Nothing, Arizona by Andrew Eames

The small roadstead of Nothing lies in a scrubby stretch of Arizonan desert around 50 miles north of Phoenix. In true Nothing tradition, there's not much here beyond a petrol station, a winsome blonde waiting for a road movie to come along, and an aged resident in a rocking chair. "What have you got?" we ask as we pause outside his shop. "Well, we got a goodly supply of gas," he squinted up at us, "and pretty much none of it's been used before".

Inside there was nothing to buy, barring the so-called town charter which harked on about how its people "Hoped for Nothing, wanted for Nothing, worked at Nothing..." etc. The aged resident tipped his hat at us as we re-emerged to apologise for not buying anything. He called after us as we moved away, "when you've seen Nothing, you've seen everything, isn't that right, boys?" Boom, boom.

You do get an awful lot of nothing in Arizona, but scattered across the harsh landscape are also idiosyncratic pockets of something. Take the small former gold mining community of Oatman, for example, 50-odd miles north of Nothing. Here all the men still sport prospector's beards and the town's annual celebrations revolve around the "burro biscuit toss" - that's throwing the donkey poo, for the likes of you and me.

Oatman was once major Gold Rush territory, but the miners all sold up, and today only the Gold Road Mine is ready to roll again, just as soon as the gold price goes up. Until then, a former miner called Two Dogs ("Nope, I'm not telling you how I got my name") conducts guided tours of the top shafts in the manner of a dead-pan Scooby-Doo. How long did the tour last, we wanted to know. "The whole time," drawled Two Dogs. "Hur hur."

As in most wilderness areas the world over, Arizona's more eccentric characters tend to stand out, but most of them have air-conditioning and satellite TV to help them cope. Only the likes of Dave Griffiths truly relish a place which is as dry as sandpaper and as cuddly as a chuckwallah lizard.

Griffiths is the Arizonan equivalent of Crocodile Dundee, a man who derives pleasure from a hostile environment, and tries to communicate that pleasure to others. His 4WD trips into the Sonoran Desert are not to be undertaken lightly, and as he guns his vehicle up the dirt tracks beyond Lake Havasu City, one of the hottest continuously inhabited places on earth, he tells how a couple of years ago two residents had broken down on the self-same route. One man decided to walk back to get help while the other stayed with the pick-up. His was the wiser decision, because after walking just two of the three miles required, his friend died of heat exhaustion.

It was a salutary tale, said Griffiths, with a definite lesson to be learned: if you break down in the desert, stay with your vehicle and never try to do anything in the heat of the day. In the Sonoran, the evaporation rate is 50 times greater than the rainfall, which is not a great indicator for human survival.

There are several places in the world where the extreme is the norm, but not many of them are both extreme and extremely well populated, as Arizona is. Much of the state is impossibly hot and dry much of the year, and its capital city Phoenix holds the US heat record at 128 degrees F, but thanks to a combination of man-made air-conditioning and the God-created Colorado River, which brings fresh water from the Rockies, Phoenix continues to rise from the ashes as one of America's fastest growing cities.

The state's year-round sunshine and clear skies earn it several million visitors every year, most of whom come in the winter months seeking to avoid cold and damp conditions further north. Some, however, are nutcases in search of a typically Arizonan challenge or two - which was why I was sitting in the back of Dave Griffiths' jeep.

Actually, Griffiths' trip out into the "kinda primordial" Sonoran was more a lesson in desert genesis, fauna and flora than an extreme adventure. This was a man who began his commentary with remarks like "we're gonna talk about rocks..." and "as any good microbiologist will tell you...", and who waxed lyrical about the likes of the creosote bush, the ocotillo and the white bur sage, which he called the "toughest plant on earth". Through his eyes we came to recognise the desert eco-system as something delicate and fragile that deserved our respect - and certainly didn't deserve a "bunch of gear-heads with guns", as Griffiths described the desert's other 4WD drivers; he showed us giant saguaro or gunfighter cactus which they had shot to pieces.

Hard country tends to bring out a frontier mentality in its settlers, and there's not much evidence of concern for the environment in Arizona. This does mean, however, that you can do things here which are becoming impossible elsewhere. Down near Yuma, for example, there's a huge expanse of sand dune which acts as a giant sand pit for owners of buggies and ATVs, who descend on it like the cast of Mad Max on selected holiday weekends.

On the river, too, there are long stretches of the Colorado where jet skis and powerboaters are the main users, even in the Native American Reservations which line the river bank. Despite their name, these are not fenced-off enclaves. There are no stockades or tipis, although the houses are a lot more humble and the fields a lot better tended than in neighbouring territory. Reservation land hereabouts is laced with irrigation channels and patched with alfalfa, wheat and melon fields. The tribes are traditionally quiet and hard-working farmers, but nowadays they also have another crop: tourists.

For the majority of visitors the main attraction is not the Native lifestyles, or even the beguiling canoe rental operation on the Colorado offered by the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT), but the casinos. As in many states in the US, the Reservations are the only holders of gambling licences.

Thus, on the Colorado at Parker, you will come across the Blue Water Resort. Built in theme-park-Mayan style, it is wonderfully situated on its own pristine section of the surging river, where it rises like an oasis of opulence from amidst straggling tamarisk and mesquite trees. Inside are 200 deluxe rooms, a four-screen cinema and three indoor pools connected by waterslides, all of it barely a handful of years old.

But no-one swims in the pools, few attend the movie screenings and the river slides past unmolested by the smattering of boats which are tied up at Blue Water's 160-berth jetties. It's not that there are too few guests to get to grips with river-based activities, but they are simply too otherwise engaged in the glittering, twittering hotel interior to be remotely interested in the big outdoors; they're here for the slot machines.

Further north at the desert-surrounded Lake Havasu itself it's a different story. This is true gear-head nirvana, where rapier-shaped chrome speedboats with names like Lick This and Eliminator roast the water. A weekend morning on Lake Havasu sounds like Brands Hatch on practice day, and a lot of the hardware can be hired by the hour or by the day.

There is, however, one place on Lake Havasu where the fastest have to go slow - out of respect to something British. The thing that first put the town on the map is a bridge that began its life spanning the Thames, until local entrepreneur Robert McCulloch purchased it back in 1967 and had it shipped over. Since then London Bridge has lost its London grime and shed 100,000 tons (it was rebuilt with a hollow core), which just goes to show that Arizona's hot, dry climate can not only slay unwary walkers, but it can even make bridges go blonde and lose weight!