Our day started at 5am waking up in the only tent in a caravan park next to a highway. Driving through the darkness was a relief from the monotony of desolate flatness, a road lined with signs for Indian Casinoes and truck stops. In the blackness even the power stations took on new form, trussed up in fairy lights ready for a show. Tavener violins soared on the radio as light began touching the horizon. The ground began to swell and we silently sailed past dark masses, like islands in the dim light. The landscape was changing.

On foot in Santa Fe, hot sun and strong winds in winter. We reached an iron gate over an arroyo, intricately decorated in iron hummingbirds and pinecones. We couldn’t find the path to the house so we just walked the dry creek bed. The house was adobe like all its neighbours, but with a garden filled with creaking wind sculptures: dolphins, birds and ballerinas. we cooked lunch on the camping stove while we waited for our host Christopher, who arrived in a car with flapping metal birds on the roof.

He was all white haired British bluster because the well pump had died that morning (what killer timing!). It’s hard for Victorians to get their heads around wells, coming from a land of drought watertanks are just the norm. He told us that they had no use for a water tank as it never rained, the neighbouring arroyo told a different story, but we let it lie.

Christopher was a fascinating character, as eclectic as his house, decorated with art and trinkets from all corners. Born north of London, but spending ten years living on a boat in Ibiza, a place he gleefully informed us where anything goes, apparently there is a night club filled with foam up to your neck and there are no rules for what happens under the bubbles. He met an American wife, now absent, and moved to America, finding Santa Fe the only place palatable, being like no other city in the world.

Town was a world of adobe, rugs and gemstone necklaces; geared towards the tourist, but lovely. The bells of the cathedral chimed and a flock of birds wheeled around and around overhead, sun gliding over their stomachs on their downward roll. Boutique beer and gourmet pizza over the town square, a tireless busker strumming on as the sun kissed the horizon to sleep.