The United States has a peculiar habit of constantly taking you by surprise - just when you think you've seen everything it has to offer, there's something new and exciting around the next corner. People who respond to any mention of the US by immediately thinking of fast food, overweight people and loud obnoxious tourists are just showing their ignorance and generalising in a really quite ludicrous way about a country which probably has more to offer in terms of diversity than many others I've been to. Besides which, as the US National Parks show only too clearly, nowhere is defined by its people alone - and even if it were, then surely places such as Monument Valley would be defined by the indigenous peoples who lived here even before anyone knew what a boat was. Most of the people who moan about the US, to be honest, have probably never even been here - if you blindfolded them, airdropped them into the middle of any National Park, removed the blindfold and asked them where they thought they were, they'd never guess that they were in the United States in a million years. Every state you go to can offer something unique to itself, which is why Americans tend to give each one a specific nickname - the Sunshine State, the Natural State, the Great Lakes State, for example. Sometimes, the nicknames don't immediately make much sense, I grant you - Utah, probably one of the most colourful and natural states I've so far had the pleasure of visiting, and a state covered in National Parks, sweeping valleys, unusual rock formations and majestic waterfalls, is known to everybody over here as the Beehive State. Why? Well, it comes down to the Mormons again - when they originally settled here, they brought with them vast amounts of honeybees, presumably spending the first hundred years of settlement eating nothing but toast and honey. If I was in charge of deciding the nicknames of the states, I think I'd come up with something rather more descriptive for Utah - the Colourful State, the Parks State, the Valley State, that sort of thing.

Monument Valley is actually right on the border with Utah and Arizona, and is also one of the most widely photographed places in the country. Of all the National Parks, valleys, canyons, mountain ranges and bizarre rock formations to be found across the US, Monument Valley probably has some of the most immediately recognisable scenery. Everyone has seen its wide flat plains depicted in Wild West films, in magazines or on television commercials, and the standard image of an empty desert dotted with huge monoliths stuck up hundreds of feet into the air for no obvious reason is Monument Valley in a nutshell. Get a picture in your head of a Wild West desert scene, a single horse riding across the setting sun, the skull of an unidentified animal baking in the foreground and tall jagged sculptures of rock standing across the horizon, and what you're imagining is probably Monument Valley. John Wayne spent much of his career against the backdrop of the buttes and mesas here. Everywhere you look is awe-inspiring - there is, to the layman, no obvious reason why the land should be dotted with these monoliths while the rest of the desert seems perfectly flat. Even knowing what we do about the way nature carves away the soft rock and leaves the hard standing, this is one place where you can truly feel small - it has taken millions of years to create this masterpiece from almost flat rock,which, to put this time scale in perspective, means that Monument Valley hasn't really changed much throughout the whole of human history. What we see today is almost exactly the same as our Caveman ancestors would have seen.

The region was first brought to the world's attention when it was used in John Ford's 1939 Western Stagecoach, and become so synonymous with the wild west that he returned a further nine times to shoot more movies - Monument Valley doubling for anywhere across the country where the west needed to be won at the time.

The distinctive red colour of the siltstone, and the strange otherworldly feel given to the valley by it's monoliths, has even led to movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey being filmed here - although, as the region has become more and more famous for its distinctive geological features, it has perhaps become harder to pass it off as anywhere else. The impressive, if unlikely, opening sequence of Mission: Impossible II, in which Tom Cruise is apparently dangling in mid-air on a harness attempting to navigate an overhang on the edge of a tall cliff, was filmed in Monument Valley.

There aren't many places left in the world where the native people can still be found living out their lives on the land, abiding by traditional values and refusing to be sucked into our westernised idea of society with its high rise apartment blocks and multi-storey shopping malls. Even when you think you've found such a place, it is often somewhat disappointing to find out later that the local tribe leader who so enthusiastically demonstrated how his people make rope out of desert sand and coyote urine was, in fact, the owner of a limited edition Porsche 911 Sport Classic which he would be using to drive back to his wife and kids in their mansion after all the tourists had left. I may be wrong, but I got the impression that Monument Valley was a welcome exception to this rule - the Navajo still live in the valley, dealing with the unbearable heat on a day by day basis as they go about their traditional lives in the desert surrounded by possibly some of the most stunning scenery anyone could ever hope to be surrounded by. And why not? Given the choice between living at the top of a heavily crowded skyscraper with eight hundred other people with an irrational hatred for each other, and living surrounded by nature, I might actually be tempted myself. I might just choose to do it somewhere where walking on the ground doesn't cause third degree burns on the soles of my feet, that's all!

Of course, you can still go and visit the Navajo on their reservations (or visit with them, as the Americans like to say, as though you're going to be taking them to the zoo or something). Doing so, however, requires dropping off the coach at the nearest car park and then jumping into 4 wheel drive vehicles which then proceed to throw you all over the place quite violently as they speed across the desert sand with you holding onto the back for dear life. Despite all the bruises and sore hands from gripping onto my seat the whole way, this really was an experience I would be happy to repeat in a moment - I cannot even begin to describe the feeling of speeding through the eerie silence of Monument Valley with nobody else in sight, surrounded by mesas shooting up into the sky. Arriving at the end of your journey at a small reservation containing nothing more than a traditional Navajo hogan and a couple of horses tied to a post only serves to add to the sense that you really are far away from your comfortable life back home, with your reliance on mass produced food in packets and Sony Playstation.

I think most of our group were instantly stunned into silence by how simple these people's lives were and how far away from anywhere they chose to live - although, of course, I suspect that the Navajo themselves would argue that they are actually surrounded by everything and that the world most of us choose to surround ourselves with is, in fact, entirely artificial. We shuffled around the reservation gazing out at the scenery and poking our noses into the hogan just to make sure that this was actually how they lived and that they didn't have a secret Satellite television system tucked away in a corner under a cushion. For once, even the younger members of the group didn't seem too keen to rush in and disturb the lives of these people with flash photography or by inserting video cameras up their noses - but, to be honest, this might also have been something to do with the fact that one of the Navajo was sitting on a horse holding a sign offering to allow people to take a photo of him for five dollars and he didn't look like the sort of person you wanted to mess with. One of our small band of explorers managed to sidle around to the back of the horse, but as soon as he produced his camera and looked even remotely as though he was going to point it in the direction of the animal, Mr Navajo jumped down from the saddle and looked for a moment as though he was going to produce a firearm and chase him all the way back to Kanab.

The traditional home of a Navajo is the hogan, a structure fashioned out of logs and earth and giving the impression of being round although in reality having five sides which represent different times of the day - Morning, the Heatwave, Afternoon, Sunset, Darkness and the Jet Black. In the traditional Navajo creation story, the first hogan was built by the mischievous god Coyote with the aid of beavers, to become home for the first man and first woman. The Navajo people, according to these stories, passed through three separate worlds before emerging from underground into this one, the fourth or Glittering World. Coyote asked for help from the beavers, who explained how the first hogan should be built to house the first Navajo to emerge into this world. A forked, or female, log should be placed at the centre of the structure and a straight, or male, log would provide support. The logs would be connected at the apex of the hogan, to symbolise the connection between man, woman and home. A third log was placed from the west to represent the setting of the sun, and a door was created in the east so that the inhabitants could welcome the new day. This was the male hogan. Coyote and the beavers, who were starting to realise that they sounded a little like a sixties pop group, then went on to explain how to create a female hogan, because clearly they didn't think things were complecated enough already...

Much to our surprise, we were invited to go inside the central hogan and observe the Navajo way of life. Inside, the seemingly tiny tent-like building suddenly seemed to be surprisingly roomy, almost like a TARDIS, and I was immediately struck by how much cooler it was than on the other side of the door. Two walls of the hogan, if you can have two walls in a round building, were covered with amazingly elaborate tapestries and woven fabrics, and sitting in one corner was an old Navajo lady who looked to be at least three hundred years old and was almost entirely covered in tapestries and half woven clothes which she was clearly unable to put to one side. In the centre of the room was a small fireplace, above which was a thrown-together chimney arrangement, and the first thought that popped into my head was that I couldn't conceive of any time when a fireplace would serve much use in the middle of one of the hottest places on Earth. Perhaps they were still saving up for air conditioning. We all shuffled in and made ourselves comfortable on the sand, although some of the younger women on the coach clearly were far more interested in how dusty their lovely new dress was going to get than in actually taking any notice of anything around them. Some people are made for international exploration and some are made for staying at home and looking in clothes shop windows, what more can I say?

The Navajo are probably best known for their amazing weaving, sometimes to the point where, well, three hundred year old ladies vanish under piles of wool with just the tip of the loom sticking out to show where they are. Our old lady, who clearly wasn't going to stop weaving things just because her house was full of tourists, didn't speak any English - or perhaps she was just the strong, silent type - so our guide and a younger Navajo lady explained what was happening in a very matter-of-fact manner as though speaking to a group of school children. The old lady was weaving stuff, as it turned out - something we certainly hadn't needed a Navajo schoolteacher to take ten minutes telling us. By the end, most of us were gazing absently around the hogan, far more interested in the brightly coloured wall hangings, rugs and exactly what was stopping the roof from caving in on us to be too worried about the different styles of wool you could get from any particular type of sheep. The irony, of course, is that much of the materials used by the Navajo in weaving their elaborate blankets and rugs comes these days from import rather than their own sheep or cotton plantations. This, however, in no way detracts from the skill involved in their art - early Spanish settlers (for which read: conquerors) routinely commented on the quality of Navajo rugs and blankets, and this was before they had even introduced the concept of sheep farming to them. Before long, the Navajo had all but forgotten their traditional farming techniques and were spending their time squabbling with each other over how many sheep should be traded for whatever they needed at the time - sheep and wool quickly became to be considered currency among the Navajo, so it really is little surprise that they are now known for their extraordinary ability to weave a beautifully detailed rug out of anything except bricks.

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.