Amarillo, Texas: show me the way to eat, sleep and have fun

Driving towards Amarillo, crossing a level plain under an enormous dome of sky, you see many cowboy-themed signs for a restaurant called The Big Texan Steak Ranch. It has been a roadside attraction since Route 66 brought travellers to Amarillo, and it thrives to this day on one outrageous gimmick. The Big Texan offers a 72oz steak – that's four-and-a-half pounds, or two kilos of meat – and it's free of charge if you can eat the thing in an hour. What the signs don't tell you is that the steak comes with a shrimp cocktail, bread roll, baked potato and salad, and you have to eat all of that too.

Seeing a gargantuan truck driver or oilfield worker attempting this feat is a hard thing to forget, especially if he succeeds, but there's a lot more to Amarillo than its most famous landmark. 'Rilla, as some call it, is never going to be a travel destination in its own right, but it's an enjoyable place to break a long road trip and spend a day or two. Visitors are encouraged to bring a can of spray-paint to the much-photographed Cadillac Ranch, a graffiti-covered art installation consisting of 10 old Cadillacs buried nose-first in the ground, a few miles west of town on Interstate 40. Its creator is a local millionaire and art-prankster called Stanley Marsh 3, and he's also put up thousands of mock road signs all over Amarillo, which add a surreal flavour to this prosaic oil, cattle and banking town on the plains. From a distance, they look like normal American traffic signs, but they carry images of strange creatures and provocative slogans: "I love the touch of silken flesh", "The body of a dead enemy always smells sweet", "Madness singing".

The best place to stay is probably the Marriott Courtyard Downtown, a nicely done chain hotel in a historic building. You can walk to Ohms Cafe for a cocktail and a sophisticated meal, and it's a short hop to the bars, cafes, galleries and antique stores on SW 6th Avenue, also known, confusingly, as Sixth Street. It's a preserved and renovated section of the old Route 66, with plenty of original 1950s Americana still in evidence.

Local hipsters get their organic coffee and craft beer at the 806, and the Golden Light is a classic old bar and diner with live music.

As you would expect, Amarillo has good barbecue (Doug's Hickory Pit, 3313 South Georgia Street) and Mexican food (Jorge's Tacos Garcia, 1100 South Ross Street), but it comes as a surprise to most visitors to see Thai, Laotian, Vietnamese and Colombian restaurants on East Amarillo Boulevard.

In recent years, Amarillo has taken in immigrants and refugees from far-flung countries, and they have broadened its culinary palate exponentially. At a restaurant called African Safari (5945 East Amarillo Boulevard), you can eat goat meat and chapatis alongside Somalis and Sudanese who look thoroughly at home in what was once a quintessential Texas cow town.

The plains around Amarillo are so vast, featureless, mirage-prone and disorientating that early Spanish explorers, borrowing a technique from native guides, would shoot arrows in the intended direction of travel to keep themselves on course. Immense herds of bison roamed these tablelands, and after the Spanish inadvertently introduced the horse to North America, Comanche Indians learned to hunt them on horseback, and lived as mounted nomadic warrior. Their military prowess and sheer ferocity brought the white frontier to a halt for 200 years, until European diseases, to which they had no immunity, defeated the Comanches and ushered in the era of the cattleman and cowboy. Anyone with an interest in this extraordinary saga, or the old west in general, should not miss the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, a short drive south of Amarillo.

The last stronghold of the free Comanches was a giant canyon called Palo Duro, which very few whites knew about, or even suspected existed in such a horizontal landscape. It's now a state park. Only one chasm in North America is deeper and wider – the Grand Canyon – and Palo Duro looks similar, with multi-coloured layers and spectacular eroded rock formations. The cliffs and spires turn a deep red at sunset, and then you can watch that huge Texas sky fill up with stars.

Richard Grant, author of Ghost Riders: Travels with American Nomads. His books include Bandit Roads, and Ghost Riders

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