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The visitors's center and the hiking paths at El Morro are really well done. The rangers stationed here were among some of the most knowledgeable and helpful, we encountered on the entire road trip.

One ranger in particular was quick witted and seemed to enjoy a little verbal sparring. When I returned from one hike I asked him "Can you tell me what those small round metal objects are that are spaced about 12 feet apart at the base of the inscription cliffs are?".

He smiled and responded "Yes".

A long pause (while he smiled at me and waited)..

Then I asked him what they were, not are you able to tell me what they are. He enjoyed that. The round metal spike heads, he told me, were driven into the face of the cliffs by early scientists "mapping" the inscriptions on the cliffs. Each round metal badge had a number to cross reference with the inscriptions.

He was full of interesting information and clearly enjoyed his job. Fun.

Rain and snow melt feed a small waterhole at the base of a cliff. For thousands of years it was the only reliable water for over 30 miles in any directions. The cliffs served as a landmark making the waterhole easy to locate. The original waterhole has been enlarged a bit over time by those who depended upon it, but it is still dwarfed by the towering cliffs that shade it and keep it from evaporating in the summer heat.

The waterhole is along the natural route between the Acoma and Zuni Pueblos. Anasazi built masonry dwellings and kivas on top the El Morro sandstone mesa and added their petroglyphs to the rock faces of the cliffs near the waterhole. These cliff faces would record the passing of many interesting, famous, and widely varied travelers.

The oldest “non-Native American” inscription was left by Don Juan de Onate in 1605. Lots of the Spanish conquistadores left their message here and “paso por aqui” or “pasamos por aqui” (I or we passed by way of here in Spanish), is a common message carved in the cliffs. Ramon Garcia Jurado carved a message on the cliffs in 1709 just 30 years after the Pueblo Revolt, where the Pueblo people united and drove the Spaniards out of their homeland (temporarily).

Among the Native American bighorn sheep petroglyphs and Spanish “paso por aqui” messages a poet left a poem in 1629 cut in stone. Then came Americans and the U.S. Army. Lt. J.H. Simpson left a crisp inscription here in 1849. Then the somewhat bizarre: in 1859 the U.S. Army experimented with the use of camels for desert travel in the American Southwest.

The camels were bought in Egypt; trained in Texas; and led by Lt. Edward Beale (He was originally in the U.S. Navy!) with a fellow named Breckenridge, in charge of the camels. They stopped by at El Morro twice, both in 1857 and in 1859 when they carved their names in the cliffs.

By the time the civil war began, the U.S. Army gave up the idea of camels and most were sold or turned loose. There are many strange stories of those travelers who ran across “wild camels” in the Southwest in subsequent years, many of whom must have given up whatever brand of whisky they may have been drinking at the time.

The stories with a link to El Morro, go on and on, and make interesting reading. A visit to El Morro brings many of the stories much more to life. It was a good stop and excellent hike. Ice had closed a portion of the loop trail, so Ed and I hiked to the end of the trail and the back tracked up to the top of the mesa to hike the other portion.

0 ACTIVITIES DAY SEVEN OF TWELVE 0

This would be an interesting day of travel on this road trip but not a particularly good day for photographs. In fact, there is only one photograph that I took the entire day that I’m proud of. The rest do little more than share a story of road trip travels and preserve good memories.

After a now customary big breakfast at Denny’s, we left Grants, New Mexico for El Morro National Monument. El Morro had perhaps the most interesting history of any place we visited on this road trip. There are few “knock out” photos to be had here but hiking along the inscriptions panel on the face of the cliffs; the water pool that “made” the place; or up across the top of the cliffs where there are kivas and masonry ruins and views for hundreds of miles - - certainly made this a great place to stop and visit.

Leaving El Morro, we drove to the Zuni Pueblo. I got my favorite photograph of the day of a young Zuni girl clutching her precious puppy, she said she had named “angel”. Zuni Pueblo though, is one of two places we visited on this road trip that I would not highly recommend. The pueblo itself is so run down it is a bit depressing, even though all the Zuni people we met were friendly, helpful, and wonderful people.

The women working the official Zuni crafts outlet store will never make a living working on sales commission but in their own unhurried way, they went about life. I bought a jet bear fetish here with

Mohammed wanted to show us all the tourist sights on or near the Damascus-Aleppo highway en route, which would under normal circumstances have been a fantastic idea. However, Emma really wasn't well, and actually passed out in Hama shortly after I took this photo. Fortunately it wasn't anything serious - just a combination of dehydration, exhaustion and heatstroke, I think. Doubly fortunate was the fact that no locals (or Mohammed) saw Emma pass out - they're so helpful and concerned about the welfare of visitors that they most definitely would have called her an ambulance, which would have been overdoing things slightly.

Emma had more or less recovered from her gastro by the time we reached Tartous, and even managed to keep on having a great time in Aleppo despite her sickness. Don't let this story put you off going to Syria - on the whole, hygiene standards there are excellent, and certainly far better than Morocco or Egypt. Emma just got unlucky....

Now, to the picture. The Orontes river flows from the Lebanese mountains down into Syria before entering the Mediterranean on the Turkish coast. The Orontes flows straight through the middle of the town of Hama, but Hama lies in a slight valley, with the fields surrounding it at a slightly higher elevation. The Romans got around this by building big wooden nourias, or waterwheels, to ferry the waters of the Orontes along aqueducts to the surrounding fields. The water wheels then remained in use for almost 2,000 years, before being superseded by diesel-powered water pumps. However, the city authorities, in their wisdom, kept all the remaining water wheels, and provided funds to make sure that locals were trained in their construction and maintenance. Hama now gets a decent amount of tourism due to their presence.