A Desert of Salt

The morning of August 15 found us in Salt Lake City, minus our car and unsure of what to do.

Our Airbnb lodging in Salt Lake City

When I had filled my fuel tank back in Badlands National Park, I had forgetfully put the fuel cap on my trunk and driven away from the pump. Needless to say, I never found it again.  Later, the "Check Engine" light on my dashboard had come up, indicating something was wrong. I knew a missing fuel cap triggered that light, but since my car is pretty old, and we had some 1,500 miles to drive home, I decided to get it checked anyway. So after we arrived at our Airbnb accommodation the evening of the 14th, I looked up a nearby Sears Auto while Poulami cooked dinner. The Sears Auto had checked our engine and said they found two codes from the transmission, besides the code for the fuel cap, and I should get it checked at Aamco. The Aamco people said it would take a few hours to check. So here we were, wandering about Salt Lake City on foot, devoid of our car and wondering what to do.

TRAX station on the road

We had added a day to our Salt Lake City stay as an afterthought, but didn't want to pack that day with hectic sightseeing. So we had spent the first evening lazily talking to our hosts, asking them about the places to see. After we dropped off the car, it seemed the best course of action would be to go to Temple Square to see the great Mormon Temple of Salt Lake City. Downtown Salt Lake City is not very large, and the streets are very nicely laid out in the form of a grid. The streets are wide and traffic is very disciplined. We saw buses, and also a light rail system called TRAX that was reminiscent of the Newark Light Rail that I used during my PhD days. We didn't take any public transport since the temple was just over a mile away and decided to walk there.

The LDS Temple

The Mormon Church, formally known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS Church), has its headquarters in Salt Lake City and the huge temple and other surrounding buildings is known as the Temple Square. Members of the church use the building for weddings (among other things), and we saw at least half a dozen couples getting married. We thought some of the brides looked too young to be getting married, so we Googled for the legal age for marriage in Utah and were surprised to learn that it was only 15. We spent quite some time in the Temple premises and then crossed the road to a nice shopping area with outdoor fountains. We found a restaurant called Blue Lemon and had our lunch there, complete with a Facebook post of the food and check-in. This incident, as they say in novels, will be important in the latter part of the story.

City Creek at Temple Square

After lunch, we decided we were getting worried about our car. The Aamco people were supposed to call us, but they hadn't. So we walked back to Aamco and asked about the car. Initially, everyone seemed to be avoiding us, compounding our worries. Then, the manager came and faced us. He seemed embarrassed.

"Er... actually, sir, we are sorry to say this, we didn't find anything wrong with your car. We have been running tests on your transmission since the morning, but everything seems fine. We hate to send you away across the country without fixing anything, but we can't find anything to fix."

I suspected the "Hate to send you away without fixing anything" was less due to a concern for our safety and more due to the fact that the tests that they have been conducting were supposed to be complimentary unless they found something wrong. But we were happy, and we left with our car.

The previous evening, when we had asked our Airbnb hosts about places to see in the city, both of them had told us to take a tour of the Utah State Capitol. The tour was a one-hour affair, with explanations and anecdotes about the architectural features of the magnificent building. It turned out that Poulami and I were the only two people interested to see the building on this hot summer afternoon, and the docent, who was an Indian lady, gave the tour for just the two of us.

At the Utah State Capitol

Next morning, we set out for the place that I had been waiting for since the day I decided to come to Salt Lake City. The Great Salt Lake of Utah is one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world, second only to the Dead Sea. It is remnant of the prehistoric Lake Bonneville that once covered much of western Utah. Today, Lake Bonneville has dried up, leaving behind a vast flat area covered with salt known as the Bonneville Salt Flats. this is the place that I had wanted to visit. I had come to know about the Salt Flats from an issue of the National Geographic Magazine back in my childhood, but most people now know the Bonneville Salt Flats for the speedway that is built on the flats. This is the track on which cars attempt to break the land speed record. In fact, the place is open to the public, and it was my secret wish to drive my car over the Salt Flats and take a picture of my car there.

Mirage on the road

The place is about 90 miles from the city and it takes an hour and a half to drive. As we left the outer limits of Salt Lake City, we found the remains of the Great Salt Lake right of the road. Then, as we moved further out, the temperature soared to 40 degrees Celsius and the earth changed to salt all around. There was even a factory of Morton Salt right on the flats. Then vegetation became rarer and we started seeing mirages. I have seen mirages on the highway before and after that day, but the mirages that I saw on the salt flats were somewhat more pronounced than any that I have ever seen anywhere else. If I stared too long, it was creating some sort of illusion in my eyes and it was difficult to see the horizon. I wondered whether there was any chance of my old car overheating, but nothing of the kind happened. At one point, we saw a partially covered parking area by the side of the road. This was our destination.

As I parked, a family in a big SUV came and parked a few spots away. They had been driving over the salt flats, and this was evident from the salt encrusted tires of their car. The bottom of their car, which was quite higher than mine, was also covered in a thick layer of salt. The passengers had apparently not stayed in the car the whole time, because when they came out, their shoes were caked with salt. I decided I was not taking my car on the salt flats. We walked down on the salt flats with our camera and tripod to take photos.

Bonneville Salt Flats

Imagine a flat field laid out right up to the horizon. Now imagine that field is a dazzling white instead of green, and you will have imagined the Bonneville Salt Flats. The ground beneath our feet was wet and granular, not unlike what salt left outside in the rainy season becomes. When it rains, this whole place is transformed into a shallow flat lake stretching up to the horizon, whose flawless surface perfectly mirrors the sky above. We didn't have a chance to see that spectacle as it had  not rained in the last few days, but what we saw was pretty amazing in itself. I set up my camera on the tripod and took many photos. There were other tourists on the flat as well, and some had even come with dogs. One lady was collecting salt from the flat in a Ziplock bag. I wanted to ask what she intended to do with it, but shyness prevented me from doing so. There is a faucet of water for washing salt off your shoes right where you come out of the flats. When we had seen and photographed the place to our hearts' content, we washed our sneakers there and came back to the car. Then we drove back to our Airbnb lodging and napped the afternoon off.

Our lunch at Blue Lemon

When I had Facebook-posted our lunch from Blue Lemon the previous day, my old friend Payel, who lives in Salt Lake City with her husband Dipanjan, had seen it. She had subsequently contacted me, and after some awkward explanation about why I had not informed her of our impending visit, we had agreed to meet them for dinner. So that evening we drove to a Thai restaurant called Sawadee, again near Temple Square and also close to the University of Utah campus. I usually avoid driving in the downtown areas of big cities, especially unknown ones, but I found driving in Salt Lake City a breeze. The food was fantastic and it felt really good to meet up with an old friend after more than a decade.

That was all there was to our two and a half days in Salt Lake City: a temple, a state capitol and a desert of salt. When we started on our journey again the next morning, we realized that we had not even bought a souvenir fridge magnet to remember the place by. We tried to correct this omission by visiting a couple of stores looking for souvenirs, but we didn't find them. In the end, we had to leave Salt Lake City with just some memories, some photos, and some grains of salt stuck to our shoes.

This time, we were headed for a real desert. As deserts go, it was tiny, but it was made of sand.

(To be continued...)