Richard Flynn :: no comment

Quick, someone check in on France to see if there’s anyone there. My experience at the Grand Canyon suggests that there was some sort of French national excursion to northern Arizona. I’m not over-exaggerating when I say that three out of four tourists I encountered there were French (-speaking). It is possible that there is an alternative national outing to San Francisco, because I heard lots of French being spoken by tourists there, too.

The Grand Canyon, when you get there, is undoubtedly spectacular.¹ This enormous canyon has an average depth of a mile, with sheer red rock-faces giving way to rock stacks dotted throughout its middle. It is so large that the Colorado River is often barely visible from the rim of the canyon. While it was about 70ºF where I was on the south rim (at about 9000 ft) in August, temperatures inside the canyon were then reported to be about 120ºF.

So, the Grand Canyon is an attractive sight (and site) for tourists. For the most part things are set up pretty well for tourists, with a ‘Grand Canyon Village’ located on the south rim, where there are lodges and shops, as well as clear and fenced paths along the rim of the canyon. However, I couldn’t help comparing the experience with that of being a tourist at Ayers’ Rock, which is a similarly remote natural wonder. As someone without a car, I found it relatively difficult to arrange transport to and from the canyon, which surprised me; when I got there there were often no clear paths to walk from the tourist village where I was staying to the paths along the rim.

I took the train west from San Antonio to get to Tucson nineteen hours later. Looking at the map when I was planning this part of my trip, it seemed evident that I should be able to fly from Tucson to Flagstaff for transport to the canyon. When it came to booking that transport, though, I found only one company with regular ‘shuttle’ service from Flagstaff to the Grand Canyon, which only operates two trips a day in its people-carrier. Fortunately, one of the times to go north to the canyon just about coincided with the schedule of my flights from Tucson via Phoenix, so I was able to take the trip with the shuttle. But when it came to leaving the canyon, there was nothing which would leave at the right time for me to check in efficiently for the flight to Los Angeles via Phoenix. I would have had to leave the canyon far earlier than necessary, which would have meant my spending at least five hours in the rather dull town of Flagstaff rather than walking along the canyon rim. As a result, I had to book a private taxi to take me the 70 miles from the canyon back to Flagstaff airport.

At the canyon itself, there is a well-organized network of shuttle buses to take people to different points in the village and along the rim path. This was fine—although some of the bus drivers I encountered were excessively officious, to the point of rudeness—but when, on the evening I was there, I wanted to walk from the lodge where I was staying to the rim (a distance of about half a mile), I found it ridiculously difficult so to do. There was a sign giving instructions about how to get to the rim from that point, but the instructions made no sense, and seemed to be self-contradictory. Evidently I wasn’t the only one who had difficulties, because I kept seeing several other groups of people wandering around scratching their heads. Eventually I found myself at the rim, having walked much further than strictly necessary, following the road open only to the shuttle buses and ending up at the Visitors’ Centre at the eastern extremity of the village. Later that evening, having walked west along the rim until sunset, I felt sure that I would be able to find the ‘proper’ pedestrian path back to my lodging. Surely, after all, many of the other people there with me would be doing the same thing? No, of course not: they all jumped in to their cars, a few got in to a shuttle bus, and drove back to the village. I pulled out my torch and took myself along the pavement-less road for the fifteen-minute walk.

As I say, this all felt remarkably different to how things work at Ayers’ Rock. When you get to Alice Springs, the first thing you see at the airport (apart from the signs about low-octane non-sniffable petrol) is a number of stalls advertising different tour companies to take you to the Rock. There is a wide array of different options: some offering everything to you ready-made, others just providing transport with the expectation that you’ve got or can make arrangements for accommodation at Yulara tourist village. Alternatively, you can fly all the way to Ayers’ Rock (Connellan) airport and be met there by shuttles which run to the accommodation at Yulara. Yulara is a few kilometres outside the national park, but again there are various options for shuttles into the park if you haven’t got a car.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have any serious difficulty at the Grand Canyon, but it struck me that some things are made unnecessarily difficult for those without a car—or rather plans haven’t really been made for people who would rather walk than go by road. I suspect that better options for transport to the Grand Canyon are available from Las Vegas,² but it seemed more sensible to me to come to Flagstaff, which is closer to the south rim, and in the same state as the canyon. Maybe I was wrong there.