Days 359-360: Sidetrips and Leaving Las Vegas

My original plan when I decided to go to the United States for a few weeks included a few days spend at the Grand Canyon, ideally doing a hike across it. Unfortunately the didn't work out. Part of the problem was that I originally planned to spend about 3.5 weeks in the country, but changes to when I left New Zealand and when I booked a flight into South America meant that I only had about 2 weeks, so everything got condensed. The other issue was that about 3 months prior I tried to book a bed at the hotel at the base of the canyon, but it was already completely full. Basically it's just too hard to juggle planning for all the things I want to do, and a few things have to get left out.

Since I wasn't going to be able to do any real hiking at the Grand Canyon, my consolation was to do one of the day trips out of Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon. Most of the day was taken up driving there and back, but we did get in a quick visit at Hoover Dam, and around 2.5 hours at the Canyon. Our drive/guide talked for much of the time, and while he did have some interesting information and good anecdotes it was buried in hours of corny jokes and repetition that left me wanting to smash my head on the window repeatedly.


The Grand Canyon itself was pretty cool. I probably would have been a lot more awed by it a year ago, but the scope of it is still enough to impress me. I've found that for natural things I really react strongest when I can enjoy them on my own, isolated from other people, and that was simply impossible with the 2.5 hours we had. I had been hanging out with a German girl who was in my hostel in Las Vegas, and we took the shuttle bus around to a few of the different view points, but there wasn't enough time to get too far off the main paths so everywhere we went there were more tourists. It was still worth the trip out, and hopefully I'll get a chance to do the hike I want sometime in the future.


The bus got back pretty late in the evening, and I only got a few hours of sleep before I had to get up again around 3am to walk back down Freemont Street to the Greyhound station to get my bus from Las Vegas to Phoenix. I got a little sleep on the bus and spent the rest of the time enjoying the changing landscapes and got into Phoenix early in the afternoon. There are only 2 backpacking hostels in Phoenix, and one was only open for the 1st and 3rd days I'd be there, and the other only on the 2nd day, so I knew there would be a lot of moving back and forth. I checked into the first hostel and spent a bit of time exploring downtown, but mostly just relaxed at the hostel and tried to catch up on sleep.