My tour today began at 8.30 with a drive out of the sprawling metropolis of Rapid City and through countryside which changed rapidly from suburban streets to fields of multicoloured crops. All the way to our first stop at the Badlands National Park, our guide wouldn't stop going on about what a great time we were going to have - in fact, I don't think she stopped talking from the second the last passengers joined us on the coach. We got to know every detail about her ten years as a tour rep, all the places she'd seen around the world and why they were all amazing, the people she had met along the way and why she loved every one of them, and just why we were so lucky to have got her as our guide rather than any of the other useless ones we could've ended up with instead. She might have had a little bit of a superiority complex.

The Badlands National Park came upon us so suddenly that most of us jumped out of our seats with surprise, coming out of the coma our guide had put us into. One moment, the scenery was nothing but fairly bog standard fields dotted with little ranch homes, and then we entered a forest which did a pretty good job of concealing everything beyond and came out on the other side into the Badlands. The coach passed through the toll gate at the entrance to the National Park, turned a corner and it was suddenly as though we had landed on the moon. That is honestly the best way I can think of to describe what visitors to the Badlands have in store for them - for miles in every direction, the ground was totally grey, and out of it were carved a sea of craters surrounded by towering stone monoliths and buttes. For half an hour, the coach drove across the surface of the moon, every one of us gaping out of the windows in stunned silence at what we were seeing, and then we were finally allowed to get off at a couple of lookout points and snap away madly with our cameras. Well, I seem to have ended up using mine rather more than I had expected. I had made up my mind before reaching Rapid City that I wasn't going to waste all my film taking endless photographs of the same thing from different angles, as I had been doing earlier in the trip - instead, I was going to carefully select my angles and finish the tour with a small but carefully chosen selection of perfect shots. Well, that idea went straight out of the window as soon as we stopped at the first lookout - I just pointed the viewfinder in every direction, snapping away happily and telling myself "well, all these photographs show equally great views - how can I possibly choose between them?"

The Car Park at the second lookout was connected to a narrow walkway which vanished around the side of a rocky protrusion, and I set off along it to see what other views there were to use my film up on. Turning a corner, I was literally so gobsmacked at what I saw that I had to go back and walk around the corner again just to make sure I hadn't dreamt it the first time. The boardwalk ended at an observation point on the edge of a cliff, and stretching out to the horizon all around and below me was a landscape straight out of a science fiction epic. A narrow path led down the cliff, inviting people to trip and fall to their deaths at every step, and I could see the heads of people in front of me as they bobbed up and down in the distance down in the valley, appearing and disappearing between the peculiarly shaped rocks strewn all across the lunar surface. I took around twenty photographs at the first lookout alone, used up the rest of the roll and most of another at the second, and by the time we had stopped for lunch at a place called Wall Drug, I was already trying to calculate how much more film I could afford to buy without using up too much of my remaining budget.

Wall Drug is one of those places that you see advertised on billboards all across the US - it is the epitome of the American Dream, and clearly an inspiration to Americans as to how you can conquer the world if you really put your mind to it. The world, of course, means the United States - you always have to remember that we're talking about Americans here. Back in the thirties, Ted Hustead and his wife decided to open up a small drugstore in the town of Wall, population two hundred. Unfortunately, as soon as they had got the whole thing set up and settled back to watch the money trickling in, they found themselves living through the great depression. With no customers - or at least, none that had any money to spend - the young couple found themselves watching hundreds of early tourists heading through on their way to the nearby Black Hills or the Badlands and hit upon an idea. Knocking up some hoardings from pieces of wood lying around the ranch, they placed them along the highway advertising "free water at Wall Drug". Now, drugstores across the country had been giving away free water for as long as anyone could remember - it was thirsty work making your way across the desert - but none of them had ever had the common sense to think about advertising the fact. The idea was simple - if people stopped at Wall Drug to grab some water to quench their thirst, even the ones with hardly a penny to their name might be grateful enough to buy a little something. Well, of course it worked like a dream, word spread, and soon the husband and wife team found themselves overrun by people stopping on their way through. Today, there are literally hundreds of signs for the place scattered across highways in every direction - as you drive along, you'll see a large billboard go past which reads "WALL DRUG - 100 MILES", then "WALL DRUG - 50 MILES", "WALL DRUG - JUST AHEAD", "WALL DRUG - NEXT TURNING", and finally "WHERE ARE YOU GOING? YOU JUST MISSED WALL DRUG". It's a little known fact, and a great example of just how out of hand the American dream can become, but Wall Drug has actually erected signs at both the North and South Poles advertising the distance to Wall, South Dakota.

If it weren't for the fact that the US government passed an act back in the sixties declaring that Billboards were highway trash and ordering all but the most important to be removed (you really wouldn't believe this, to see the amount that still exist everywhere you look), there would still be Wall Drug signs by the side of every significant highway across the country. In fact, if you stop at the store you can expect to be handed a small Wall Drug sign which you can take home with you so that you can promote them from wherever in the world you happen to live! The store itself, of course, has become a whole city block - it now contains gift shops, stores, a restaurant with enough seating for five hundred people, a giant rabbit on wheels and a miniature Mount Rushmore which people who couldn't be bothered to visit the real one down the road can have their photograph taken in front of, and an amusement arcade. In fact, all they need to do is build some chalets and a ballroom and it could be an American Butlins. Oh, and when Interstate 90 was built in the sixties and threatened to reroute people away from the small road which leads past wall drug, the store simply erected an eighty foot long dinosaur by the side of the Interstate demanding that people turn off and call in. Well you would, wouldn't you?

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.