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The Mail On Sunday
Sept. 19, 1999 Issue
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The biggest WOW! in the world...
by Frank Barrett
Frank Barrett hits his Millennium high
with a Grand Canyon helicopter ride...
Just over the crest of that hill, he said, and we'll be there.
Deftly dropping his left hand from the control column, he touched a
button and the music playing through our head phones changed to the
Richard Strauss tune used as the theme for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A chorus of brass: dah-dah-dah DAH-DAH, dah-dah-dah DALI-DAM, a
pounding on the timpani -- boom-boom boom-boom. And then... Ka-pow!
The bottom was dropping out of my stomach as we suddenly found
ourselves plunging into a vast cleft in the earth. Below us was the
most fantastic sight in the world.
The pilot's voice crackled over the headphones: 'Welcome to the
Grand Canyon.'
None of us felt able to comment. We sat mute, agog at the spectacle.
'Blimey O'Reilly,' I eventually said.
A British guide at the Sistine Chapel in Rome once told me about the
'wow' spot -- the place where visitors first took up, see
Michelangelo's frescoes of Genesis and go: Wow! This started me
thinking about the collection of 'Wow!' moments that I've
accumulated on my travels. I'm not sure whether the Sistine Chapel
got a 'wow' out of me but I know that on the drive into New York
from JFK airport the first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline made the
hairs rise on the back of my neck.
Flying into Australia I'll never forget the terrific thrill of
seeing Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge through the plane
window as we came into land. Walking on a beach in Patagonia with
about a million penguins was extraordinary; so was watching a turtle
lay her eggs at dawn on Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef and
swimming with manatee in Florida.
Flying on Concorde, travelling on the first Eurostar service to
Paris and crossing the Atlantic on the QE2 count as 'wow!' moments,
too.
But if I were honest, I'd have to say that I haven't hit the 'Wow!'
spot as often as I might have hoped. Before this millennium expires,
I craved a big 'WOW!' -- a travel experience fit for a thousand
years.
What were the options? The Great Wall of China? As a West Brom
footballer on an Asian tour once acutely remarked: 'When you've seen
one wall, you've seen 'em all.' The Taj Mahal? Disappointing, I was
assured. The Pyramids? Too tacky. The statues of Easter Island? Too
remote. The Victoria Falls? Too wet. My list whittled itself down to
the Grand Canyon. Everyone I spoke to assured me that the 'Wow'
factor was high. The one drawback was its relative inaccessibility
-- at least a four-hour drive from Las Vegas, the nearest main city.
The intriguing option was a helicopter trip right into the Canyon.
From Vegas to the Canyon and back again -- in less than two hours.
Wow!
That made the thing a 'Double Wow' -- not even Signor Michelangelo
could match that. The helicopter company arranged to pick us up from
our Las Vegas hotel at 6:20am. The man driving the pick-up bus wore
a pilot's uniform and, worryingly, an ear stud (male jewellery
doesn't actually inspire confidence - you wouldn't want your heart
surgeon, for example, sporting a nose ring). My daughter had other
doubts: 'He looks like one of the Chuckle Brothers,' she whispered.
'I hope he's not our pilot.' He was just the bus driver. But as our
pilot had the look of Roberto Benigni (the Italian Oscar-winning
comic star of Life Is Beautiful), this was scarcely more
encouraging.
Fabio, our pilot, really was Italian and possessed a surprisingly
dry Turin wit. 'Anybody flown in a helicopter before?' 'Yes,' I
said. 'Good, you're one up on me then,' he flashed back (for some
reason helicopter pilots feel it incumbent on them to play the fool
- any jumbo jet pilot jocularly informing his passengers that it was
his first time on the plane would have the customers screaming to be
let off).
Fabio pointed out our French-made chopper to us: 'The manual came in
French, couldn't understand a word -- good job they supplied an
instruction video, too.' He showed us where to find the sick bags:
'If you feel it's going to happen, use this -- all I ask is try not
to hit me.' After we took off we briefly circled the Grand Concrete
Canyon of Las Vegas (which now surety counts as one of the Seven
Manmade Wonders of the World) before heading east to the real thing.
Fabio offered a breezy commentary on the sights as we passed over
them, all delivered over a changing musical soundtrack played
through the headphones. As we flew over the extraordinary Hoover Dam
-- opened in 1935 to keep California and the American south-west
supplied with water -- I thought for a moment that we were being
played the theme from The Dambusters, but it was a similarly rousing
passage from Star Wars.
While we headed on to the Canyon over Lake Mead (the largest
man-made lake in the States), we were treated to the Ride Of The
Valkyries, famously used in the film Apocalypse Now. The Robert
Duvall character blasted it out from his helicopter gunshlp during
an attack on a hapless Vietnamese village. 'I love the smell of
napalm in the morning,' quoted Fabio (to the consternation of the
couple from Miami sitting next to him in the front).
We drifted over high peaks and Fabio pointed out the old wagon train
trails -- still clearly visible -- taken by the early pioneers. As
we grew ever closer to the Canyon, it was clear that the scenery was
busy preparing to transform itself into an epic landscape
production. We had rapidly climbed from featureless desert towards
the craggy, colourful, stratified rock forms famous from a million
postcards.
Aware that we would soon he in for something very special, we fell
into quiet contemplation. And then came that wonderful,
extraordinary moment. For an anxious second it seemed as if we would
scrape the crest of the ridge but suddenly we were over the Canyon.
It gloriously opened up all around us. We were transformed into tiny
insignificance, fluttering in the air like a gnat. Above us a vast
blue sky, below the muddy snaking shape of the Colorado river. And
both sides of us, great waves of spreading, awe-inspiring rock.
Wow was the only word for it.
It was all so sudden and fantastic, it seemed wholly unreal. Had we
flown straight back, we would have been left with little more than a
fleeting dream-like sensation.
But now we began to descend 4,000ft into the Canyon, eventually
coming to rest on a spot just a few yards from the river. A little
more than 30 minutes before, we had been in the glittery gulch of
Las Vegas – now we were here in rawest nature. 'Don't jump out yet,'
said Fabio, indicating the slowing rotors above us. 'You'll get an
instant haircut.'
Fabio helped us out of the helicopter into the perfect stillness of
the Canyon: 'Watch where you are walking, There are three kinds of
rattlesnakes as well as scorpions and tarantulas -- and because it's
so early in the day, they're still cold and a bit cold and groggy.'
We were all a bit groggy, drunk on the exhilaration of our
surroundings, but we were all very careful about where we put our
feet.
Fabio led us to a ramshackle structure that the brochure assured us
was an authentic 'ramada' shelter of the Hualapai Indian, though it
looked suspiciously like a DIY gazebo from an ethnic B&Q. From a
couple of large tote bags Fabio produced a champagne breakfast --
actually not champagne but Italian sparkling white. However, in
these heady surroundings a bottle of dandelion and burdock would
have tasted like Veuve Cliquot.
HeIiUSA, which runs these Canyon trips, is able to put down near the
river through an arrangement with the Hualapai Indians, who own the
land on this side of the Colorado (a relationship likely to prove
invaluable when, as seems likely, the American government, in
response to determined lobbying from influential environmental
groups, bans Helicopter Tours over the National Park areas of the
Grand Canyon).
You might have thought that the government had more pressing matters
-- like high school massacres -- on its plate, but such is the
nature of American politics. We ate our breakfast and sipped our
spumante in quiet contemplation, overawed by the grandeur of our
surroundings. Fabio carefully gathered up every last piece of
rubbish and ferried it back to the helicopter.
Within minutes we were back on board. Fabio took off and headed for
the canyon wall. Seemingly only feet away from solid rock, the
helicopter rapidly climbed -- it was like being whisked up in a
glass elevator. 'Wow!' said a voice over the headphones. It was
mine, I realised.
We had barely climbed out of the Canyon when the shape of Las Vegas
seemed to become visible ahead of us. On the tour out, the mood
had been light and chatty. On the return, we all feel quiet -- well
and truly wowed.
Just before touching down in Vegas, we circled around the big
Stratosphere tower, the city’s recently built landmark. Fabi pointed
out the Big Shot needle at the very top. Riders are strapped in and
fired to the top at 45 mph, offering a worryingly unencumbered view
of Vegas from 1,100 ft up.
'That must be a wow moment’ reckoned my son.
We tried it, it wasn't. It was an 'Oh my God, I'm going to die of a
heart attack' moment. Not quite the same thing at all.
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