Santa Fe and Santo Domingo

Perhaps it was just us but, well, we were a little disappointed with Santa Fe. With the aid of our trusty TomTom we found our way to the Old Town of Santa Fe which is an unusual series of adobe built buildings interspersed with some more modern structures, 1900s or thereabouts, that seem to be occupied by businesses selling some very up-market merchandise to visitors with other shops selling the usual range of tourist tack that tourists always buy. Most restaurants concentrate on local cuisine which means Mexican/New Mexican cooking so nearly everything comes with a choice of red or green chillie, no not without chillie but with a choice of the two colours. It is up to the customer to decide whether he or she can trust the server when questions about the relative strengths of each variant are answered. In some places red is hotter than green, in others the opposite. So, after eating vegetarian burittos with fairly hot both red and green chillie sauce on them and, no you have to have chillie, you cannot get food without it, we walked through the almost deserted streets of the Old Town at the very late hour of nearly 8.30pm towards the Plaza and the Govenor's Palace built in 16210 which is the tourist highlight of the town. Apart from a few straggling tourists like ourselves the main occupants of the Plaza were some homeless people settling down for the night and groups of youngsters in differing stages of inebriation and intoxication. As we walked back towards the car park where we had left our trusty hire vehicle a small group seemed to detach themselves from the main gatherings and started to follow us down one of the streets. At the same time a girl started shouting and screaming at a couple of men and a brief kicking and punching fight started. We crossed over the street from our followers, sped up our walking speed and made our way back to the relative security of the car park. I decided that we are getting much too old for the hazardous vagaries of street life in modern America and my feelings were echoed by the man on the desk in our hotel who said that he hardly goes into the enter of Santa Fe anymore because of the threats, both imaginary and real, that the drunks and druggies in the Plaza now represent. But before that and to show that Route 66 is at the heart of this trip here is a picture of me close to a Route 66 marker in Santa Fe.
The following morning we checked out of our hotel a day early and drove south to Albuquerque and an unscheduled stop at the Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town that I found and made a reservation in from the comfort of our Santa Fe Holiday Inn Express. On the way southwards on I-25 we pulled off the highway to follow a sign pointing towards Santo Domingo Pueblo. A couple of miles along the side road the metalled road gave way to rough dirt tracks running between a few rows of single storey adobe buildings. Children playing with dogs in the dry dust besides houses, some of the buildings had dome-shaped abode built ovens next to them. Each one had a large opening at floor level with one or two blackened soot encircled openings at about head level at about 90 degrees to the main opening. The largest and most modern building in the pueblo had a large sign on its front , 'Santo Domingo Tribe War Veterans Center' and next to it was another sign demanding that visitors do not take pictures, use video cameras, make sketches or use cellphones. Anyone breaking these rules would be liable to a fine of up to $1,000 payable to the reservation police. Groups of Indian men dressed in jeans, shirts and heavy jackets even though for us it was a hot day, stood around talking to each other and greeting friends as they walked or drove slowly by. Feeling very much as we were intruders we decided to turn the car around and drive away from this tribal area. One nice touch was that both as we drove into and out of the pueblo, Indian drivers would look towards us and acknowledge us with the lift of a finger on a hand holding a steering wheel. After not responding to the first gesture I suddenly realised that this was no different to driving on the roads of County Mayo in Western Ireland. So one or two Santo Domingo inhabitants were hopefully pleasantly surprised by at least one not so ignorant white man.