Taming the Wild West

GO ARIZONA: The Arizona desert is notoriously inhospitable, but luxurious Scottsdale is an oasis in the expanse of dry earth, writes ADAM ALEXANDER

IT TAKES a while to get used to being in a hot-air balloon, and to the idea that you’re hanging nearly 1,000ft in the air in nothing but an enormous laundry basket. But once you relax and stop worrying about the fact that you’re drifting over steep hillsides pin-cushioned with cacti, you can finally bring yourself to look over the edge and marvel.

When you’re floating above Arizona, you can marvel at just how in the hell a place of nothing but canyons, coyotes and cacti became a home for millions of people with swimming pools, sports stadiums and more than 200 thirsty golf courses.

Strictly speaking, the Arizona desert – home to such incredible natural spectacles as the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley – is a place that should be the death of you. But in the enormous valley sprawl of the Arizona capital of Phoenix and its Beverly Hills-suffix city of Scottsdale, they’ve somehow taken that precept and turned it entirely and not a little awesomely on its head.

Scottsdale especially is a place you go to rejuvenate, get pampered in spas and resorts that would give ancient Rome a run for its money, enjoy organic-only food at the finest restaurants, and pursue any number of healthy and fun outdoor activities, such as mountain biking through the desert or learning to be a cowboy even. Providing, of course, you don’t arrive haplessly in the middle of the baking summer, when even the rattlesnakes are looking for a rock to crawl under. It has also got to be about the cleanest place I’ve ever seen. Cars gleam in Scottsdale as if only just bought; sidewalks look good enough to eat your dinner off; and there are barrels of brightly coloured flowers everywhere between bits of perfect lawn that look as if they may secretly be manicured at night using nail-scissors.

And all of it nestled neatly into what strikes you at first like a fabulous desert backdrop created by Hollywood, with its looming lunar-landscape of beautiful Camelback Mountain, and nine to 12m giant saguaro cacti that grow along the roads here like trees.

The result is possibly Lawrence of Arabia’s most perfectly imagined retirement idyll. But Scottsdale is more than just a swanky desert locale, and far from just for the retired. From the luxurious spas and health resorts that populate the whole area, to the people here who think nothing of running 15-20km every day through the desert, it’s a whole sun-kissed lifestyle, and in many ways perhaps – especially for someone admittedly more used to finding redeeming features in rundown places than noticing imperfections in near-perfect places – a slightly surreal glimpse into the Brave New World of the future.

Immaculate shopping centres have splash fountains specifically for children to play in while their parents take a breather from designer shopping; bars spray mist into the open air to cool their customers while they drink, and hotel staff and even cops ride around on Segways, those zippy, futuristic two-wheel devices that make it alarmingly simple for someone to suddenly sneak up on you.

But then there is a definite respect for the environment of old here, too, with strict codes on building, advertising billboards and light pollution – though obviously not profligate water-use. It will leave you impressed by the irony, if nothing else, of what looks like a better and more serious attempt at “greener” sustainable living here in the desert than other parts of the US, where the urgency isn’t so obvious.

But perhaps there is nothing new or ironic in this at all, as apparently Arizona was first populated by people who thought the desert the perfect place to live, including the Comanche, the Navajo, the Hopi and the Apache, of course. People who over the centuries have sworn by the restorative properties of its clean, dry air, and who likewise found their souls nourished by its sunsets and starry skies.

Every weekend, 30-40,000 people come to Scottsdale to enjoy more than 50 bars, 50 golf courses, 100 art galleries and 100 restaurants. It wants incongruously to be both the Beverly Hills and Beverly Hillbillies in places, especially the kitschy centre, but the signs in Scottsdale that proclaim it “The most liveable city” give more than a clue to the fact that this is one place many people from all over the world understandably dream of living and retiring in.

“It’s only four to five hours from Vegas,” a young married man in his 30s explained to me, giving another reason he liked living here. “I can get to San Diego in five hours, Los Angeles in only six, Mexico in about the same, and they’ve got some lovely beaches there. Everything is five to six hours away,” he said.

Less than that though, perhaps only an hour or two from Scottsdale, through such beguiling-sounding Sonora desert locales such as Horse Thief Basin, Big Bug Valley, Dry Beaver Creek, and the town of Bumble Bee, lies the popular tourist-magnet of Sedona – a smaller, even more sought-after retirement haven in the centre of a rugged, red-rock valley that looks straight out of a John Ford western.

Here, more than anywhere, it doesn’t take much to imagine that at night, when coyotes howl and the sky becomes a star-gazer’s paradise, this is the place to be. Gazing upwards, and as the writer John Fante might have said, groping stupidly for meaning in that perplexing desert sky . . .

One of the great relaxing joys of visiting America is that you can go out wearing anything, your pyjamas even, and still be confident that you won’t be the biggest fashion disaster you meet.

It’s the same with conversation there – whatever you say, it probably isn’t going to be nearly as bad as what you’re going to hear. Such as the fact that Sedona promises to be inundated next year by doomsday tourists hoping to escape the Mayan apocalypse, in spaceships some of them believe are secretly hidden in the surrounding flat-top mountains. How strange it is then, that in all other walks of life, this is a country in hot pursuit of, and indeed almost obsessed by, the need to be perfect.

But while you can make your environment perfect, as Scottsdale almost proves, it is obvious that people will never be, no matter how many plastic surgeons there are.

And if there is at least one major, perhaps fatal flaw in the whole plan here – and there are no doubt cracks all over the place – it is that everything is still designed around the car, and that Scottsdale, which is an incredible 32-miles long, and indeed the whole of America, is virtually impossible to get around without one.

But as my holiday was finally ending by the pool next to the ‘W’ Scottsdale hotel, where Arizona’s finest (and possibly surgically enhanced) bodies gather every Saturday, all I could do was be grateful for the enormous lengths that these people have gone not only to try and make their lives perfect, but to make my time here perfect, too.

Scottsdale where to . . .

3 places to stay

Hotel Valley Ho, 6850 E Main Street, hotelvalleyho.com. If a glimpse into the future frightens you, head anywhere into this wonderful restoration of a famous 1950s Hollywood hotel that once attracted names such as Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart. Even on the roof, as you look out over low-rise, low-light Scottsdale, it can feel as if the whole world has suddenly gone back to the fabulous 1950s. Magical.

Intercontinental Montelucia Resort Spa, 4949 E Lincoln Drive Paradise Valley, icmontelucia.com. Admittedly, this is the same five-star luxury Obama enjoyed when he came to Arizona, and he might have had more nerve to use the "anything you want, anytime" button on the phone. But when you're sitting in a hot-tub at 1am and a member of the hotel staff appears from nowhere just to ask you if you want the bubbles turned on, you know you're in a hotel fit for a president.

The 'W' Scottsdale, 7277 E Camelback Road, wscottsdalehotel.com. From the identical twins that run the reception desk, to the disco-like elevators, to the rooms called "wonderful", "fabulous" and "extreme wow", it may take a while to figure out what the W stands for, but you won't have seen anything like this before.

3 places to eat

Cafe Zuzu, Hotel Valley Ho hotelvalleyho.com. Not only a great restaurant, but as part of the magical Hotel Valley Ho, you'll feel like you're eating on the set of Mad Men.

Posh, 7167 East Rancho Vista Drive, poshscottsdale.com.This is an interesting concept: you tell the chefs what you don't like on their menu and they do all the rest, such as the choosing. Different and daring.

Cowboy CiaoFNB, 7133 E Stetson Drive, cowboyciao.com, and fnbrestaurant.com. Two mega-popular downtown restaurants with great food and great atmosphere in the same family and the same street.

Things to do

Musical Instrument Museum, 4725 E. Mayo Boulevard, Phoenix, theMIM.org. Every time you get worried about how insular Americans can be, something like the Musical Instrument Museum comes along to knock the absolute wind out of you.

This collection, completely funded by a private philanthropist, contains what seems like every instrument from every century in every country of the world, and rarely have I seen a whole group of journalists having to be torn away from something that wasn’t serving drink.

Hot-air ballooning: as they might say in America, "Get ready for the most amazing experience of your life . . ." with rainbowryders.com.

Cowboy college:spend a week with nothing but a horse underneath you and the stars above you at the Arizona Cowboy College in north Scottsdale that takes city slickers and turns them into cowboys. See cowboycollege.com.

* Adam Alexander was a guest of the Scottsdale Convention Visitors Bureau. Tel: 00-1-800-782-1117 or visit exper iencescottsdale.com