01/08/09 Grants (NM) – Chinle (AZ) / 422 km

We were ready at nine. We got ready for the rain covering everything with plastic bags. This day we changed the route and we did not follow Route 66. A friend of us told us that it was worth visiting the villages of Zuni and El Morro and we went there. When we arrived to El Morro they offered us to do some guided visits but we did not have time for that. Basically but there is to see there are some shanty towns belonging to old tribes and some inscriptions that have been made in the rocks. We went to Zuni, where an Indian community live at this moment, and they keep the village as it was in the old times. We could not see it, again our bad luck, since the Indians were celebrating their summer rain prayers and they did not want to receive visits during these celebrations. So going out the Route it was not of much use after all.

We crossed Gallup and what we saw from the bike was very nice. Again, it was a pity that we did not have to sleep there. It was very similar to Santa Fe, but it looked more real, less focused on tourism and therefore nicer. A little bit further up we took Route 666, what is called the Devil´s Route, and we entered Arizona but without abandoning the Navajo Nation ( this country is divided among four States; New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado). It started to rain and we stopped in a gas station to put on the rain clothes. Some guys that were there looked astonished at our Wisconsin plate.

We had two options to arrive to Chinle: a quite dodgy way without rain ( by the looks of the sky) and a good road but probable with rain. We decided to take a risk and we avoided the rain by the skin of one teeth. We rode two kilometres under the rain but we could see the sky was clear ahead of us.

The traffic is very light in this area, the roads are quite narrow but it was nice to ride. We arrived to Chinle campsite. To be a free of charge campsite it was clean and convenient. After mounting the tent and all that, we visited the Canyon de Chelly, which we liked a lot. It has very flat walls and you can distinguish the ancient houses of the tribes that lived in caves made on these walls. They were made quite high, to avoid the attacks of predators. There is a high rock in the middle of the canyon that the Navajo people call "Spider Woman" and that according to the legend is supposed to be the one who tough the Navajo people to weave their tapestries.

We were quite tired and we went to a Navajo hotel nearby to have dinner. We did not like it very much and besides when we asked a woman working there about the Navajo language and culture she did not pay much attention. Maybe she was not Navajo or maybe she could not bother giving explanations to the tourists, who knows. That night there was a thunderstorm, but we were in the tent when it started. The rain was nice to us and the next morning our stuff and ourselves were dry.