If you cast your mind back, you may remember me enthusing recently about a place called Montezuma Castle down in Arizona. You may also remember that one of the few things I was disappointed with was the fact that visitors are no longer allowed to climb the rickety collection of ladders which lead up to the ancient Sinagua village embedded in the cliff face, due to the fact that previous generations of tourists have not only eroded away much of the priceless history of the place with their size nine boots but also filled the rooms with discarded crisp packets and other modern junk. Not, of course, that I would want it any other way - you wouldn't walk up to the Mona Lisa holding a burrito and start smearing your greasy hands all over it, so why should you be allowed to visit a priceless Native American cultural site and cover it in a sea of Big Mac wrappers? Nevertheless, I do remember wondering after my visit what Montezuma Castle looked like from the inside, and wishing that there was some way I could find out - and on the face of it, Mesa Verde appears to provide the answer to that question.

I should probably point out, at this stage, that Mesa Verde National Park actually covers an area of 81 square miles and contains more than 600 Pueblo cliff dwellings, which sort of explains the US Government's eagerness to slap a protection order on the whole area and threaten people with jail for dropping anything on the ground or taking a pebble away with them as a souvenir. What I'm actually talking about when I refer to Mesa Verde is by far the most famous of the cliff dwellings, the so-called Cliff Palace. I wouldn't want you wandering aimlessly through the desert in Colorado trying to work out what the hell I was talking about. The Cliff Palace is very similar to Montezuma Castle in that it is an impressive ancient settlement embedded into a cliff face - the difference here, however, is that Mesa Verde is at ground level and therefore entirely accessible by foot. That's not to say, of course, that you can just wander up and start climbing over every surface - the site is carefully maintained, and tourists are led through by a guide who explains exactly what you're looking at and why she'll kick your ass all the way to Florida if you even so much as look as though you might be about to sit on anything of historical significance. Which is fair enough. The Cliff Palace is actually sited within a large cave and contains 23 round ceremonial rooms called kivas, each of which has been sunk into the cave floor in such a way that entry is only possible by climbing down from above. 150 rooms are crammed into the cave, surrounding the kivas and suggesting that the Cliff Palace was inhabited by quite a large community - many of these rooms are also sunken in the same way as the kivas, although one of the most imposing features of the Palace is a tall building known as Square Tower House, which reaches 26 feet in height and is constructed on four levels. This tower, however, was almost in ruins before the National Park Service restored it to what we can only assume was its former glory. The kivas and rooms of the Cliff Palace are formed from sandstone and held together by a mixture of mud, ash and water. Originally, many of the walls were painted in bright, perhaps ceremonial colours, but these have unfortunately faded and eroded away over time.

The Pueblo people are often referred to as the Anasazi, more so since the X-Files introduced the term to the rest of the world in an attempt to look cool before realising that they didn't actually know how to end the series - a tradition continued some years later by the writers of "Lost". The Pueblo themselves don't actually like the term and will often consider you ignorant if you use it, which is probably entirely reasonable as they've never referred to themselves by any such name and Anaasazi is actually Navajo for "Ancient Enemy", which is hardly the highest complement you could give anyone. The Pueblo people are particularly well known because of their penchant for building multi-storey apartment blocks out of adobe mud and carving entire villages out of the cliff face at a time when other Native American peoples were perfectly happy to live in collections of Wigwams, Tepees or Straw huts made out of whatever local materials came to hand. This, of course, was probably born out of the necessity to keep out of the scorchingly hot weather in this part of the country - by building your homes into the face of a cliff, you ensure that the sun doesn't bother you for much of the day and that warm breezes from the surrounding desert keep your home pleasantly warm during the winter, something which certainly couldn't be said of a straw hut in the middle of nowhere. Nevertheless, we as a modern culture do tend to look on these high rise apartment blocks carved out of mud from sheer rock faces with something approaching incredulity, finding it hard to believe that such a thing could be possible without modern tools, mechanical diggers, cranes and about a billion dollars in financing. We're conceited like that. Probably the only reason why nobody has ever thought to demolish the Great Pyramid of Giza or raze Stonehenge to the ground is because we have a fascination with looking at things from bygone times and refusing to believe that they could possibly exist.

To a certain extent, the Pueblo could be considered the mountain goats of the ancient world, preferring to build their houses on the top of the sort of towering mesas that Monument Valley is famous for long before anyone thought to set about the edge of a cliff with a digging implement. If anything, this clearly shows how their thought processes evolved over time, as the top of a giant sticky-up rock in the middle of nowhere may well keep you safe from predators but probably isn't the most intelligent place to site a colony in one of the hottest places on Earth. Yes, a high rocky plateau with 100% exposure to the sun might sound like a good place for planting crops, but probably not for actually living year around. "These mud huts we've been building on the scorching desert floor are all very well, but what we really need to do is move them just that little bit closer to the sun!"

The Cliff Palace is thought to be the largest Pueblo cliff dwelling in North America, and it's quite easy to believe this when you look at it from a distance. On the face of it, Montezuma Castle perhaps appears more impressive due to the fact that the Pueblo somehow managed to chisel it out of the rock face half way up a cliff, which means that they must have done so while standing on ladders or hanging from... well, we don't have a clue how they did it, to be honest. The Cliff Palace, on the other hand, is pretty much at ground level and inside a cave - so what makes it so impressive is more about its sheer size than how it was built. Tours run every half an hour from early March to early November and must be booked in advance at the ranger station, but only cost a few bucks so probably won't break the bank - it is, however, very important to remember this as the last thing you want is to hike your way along the hot dusty trail to the base of the cliff only to be told that you can't go on the tour because you haven't got a ticket. The Cliff Palace is certainly a lot less strenuous to explore than other Pueblo dwellings in the park, but please remember that this is one of the hottest areas of the country and you will be climbing up and down ladders - so anyone for whom such temperatures or climbs may be a problem should probably reconsider. Bear in mind, also, that the average height of the Pueblo people was between 5 and 5.5 feet, so if you often find yourself looking down on others from a great height you will either find yourself having to bend almost double to get through doors or, in one extreme case, not being able to even make it up a narrow corridor. You have been warned.

Those who do not wish to go on the tour, or cannot do so due to any of the reasons I mention above, can view the Cliff Palace from an observation point opposite, although this is not quite the same as actually getting to see it up close. The best time to visit, if at all possible, is as early in the day as possible before the crowds arrive - tour groups tend to queue up in front of the cave, with one group taking the tour while the next waits patiently, so after the first tour of the day has started it is all but impossible to get a photograph without a queue of people blocking your view. Call me picky, but when I've travelled half way around the world to visit an ancient historical landmark, I really don't want my photographs to end up covered in people I don't know and their screaming kids who can't understand why this isn't Disneyland.

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.