The Land of The Real Americans...Arizona

I've been lucky...That's what they said...and I agreed...And I thanked Allah...The One and Only, The Most Beneficent, The Most Merciful...for giving me continuous opportunities to see the world...

I've been craving to go to Lyon, France this year...to attend the European Biomass Conference...the one attended by Asmadi and Matsuoka in Hamburg, Germany last year....but the due date passed us by without any direction from the boss (Yes, doing PhD in Japan, it is your boss (sensei, supervisor) who will evaluate and instruct you to go and present in conferences...not by your own choice)...But suddenly in the middle of no plan to go abroad...my boss called me one morning and he showed me a letter the from the American Oil Chemists' Society (AOCS)...and that letter is the one that brought me to the Native American land...Arizona...as the recipient of AOCS Industrial Oil Division Award...and it was a God-sent...to show me the other side of the world I have never ventured into...

Arizona doesn't lend itself to sedate, restrained discussion. Arizona is just plain sheer extravagance. One of its river spent 10 million years carving the Grand Canyon, the greatest natural spectacle in the world. I bet all of us had, at least, heard the name of the Grand Canyon and this place definitely tops the Must-go-list for geologists, environmentalists and nature-lovers from all around the world.

Another river transformed a quarter million acres of central Arizona desert into one of the most intensively cultivated and most productive agricultural areas in the world and prompted the development of one of the major cities in the American west.

One unique fact about Arizona is that, by traveling up North from Phoenix, you could cover the whole landscapes that America has to offer. From the largest unbroken stand of ponderosa pine forest to the desert land thick with other worldly plant life; a dreamland of thorns and sinews and leafless tree. Some Arizona mountains are gray-ash-heaps, others the immense, thickly-forested hulks of dead volcanoes. Arizona's dramatic landscape has a history to match, and the people whom history has brought here demonstrate the same bewildering diversity as the land forms on which they live.

Hopi and Navajo Americans who look at the world through two thousand year old eyes (Extremely conservative although a little trendy nowadays>>>), Mexican-Americans, descendants of an empire that once reached north into Arizona and South as far as Chile, farmers, loggers, hunters, buckaroos and broncobusters...the list is endless and my 10-days excursion is not enough to dive deeper into this perplexing community...and here, then, is Arizona. See it by your own eyes...and you'll be amazed...