There are two ways to get to Taos from Santa Fe. There is the quicker (but still pretty) Low Road, and the more dramatically scenic and historically interesting High Road. This winds through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains through high desert, forests and tiny communities. On the way there are stories to be discovered, stunning landscapes to marvel at and picture-perfect churches to explore.
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In the mid 1930s a young couple set sail on the SS Moldavia with a group of friends, cruising to Lisbon, Madeira and the coast of north Africa on what they termed a ‘proper holiday’. They captured their adventures in photographs which they carefully stuck into an album and labelled. Later they added to the album: photos of a walking holiday in Germany, camping in Devon and more.
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When the first Spanish explorers arrived in what is today northern New Mexico in 1540, and saw the adobe structures of Taos Pueblo, they believed that they had found one of the fabled seven golden cities of Cibola. These were rumoured to be dotted across the desert plains of this region. Some say the sunlight glinting off the straw embedded in the adobe mud fooled Europeans into thinking there was gold in the soil.
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When Newcastle United reached the last 32 of the Europa League in 2013 we held our breath to see what team we would be drawn against, dreaming of a February trip to warmer climes, maybe Italy, Spain or Portugal. Instead we got Metalist Kharkiv, a team we had never heard of, in the eastern depths of chilly Ukraine. Would we go? You bet we would!
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After the deforestation of Rapa Nui, and the destruction of the moai, probably as a result in part at least of war between the tribes, the people needed to believe in something; if their ancestors could no longer protect them, who would? The answer was, one of their own.
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An elderly man in naval uniform sits on a bench in the museum grounds. He is eighty years old and is employed by the museum as a guide, although his main duty is simply posing with tourists. To the visiting North Koreans this man is a national hero; while to the relatively few tourists from further afield he is simply an historical curiosity.
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There is something about a tale of an abandoned city that tugs at the imagination, and this one is no different. Here among the remnants of an emperor’s glory you can still discover riches, and the sense of a world that existed only briefly and is long gone.
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There is a solidity to this church; it seems rooted in the soil from which it was built. Its thick walls with their jutting buttresses look more like a fortification than a place of worship, and its massive bulk seems completely out of proportion to the small community it was built to serve.
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A king and his queen are buried here, an unexpected sight in a country where much of ancient history has been forgotten, ignored, rewritten or even erased.
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Imagine this. You were born by the shores of the Mediterranean. Your childhood summers were hot and your winters temperate. But now you are grown, and you are a soldier, posted to the furthest reaches of the Empire where icy winds blow down from the north and snow falls in the winter months.
