Along the way today, we've been surrounded by nothing but mountains topped with snow, turquoise lakes stretching off to the horizon and hillsides covered in forests almost from the moment we set out - but the highlight for me has been the animals of Yellowstone. First thing this morning, our guide gave us a long lecture, I supposed half-heartedly, on what to do if we should be attacked by a bear while in the park, and then went on to say that our chances of actually seeing one at all were extremely remote.

There are apparently two types of bear in Yellowstone National Park. Grizzly bears like to survey their territory from high up and tend to hang out on high plateaus where they can watch for trouble, while black bears prefer to wander around anywhere but are not in the habit of getting involved with humans unless provoked or really hungry. I can honestly say that I had no intention of provoking anything with claws, but it was the really hungry bit that made me nervous - if you see a bear looking at you from a hill, how exactly do you know whether it's hungry or not? As one of the more cynical rangers at the West Yellowstone preserve told me this evening, if you're going walking in Yellowstone, it's best to take an unfit friend with you. That way, if you get attacked by a bear, you don't need to be able to outrun it - you only need to be able to outrun your friend. Nice.

About ten minutes into Yellowstone, we ran into the back of a traffic jam. Ahead, a line of cars had all stopped to look at something off to the left hand side of the road, and there was a very irate ranger wandering up and down trying to wave people on and telling everybody that there was nothing to see. When somebody in a position of authority tells you that there is nothing to see, you can be sure there's something to see. At first, I assumed that there had been some sort of road accident and that we would get to the front of the queue and find a couple of upside down cars and an ambulance or two trying to sort it all out. Our driver isn't the sort of person who likes to be bossed about, however, and he managed to do a fairly good impression of somebody who had only just passed his driving test, making his way as slowly as possible between the cars on either side of us while leaning out of the window and checking constantly to make sure that he wasn't about to scrape anybody. This gave us all plenty of time to crowd around the windows to see what was going on. On the bank to our left, alternating between licking his paw and looking down on us with interest, was a grizzly bear. Our guide, who had spent so much time this morning explaining that our chances of seeing a bear were almost zero, couldn't quite decide how she was supposed to react and went for several minutes between sitting in silence with her mouth flapping wildly but no sound emerging, and having a full blown orgasm, jumping up and down, screaming and pointing as though she'd never seen a bear before. Come to think of it, perhaps she'd never seen a bear before. People started rummaging in their bags for cameras all along the coach, and by the time we had crawled past all the other cars everyone had managed to waste an entire roll of film - just to make absolutely sure that they had at least one perfect shot.

We've only had one major stop today, at the famous - and rather over-rated, as it turned out - Old Faithful geyser. Old Faithful is so called simply because it has erupted pretty much on time for as long as anyone can remember, although it has been getting slightly less regular over the years. According to our guide, who had calmed down by now and was probably already working on what she was going to tell her next group about her exciting encounter with a bear, Old Faithful wasn't at all what it used to be. When she first brought the coach to Yellowstone a few years ago, she explained, the geyser was in the habit of blowing its top on average once every forty minutes - now it's down to once every eighty minutes or so, and that's only happened over the space of a few years. When Dad came through here with his friend Richard a while back, apparently the place wasn't quite so commercialised - but now it is really just one big tourist attraction. There's a huge hotel and inn complex on the site, predictably named the Old Faithful Inn, which is billed as the world's largest log cabin on the basis that, well, it's pretty damn huge and made out of logs - which is really all you need from a log cabin. The interior of the Old Faithful Inn is typically over the top in a way that only the United States could achieve - its multiple levels of eerily lit wooden balconies are arranged above an atrium where people can sit at tables and chairs made out of logs surrounded by magnificent wooden beams and flickering lanterns, or sit by a roaring open fire which looks as though it might burn the whole place down at any moment. The various balconies are interconnected by grandiose wooden staircases with strangely bowed and warped banisters, and the whole thing seems to be a cross between something out of the mind of Escher, and something you'd expect to find by the side of a remote lake in Scandinavia. Oh, and it really ought to have a ghost or two.

The rangers post notices up on the board in the wooden atrium telling everyone when they can expect the next eruption to take place outside - plus or minus ten minutes. Old Faithful can blow up to ten minutes either side of the posted time, and there are two rows of seats positioned in half circles a little way from the geyser itself so that people can sit and wait eagerly. Well, after everything I'd heard about Old Faithful over the years, and all the hype they give it around the world, I'd been expecting something truly monumental - a jet shooting several hundred feet up in the air at the very least. As we sat in excited silence in our seats, eyes glued to the geyser, faint gurglings from deep within the earth told us that something was happening. For a moment, there was nothing - then, a slight splash of water suddenly spurted half-heartedly from Old Faithful, as though someone just under the surface had thrown a bucketful of water into the air. This was followed almost immediately by so much steam that everything vanished in a blanket of white and it was totally impossible to see what was happening at all. From time to time, the steam cleared enough for me to realise that the water spray was slowly splashing and sploshing its way higher on each attempt, but after about three minutes the steam cleared and it was obvious that it was all over. According to our guide, it must've been a particularly impressive show as the rangers were predicting afterwards that it would take a couple of hours for Old Faithful to refill again for the next show - but I was unimpressed. If that was a good show, I'd hate to see a poor one. Mind you, I do have to admit that there is something somehow romantic about the idea of staying in the Old Faithful hotel and being able to wake up to the sight of the geyser erupting outside your window, or to be able to sit on the balcony with a drink and watch - but at least then you'd probably have a chance to catch the occasional spectacular eruption. Perhaps I was just unlucky today - I bet if I go to the new Old Faithful webcam and see what it's doing now, it'll turn out that I visited on the only day when it was rubbish. Wouldn't that be typical?

My stop for the night is in the small town of West Yellowstone, just outside the west entrance to the park. I decided to have a meal in the hotel restaurant, where I discovered that the staff didn't quite understand the meaning of the word "buffet" but were well aware of how to make a buck or two. For the grand price of sixteen dollars, I was entitled to help myself from three dishes which had been laid out on a table containing beef, corn and gravy. That's not a buffet - that's a fixed meal. They could've just brought it to me on a plate. The hotel itself actually had a kind of old world back to nature charm which I liked very much - the lobby was made totally out of wood and had the most incredible staircase which swept majestically up both sides to a wide balcony on the first floor. Downstairs, there was a small cosy bar next to the restaurant, also clad entirely in wood, and a maze of passageways with wooden pillars down the middle which led to the various rooms. I spent the latter part of the evening in the bar where several of the coach group had pushed some tables together and were chatting about the trip until the early hours - I was also quite flattered to be asked to dance by a girl sitting at the bar who just came over and asked if I'd like to join her, so you certainly can't say that American girls are shy. In fact, I was so pleased to have been noticed that I was only slightly embarrassed by the fact that the only thing even approaching music was coming from a crackly radio on the bar and I was being watched by lots of people from the coach who would no doubt be whispering in the morning about this strange drunken man who had danced with a stranger to the big game on the radio.

Before eating, I had wandered into town with another couple of members of the tour group and found my way through the empty streets of West Yellowstone to something called the Wolf and Bear Preserve - a sort of mini zoo where wolves and bears from Yellowstone park are taken and looked after rather than being put down. These are the sort of bears which have done something really terrible like thinking that they have the right to actually act like a bear - I get the impression that, as soon as a grizzly looks at someone funny while licking its lips, somebody fires a dart into its backside and carts it off to be looked after. The preserve (surely that should be reserve - bear preserve sounds like some sort of odd flavour of marmalade) wasn't nearly as exciting as our guide had led us to believe when she had described it earlier in the day - but then, she obviously does have something of an abnormal love of all things bear related. To be fair, she did say that she hadn't been to the preserve before and that she was going purely on what other people had told her - so perhaps I shouldn't judge her too harshly.

I'd been expecting a large area of the park into which the bears and wolves had been released to wander happily - we would then be shown around, I had hoped, by a ranger who would take us to see the animals in a 4x4 vehicle as though we were on a safari. What I actually found was a small zoo in which the two brown bears homed there were wandering around looking slightly unhappy in one enclosure while a pack of seven or eight wolves inhabited another. There were areas in the middle of each enclosure where the ground on which the animals lived fell away into a pit so that people who couldn't be bothered to go out and look in the wild could take photos of them without having any bars in the way and then go home and tell all their friends that they'd been terribly brave and spent two weeks going up to bears in the wild and asking them to pose.

At the end of the evening, there was a birds of prey show - and this was probably one of the most bizarre shows of this type I've ever witnessed simply because it took place indoors. I joined a group of bemused tourists as we sat in the theatre area watching a young lady with a pair of jessies - special gloves for handling birds of pray, rather than her two assistants - displaying hawks and owls which clearly had no more clue as to why they were indoors than we did.

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.