Over the last two days I've headed south from Las Vegas into Arizona and will be doing a whistle-stop tour of the state, taking in a few of the more well known national parks and tourist spots before my schedule pushes me on into Utah where I have a hotel booked in a few days up in a place called Kanab. To be honest, Arizona hadn't been one of the places I had planned on visiting while in the US - so my knowledge of the state was limited and I was very much going on what I'd been told by other travellers en route. The plan, very much put together at the last minute, was to grab a coach down to Phoenix and then jump onto a tour heading back through the middle of the state towards the Grand Canyon. Most of the places of interest in Arizona seem to be along that central route, but as I couldn't get a coach until the afternoon yesterday it did mean that a day was essentially wasted getting to Phoenix.

We stopped for lunch at a small town in the middle of the desert, the name of which escapes me for the moment, and as we all piled off the air conditioned coach it felt as though I was walking naked into a furnace. I've been told since that the actual temperature yesterday was in the region of eighty-five degrees, but since there's no wind to speak of in the desert except for the occasional hot breeze, it felt more like over a hundred. In the time it took us to cross the road to the nearest place where we could get a cold drink, which happened to be the largest supermarket I think I've ever seen in the middle of the smallest town I've seen since outback Australia, my shoulders turned a nice shade of red and my arms felt as if they were being roasted.

Overnight in Scottsdale, just outside Phoenix, there was an unexpected bit of excitement. No sooner had I got to my room and got into bed, than there was the most terrific crashing noise which sounded as though it had come from the next room. Getting dressed in a hurry, I rushed outside to find the door from my corridor into the street smashed into tiny pieces and lying all over the pavement outside. The people across the corridor had already called the front desk, who in turn called security, and in no time at all the hotel was crawling with big burly police types with guns the size of their arms hanging from their belts and with walkie-talkies strapped to their mouths so they could call each other Romeo and invite each other to do the Foxtrot, or whatever it is these guys say to each other on walkie-talkies. The people in the next room claim to have seen a little man with glasses and a briefcase running away laughing and holding an axe, but we're taking this with a pinch of salt as some of us suspect that the thick smoke emanating from their room might not have been of the variety that comes from cigarettes, if you get my meaning.

My first stop north of Phoenix was at a Wild West Town by the name of Rawhide, making it sound like more of a television series than a town. Now, call me Mr Suspicious, but this place seemed rather too good to be true and my guess would be that about ninety percent of what the town has to offer is based on what a twenty-first century bigwig somewhere has decided the tourists will want to see, as opposed to anything that actually happened in the days of the Wild West. For a start, I was fully expecting to see a proper old western town. Sure, I had imagined the place to be full of dirt roads with tumbleweed rolling across them, bars along the streets for shackling your horse, saloons with swinging doors just waiting to be thrown open by seven foot gunslingers holding eight foot guns and wanting to know who shot their fathers. What I really wasn't expecting was for the place to be quite so commercialised, so stuck up itself with tourist stereotype that if somebody came through a timewarp from the nineteenth century they wouldn't recognise a thing. Rawhide clearly wasn't the real old western town I had been expecting. Instead, it was a recreation built on the site of the old western town I had been expecting - not, I think you'll agree, exactly the same thing. Take a look at the official town website, which instantly blasts you with the theme from the television series of the same name and then goes on to show you photographs of actors in costumes throwing bottles at each other and having gunfights in the street in front of crowds of spectators, and then tell me that this isn't pandering to tourism on the most appalling level! The introduction to the town starts by welcoming visitors to their 1880s Wild West town full of good eating, fun attractions, unique shopping opportunities and a steakhouse - all things I'm pretty certain were lacking from these places in the last century.

Clearly, Americans don't know what authentic means in the same way that they haven't quite grasped the idea that eighty years doesn't really make something an antique, and that a fifty year old building isn't what anyone would really call historic. Stop me when you know what I'm getting at here, or I might go on like this all night.

Hmmm. Having just read back what I've written so far I think I might be about to say something which might make you fall over with shock, so brace yourself. Here we go - I really liked Rawhide. Ok, so it's not what I was expecting and it's about as tourist oriented as you can get - but then so is Disneyland and that doesn't mean I hate the place, far from it. I would've liked to have seen a proper western ghost town with dirty ramshackle buildings and a saloon with the door hanging off, and been walked around by a guide telling us exciting stories of the west, but hey - if I was going to get a theme park atmosphere instead, then why not make the most of it?

So, we've established what Rawhide isn't. So what exactly is it? Well, the film WestWorld comes to mind - but obviously without the killer robots. What we have here is a recreation of a Wild West town exactly as it would've looked in its heyday, with all the good bits played out by actors who really know how to milk a part. Go for a drink in the saloon, and expect to be interrupted half way through your Coke by a seven foot actor dressed as a gunslinger throwing open the door (I'd really love, one day, to see somebody do that in a western and have the door swing back and knock him over - which is, lets face it, what would happen if you did that in real life) and demanding to know who's the sheriff of this here town. At this point, somebody will stand up from one of the tables, numerous extras who you had previously assumed were just there for the atmosphere throw themselves under tables and you find yourself diving for cover as everybody starts hurling abuse and bullets at each other. Throughout the day, on the streets, people will just start shooting each other for no immediate reason - and if they're not shooting each other, they'll be walking around telling visitors about the history of the west or having their photo taken.

I spent a good half an hour absolutely transfixed by the line of people queuing up to be thrown about mercilessly on the back of a mechanical bull. I like to think we've all got a reasonable level of courage when it comes to trying new things, but somehow I've never been able to get particularly excited about the idea of sitting on the back of a computer operated bull and being hurled across a courtyard. Apart from the sort of people with nothing better to do than practice all day, I've never seen anybody get on a mechanical bull and not fall off within about a second - why do people do it? Surely landing on the hard ground on your backside has got to hurt, and you would know that before volunteering to climb on wouldn't you? Still, I'm always happy to watch stupid people hurt themselves unnecessarily - although I am led to believe that I missed somebody being shot and falling off a balcony in the next street while I was doing so.

If the kids have been good, you can buy them a donkey ride around the town or show them the petting zoo where they can make friends with anything from horses to rabbits, not an animal the west was particularly well known for - but even if they've been driving you crazy all day and you don't feel particularly like giving them a treat, Rawhide has the very attraction for you. Just have them arrested and thrown in jail, and go off to enjoy yourself while they have to plead their case for release. No doubt, many of you will be wondering why no other theme park has thought of this idea before.

On the whole, I spent an enjoyable day in Rawhide even if it did suffer from "over the top syndrome". I actually wish I could've stayed longer as there's a steakhouse on the premises and the menu looked particularly inviting, but as I said before Utah calls. One of the best things about Rawhide is that it's free - and this really is an unusual way of doing things in the United States. Normally with these places, you pay at the door and then everything inside is included - but in this case it seems that a bit of sense has prevailed. No having to pay ridiculous prices for a one day out of town family ultra saver pass and then discover that it doesn't let you into anything except the restrooms here, at Rawhide you can stroll around the town and just pay for what you want.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.