junkie felt the siren call of roadside America and pulled over in his 82 Nissan Stanza to find out what The Thing? really was.

Past a curio shop stuffed with plastic tomahawks and The Thing? shot glasses, I entered a back lot with three sheds. The first two were stuffed with dusty displays of fascinating junk, everything from a mock-up of a torture room to a 1937 Rolls Royce supposedly owned by Hitler. There were strange carvings made of roots and driftwood too, and random bits that looked like they were saved from a dumpster behind an antique mall.

But then I spied the yellow trail of Bigfoot prints leading to the third shed. I followed them and beheld in all it’s glory–THE THING?!!!

So what is it? A crashed UFO? A fifty-foot Eiffel Tower made out of jelly beans? J. Edgar Hoover’s drag queen outfits? No! It’s. . .it’s. . .

. . .well, it’s this. A dusty female mummy holding a baby mummy and shyly hiding her geriatric genitalia behind a Chinese hat.

Is it real? This former archaeologist made a thorough examination of it (by staring through the dirty glass) and came up with the professional diagnosis of “maybe”. The face looks pretty fake, making me suspect its a paper mache dummy with a few spare ribs from somebody’s barbecue added for effect, but something made me think twice. Dessicated human remains are fairly common in the Arizona desert, and were even more common back in 1950 when the museum opened.

As an archaeology student at the University of Arizona back in the day, I got to tour the state forensics lab and saw several of these mummies. Some were ancient native Americans, others dated to modern times and were what the lab attendants referred to as JPFROG (Just Plain F**cking Ran Out Of Gas).

Another roadside attraction, The Million Dollar Museum in New Mexico, had several of these things, but sadly they have closed. According to unverified reports (what else would you expect?) the FBI was sufficiently convinced the mummies were real that they hauled them away for DNA testing.

Ancient mummy, cheesy fake, or JPFROG? You be the judge. Go to. . .The Thing?

Or be lazy and watch this YouTube video narrated by Hunter S. Thompson (not really).

Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia

by Sean McLachlan on

The news wires have been aflame for the past couple of months with reports of the amazing new fossil called Ida, which has been hailed as the fabled “missing link” just as Lucy was when it was excavated in Ethiopia in 1974. Journalistic hyperbole aside, they’re remarkable finds, and now you can see both of them in Times Square, New York.

A traveling exhibition called Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia highlights these two relatives of ours (Creationists please do some research before commenting) and carries on to cover Ethiopia’s rich cultural and historical heritage.

While this exhibition has been on for a month, seeing the Ida fossil for yourself is even more interesting now because of an important article in the latest issue of Scientific American casting doubt on Ida’s close links to humanity. The poor little critter may be a country cousin at best.

While the main draw is these two paleontological superstars, the rest of the exhibition is equally important in that it covers the deep culture of one of the world’s oldest nations. Ethiopia is the second oldest Christian nation in the world (after Armenia) and the only African nation to successfully resist colonization. Only for a few years was Fascist Italy able to occupy the country, but they faced constant resistance and never really controlled the country.

Over the centuries Ethiopia has produced a vast corpus of literature, ornate painting and metalwork, and architectural wonders such as the sunken churches of Lalibela pictured here, hewn out of solid bedrock 800 years ago.

Oh, and it was the Ethiopians who discovered coffee. We must all give thanks.