Utah Part 1: Monument Valley

Our friends Jess and Luc were visiting the USA from Sydney, so we decided to fly over to meet up with them for part of their travels.  We flew into Las Vegas (direct flights from Toronto and only $400 return!), and the next day drove 650km across southern Utah and northern Arizona to meet them in Monument Valley, which is on the border of Arizona and Utah.  

I'd booked our car through a Hotwire mystery deal, and it ended up with Hertz.  At the airport, the staff member tried desperately to upsell us on everything - a better car, insurance (that we'd already purchased), fuel, GPS... and as a final act of revenge when we declined every upgrade, she took our booking for an economy car and instead put us in a compact car with no numberplates and a temporary registration sticker, that Stephen could hardly fit into. We ended up getting pulled over for the lack of numberplates by a Sheriff in Utah (where it's illegal), but luckily he was swayed by the "stupid Australian tourist" persona and didn't put us up on charges for it.  Hertz - jerks.

Anyway, eventually we made it to Monument Valley.  You might not recognize the name, but you probably recognize the view.  It's a series of sandstone buttes that jut 300m out of the plateau at random.  These two are called The Mittens... for obvious reasons.

They're pretty big.  That's a 4WD and a person at the bottom of the photo, for scale.  We drove around on a ~20km off-road track through the desert to see them all.  Luckily Jess and Luc had fallen for the upsell from their car rental check-in person and had a huge 4WD car, as I am not sure that the tiny compact car would have been great at 4WDing.

Monument Valley is on Navajo Native American land.  The buildings you can see in the foreground are hogans, which is the traditional way of living for Navajo people.  They are basically wood and packed mud and earth, and the doors always face east to welcome the sun.  Apparently they're the first real energy efficient homes, as the construction meant that it was cool in summer and kept heat in in winter.  

There were wild horses randomly wandering around in the desert, like this poseur.

It's very flat apart from the buttes, which looks pretty crazy when you get to any sort of viewing place.  That green speck in the lower-middle of the picture is a house.

Hey look, it's us!

We stayed at a lodge overlooking Monument Valley.  Jess and Luc wanted to make the most of their holiday in Utah (and are also slightly crazy), so they made us get up at 7am so that we could get a headstart on the day.  I wasn't impressed by the early wake-up time (well I was on vacation!), but we were awake in time to watch sunrise over Monument Valley from our balcony, which was pretty good compensation for the early start.

Trip continues in Part 2 and Part 3.