Mon, Dec 29 - Monument Valley

6.52am - sunrise over Monument Valley, from our hotel room

7.55am - great crunchy French toast (made w/ corn flakes) and fresh fruit, at the hotel restaurant 8.08am - our hotel seen from the Valley, just before starting our tour with a Navajo guide (you have to have a local guide to be allowed off the one dirt road that loops through the Valley)

Ah, so many pictures - here are just a few of my favorite things:
Pre-Columbian petroglyphs

The "Eye of the Sun"

Ritesh's shadow (all that's missing is a colt and a cowboy hat...)

The Totem Pole

A Navajo hogan, which until recently was inhabited by a sprightly centenarian Navajo lady who has lived her entire life in the Valley herding sheep and making rugs. She still makes rugs in here, but has since relocated to a heated little house next door.

After the tour, we drove to Kayenta to get lunch. This is inside the Kayenta supermarket.
Navajo looks like one hard language to learn. In fact, it is so complex that the US used it as code during WWII, and it was never cracked.

Navajo Cakes

This seems to be a wildly popular dessert - in fact, it was the only dessert on offer at the deli counter (where they served Navajo Tacos for lunch): jello w/ some whipped cream, in a variety of flavors (orange, lime, raspberry) - they call it a Parfait Salad. Now I am certainly one to want to try everything, but looking at the ingredient list of one of the to-go packages, I pretty much recoiled in horror. There is not one nutritionally redeeming thing in there. It's just sugar (not even, just five varieties of corn syrup), fake coloring and preservatives. Not even the cream is real. Ahrgh.

1pm - So we ended up at the Subway next door. This is the same turkey sandwich we always get, but we couldn't help but note how sadly understuffed and low on veggies it is. Not so happy about the cheetos and the coke either. Ho hum. 3.47pm - Stunning Ancestral Pueblan ruins at the bottom of the Canyon de Chelly - this is a famous one, shows up on all kinds of paintings, book covers and such. I guess this is why they were called cliff-dwellers... 4.03pm - I had every intention to finish off these remains of Ritesh's Bumble Bar but alas, I dropped it. No worries, I picked it up again and carried it up to the trashcan at the top of the canyon. Although it is so 100% natural it would probably have decomposed quite nicely.

4.25pm - cactus in the snow, on the climb back up from the bottom of the canyon

5.15pm - Found some blue corn and chili crackers we'd brought from home - yay! On the drive back to Monument Valley from Canyon de Chelly

5.25pm - a fuji, leaving the Canyon de Chelly National Park

On the way back, around 7.30pm (yes, this was a long drive) we stopped in Kayenta for dinner at Golden Sands Navajo restaurant.
This is a starter salad from the salad bar: lettuce, shaved carrot, fake bacon bits, croutons and sesame seeds. Other choices included canned pear, canned peach, cottage cheese.

Ritesh's chili, which he recognized as Hormel's, meaning it came straight from a can.

My so-called mountain trout, with a side of (canned) sweet corn plus a baked potato with margarine. I asked the waitress if they had any butter, to which she nodded and said "I'll get you some", quite conspiratorially, if I may add - only to then return with three more little margarine containers!
Meanwhile, every single one of the Italians at the next table ordered the fried liver and seemed to enjoy it. Hmm. I bet there's an Italian guide book out there that recommends this place and tells you to the best dish to get. Which leads me to believe that one should get an Italian guide book whenever traveling, for the food recs alone. Our lame old Lonely Planet USA recommends places like The Blue Coffeepot or the Amigo Cafe, which were not only closed every time we drove by, but also looked somewhat dispiriting. Plus, why would I want to eat Mexican food while in Navajo Nation? I'd much rather stick with the authentic canned food...