A US journey of 3,000 miles in seven days begins with PAL
Recently, at the invitation of Philippine Airlines, and Destination Specialist, the multi-awarded travel agency led by ReneVillarica, we ventured on a seven-day journey to America that began after a 12-hour hassle-free straight flight from Manila to Los Angeles and then by land to Las Vegas.
The following day with Eugene Cheng, a professional tour guide on the wheel, we started our voyage across Arizona, the southwestern part of this great melting pot, stopping by Lake Mead National Recreation Area. With 1.5 million acres, it offers year-round recreational opportunities for boating, fishing, hiking, photography, picnicking and sightseeing. It is also home to the world’s fastest animal, the peregrine falcon and thousands of desert plants and animals, adapted to survive where rain is scarce and temperatures can soar.
Late in the afternoon we watched the IMAX movie as presented by National Geographic, introducing one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon with rocks shaped by thousands of years of rains and floods, represents one of the most spectacular natural environments in America and perhaps in the entire world. From its edge, we gazed in awe far down into the great gorge winding among its many creations. The Grand Canyon owes its distinctive shape to the different rock layers in the canyon walls. Each responds to erosion in a different way, some form slopes and cliffs while others erode more quickly than others. The vivid colors of these layers are due mainly to trace amounts of various minerals, which impart subtle hues of yellow, red and green to the canyon walls. We then toured the 23-mile scenic east rim drive with a quick photo-opp at Desert View.
In the afternoon we headed towards the border of Arizona and Utah and visited one of the majestic sights in Navajo land – Monument Valley with its definitive images of the American West. The remote red mesas, buttes and sometimes desolate landscape surrounded by sandy desert have been filmed and photographed over the years for movies and holiday brochures.
From one Navajo landmark to another, Antelope Canyon is the most-visited and most-photographed slot canyon in the American southwest. This canyon was formed by erosion of Navajo sandstone primarily due to flash flooding and other sub-aerial processes. Rainwater runs into the extensive basin picking up speed and sand as it rushes into the narrow passageways. Shafts of direct sunlight radiating down from openings in the top of the canyon create a beauty to behold. By mid afternoon we were at Glen Canyon Dam, a concrete arch dam on the Colorado River in northern Arizona near the town of Page. The dam was built to provide hydroelectricity and flow regulation from the upper Colorado River Basin to the lower. Its reservoir is called Lake Powell, and is the second largest artificial lake in the country.
Our last day was spent at Bryce Canyon National Park located in southwestern Utah. The major feature of the park is Bryce Canyon, which despite its name is not a canyon but a collection of giant natural amphitheaters. It is distinctive due to geological structures called hoodoos, formed by stream erosion of the river and lake beds, sedimentary rocks and frost weathering.
Having traveled close to 3,000 miles by land in seven days, we drove back to Los Angeles for our flight to Manila. It was certainly not the usual familiarization tour where shopping and more shopping was top on the list. This unique trip was about communing with nature, catching sight of lone farmhouses or small communities nesting into valleys. It was admiring the handiwork of the native American people such as pottery, paintings, quill work and baskets and getting caught up in that dream of long ago.
