Well, Salt Lake City is one of the places I've been looking forward to visiting for a while, although most of yesterday was spent on the road actually getting here and I didn't even see the outskirts of town until something like three in the afternoon. This is the famous city of the Mormons, and my father has been telling me for some time how beautiful it is ever since he came here himself on one of his trips to the United States, so I was obviously going to be quite disappointed - not to mention pissed off - if Salt Lake City turned out to be a dump.

I've been here for a couple of nights now, and have had plenty of time to explore the city and take it all in. The city prides itself on being a clean, god fearing place which is happy to be home to anything wholesome and equally happy to send anything remotely seedy packing - you certainly won't see an adult video shop on every corner here, although I'm sure they do exist somewhere with an appropriate amount of people standing around outside protesting. The city draws believers in from all over the world to join the thriving Mormon faith, a religion which must surely be in the record books as the most well known faith for which nobody actually knows the proper name - "Mormon" is actually the name given to members of the church, not the church itself, so when someone says that their friend has joined the Mormons they should really be saying that their friend has joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This, of course, is rather more of a mouthful - which probably explains why everybody sticks to "Mormons".

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which I shall refer to from now on as the LDS in case my word processor runs out of ink, is currently the fastest growing religion in the world. From what I've seen here in Salt Lake City, followers seem to be by far the single happiest, most laid back group of people I've ever seen outside of a hippy commune - sometimes I wonder if I've accidentally entered Stepford. Oh, I'm sure the locals can get as worked up as anyone else, but when you've spent two days walking around a city being smiled at by everyone, you start to wonder if they might be putting something in the water. It's easy to see why people treat the LDS with so much respect, though - according to our guide on the tour of the Mormon temple yesterday, the church is one of the few which actually discourages its followers from trying to recruit new people to the cause unless they've shown an interest first. When we were told this, I think several of the group nearly choked on whatever they were munching on at the time in disbelief, but when I think about it I can't honestly remember ever being approached by a Mormon. I could make a list a mile long of the number of Jehovah's Witnesses who have come to my door wanting to know if I've found the Lord (I usually suggest they look in the last place they saw him), or people I've had to fight off who were blocking my way down a busy street preaching about the coming apocalypse, but I can't honestly remember ever having been bothered by anyone waving the book of Mormon at me. And don't even get me started on that lot who march up and down the high street beating drums, chanting and getting in everybody's way at just the moment I decide to go out for a newspaper. As I discovered the other day in Kanab, a Mormon is far more likely to want to be your best friend and then mention discretely at some point that Jesus loves you, just in case you might like to press them further on the subject. If you don't want to know, they'll just sweep straight on to asking if you saw last weeks episode of Lost as though religion hadn't been mentioned at all. At least, that's the impression I've been given while in Utah - but as our guide was quite willing to admit, not all of their followers are quite as happy about obeying the rules. Judging by recent protests outside the temple by people with placards calling them every name under the sun - Mucking Formons was one particulatly eloquant one I saw recently on the internet - they do make a lot of people very unhappy!

The followers at the Mormon temple yesterday were eager, to say the least. They considered it a real honour, we were told, to have been called upon from all over the world to come to Salt Lake City and show strangers around their beautiful temple - the level of enthusiasm was a little disturbing at times, if I'm absolutely honest, sometimes bordering on cult-like, but this is a mainstream religion and nobody is being forced to marry the leader and have eighteen children by him so I assumed that it was simply genuine contentment. Teenagers who join the Mormon faith are called upon to undertake missionary work all over the globe, and this is where the slightly sexist side of the LDS rears its ugly head - girls are generally called to Salt Lake City to show people around the temple and then expected to take husbands and settle down to be good little housewives, while the boys are sent off to do manly things like missionary work in third world countries and spread the world in the jungles of darkest Africa. Wherever they are in the world, and however hard they get to toil for their faith, everyone in the LDS is expected to put ten percent of their wages back into the church, which I guess does rather explain why they can afford all these big shiny temples and to send people off all over the world on the slightest whim. The girls who showed us around the Mormon temple - and I use the word "girls" quite correctly, as none of them could've been older than their late teens - were all dressed in long dresses and were standing around with big smiles waiting for us to turn up. I got the impression that every one of them really enjoyed getting to meet people from around the world who were in town for the day, and they seemed almost scarily interested in anything we had to say. Just like the girl I met back in Kabab, they would all give you the impression that you were the centre of their world and nothing else mattered, something which naturally makes you feel incredibly welcome and may well explain why the religion doesn't seem to find it hard to recruit new followers, especially young men. Oh, and every single one of them was beautiful - it was like walking into a model convention, and this I found just a little disturbing as well. Where were all the normal looking girls, why was the temple full of supermodels? I'll leave you to draw your own conclusion here, bearing in mind that these were obviously the chosen few who had been hand picked to show strangers around their temple in the hope that they would join the faith, and it's the men who get to go off and do the real missionary work... I also refer you to a resolution passed by the city of Kanab in 2006, where I was the other day, which sums up the level of religious bigotry and sexism still present in some parts of US society:

"We envision a local culture that upholds the marriage of a man to a woman, and a woman to a man, as ordained of God... We see our homes as open to a full quiver of children, the source of family continuity and social growth. We envision young women growing into wives, homemakers, and mothers; and we see young men growing into husbands, home-builders, and fathers."

I ought to clarify something here. I keep saying that we were being taken on a tour of the Mormon Temple - this is technically incorrect. The Temple is the centrepiece of the ten acre Temple Square, the home of the Mormons in Salt Lake City. Temple square contains extensive grounds, the various buildings used by the LDS, visitors centres and the homes of followers living on site - the temple sits in the middle and towers over all of them. Actually entering the temple itself is not permitted, as it is considered sacred and only those with something called a "temple recommend" are allowed inside - this involves being a member of the faith. This policy actually causes a huge problem when it comes to Mormon marriages, and strict adherence to the rule has led some to describe the policy as barbaric. Members of the LDS who choose to marry obviously consider it the most sacred of honours to get married in a Mormon temple, because they believe that doing so ties people together for all eternity and not merely until death do us part. However, should they choose to do so, members of their family who are not Mormons are quite simply not allowed to attend the ceremony because they are forbidden to enter a Mormon temple - it can't be at all unusual to find Mormon couples getting married in an empty temple because none of their families are allowed in. What makes this a double blow for the parents of the bride is that they are still expected to pay for the whole thing, and then only permitted to take part in a small celebration somewhere else afterwards. This policy, as you can probably imagine, is not widely publicised.

The Mormon guides at Temple Square all went around in twos, which is apparently completely normal. It is a requirement that the girls at the temple are virtually joined at the hip with a companion to whom they are introduced on arrival - I assume that this is to provide a chaperone should either of them suddenly have a moment of madness and head off down the local nightclub to chat up all the local boys. Companions go everywhere together and never leave each others sides (except, presumably, to go to the bathroom - although I didn't like to ask). The tour group which I had joined were met at the gates by a group of young women who bustled over excitedly and began picking each of us off to be shown around by Sisters Jane and Mary, or Sisters Beth and Annie, or whoever - it was like being back at school waiting to be selected for the sports team. Each pair seemed to perform as a double-act, taking the whole companion thing to an entirely new level - one of them carried a microphone with which she could speak to her crowd, and her friend carried a loudspeaker to which the microphone was attached by a cable just short enough to ensure that they were constantly falling over each other. From time to time, they would swap places and the girl who had been on the loudspeaker would take over the narration. The whole tour was an interesting mix of carefully rehearsed patter and that same feeling that I had experienced back at the camera shop in Kanab that we were being chatted up and checked out to see if we were suitable to join the faith. We would walk along as a group, listening to the fascinating history of the Mormons and the story behind the temple and its surrounding buildings, but once our guide and her companion had told us everything about the area we were in they would remove the microphone from the speaker, split up and casually saunter over to chat one on one with whoever took their fancy until we reached the next place of interest. The grounds were full of beautiful gardens and ornate statues, and it was easy to see how this would be a perfect place to live in the midst of the bustling city around us - if it weren't for all the religious stuff which would have to go with it, of course. the smiles never left the faces of our guides for a moment, and at one point I suddenly found myself sitting on the plinth of a statue with a particularly cute young lady with a New York accent who clearly didn't know the meaning of the word inappropriate. Perhaps it's simply the American way to be really outgoing and talk openly about your feelings to whoever will listen, but I was still slightly taken aback when this gorgeous specimen of womanhood with long flowing red hair and freckles plonked herself down next to me, asked casually if I was enjoying the tour, and then mentioned that she was really looking forward to finding somebody to marry so that she could lose her virginity. Living with her companion day and night, she told me, and only seeing boys when they came on the tour was starting to get quite frustrating. I wasn't drinking anything at the time, but I'm pretty sure that, if I had been, I would've spat it right across the square.

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.