Las Vegas

First glance of the city from the freeway is it’s ugly: squat with no identifiable skyline as it rises from the desert floor. Checking the SatNav, I see it is still 22 miles away so looms ever larger as I pick my way through the congested hinterland. Only when I turn right onto Las Vegas Boulevard (aka ‘The Strip’) does the city make itself known, such is the impact of colour, noise and scale

I’m staying at the LINQ, one of the least attractive hotels on the strip. It resembles an industrial facility which is at least honest in a city where virtually everything else is fake. It's an intricate, complex site, designed specifically to support a series of processes developed to remove as much money from the guests in the shortest possible time period.

Check-in is fully automated, swift and convenient. It needs to be, given the number of arrivals. The process features a few cross-sell/up-sell attempts (room upgrades, show bookings and so on), all of which set the tone. In most hotels, elevators are situated conveniently in the lobby but not in Vegas.

There is first a five-minute, four-hundred-yard walk that snakes through the various sub-components of the machine to tempt even before you've dropped your bags. First, the tables, the part that flays and hacks off great chunks of wealth at alarming speed, given the acceptance of large stakes.

Then, there are four restaurants, two bars, two cafes and three largish shops to gently compress what’s left in the carcass and squeeze out a few more drops of liquidity. Lastly are the small rotating knives of the gaming machines that pick off the bones, whatever minute scraps remain.

Oh, and right by the lift is a concession selling hangover cure injections so wasted and wounded folk can rejuvenate themselves so the city can have one last go at them.

I make a booking at HaSalon, a newish Tel Avivian joint that is a hot ticket according to Conde Naste Traveller and half a mile north on the strip.

After ten minutes walking, I’m still inside the LINQ, emerging briefly to daylight before entering another disorientating maze of spending opportunities, gazing up at the perfectly rendered Venetian sky, painted Truman Show-like on a huge dome hundreds of feet above. The cafes look like those on Piazza San Marco and there are canals, Gondalas, the works. The atmosphere is carefully controlled in terms of temperature and humidity to replicate an early evening in Venice in May, whatever the time of day or year.

Vegas is the antithesis of good urban planning insofar it sets out to create a sense of abandonment and unease. At some point, you'll just give up trying to get where you wanted to and start spending.

The restaurant is fine, but no more. Hackney’s Oren on Shacklewell Road is the same vibe but much better and a fraction of the $180 that a starter, main and two glasses of wine cost here.

In the LINQ complex is the Jimmy Kimmel Comedy Club featuring a midwest turn called John Capurolo who is sporadically funny. The problem is mine insofar I don’t get many of the cultural references. Or maybe it’s just I haven’t really got Vegas.

Returning to my room at 11:30, there is still a crowd trying to check in, more meat for the grinder.

28 March 2024

At 07:00, I go in search of a coffee. The same people are trying to check-in. At least they look the same. Glum, grim, exhausted and wearing a look of foreboding. Like battle-weary troops: nervous; with no confidence they will survive what is to come.

The machines are still chirruping away with more of the same people playing them. Poor, poorly dressed, often grotesquely obese, they were probably pretty much broken before they got here. Vegas will no doubt finish the job.

Finding my way out onto the strip, even at 08:00, all deadly sins are available on tap with the volume turned all the way up to 11. Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, and wrath are predictable but sloth makes a surprise appearance. Various escalators and walkways take you over the strip and back again with minimum effort, to allow the fun to continue with minimal interruption.

I walk south past all the famous names: Caesar’s Palace, the Bellagio, Mandalay Bay and they are impressive, if only for the sheer bulk and ambition. To establish this in the middle of a scrubby desert has a commercial acumen,  foresight and cahonas most of us can only dream about.

There is a sleight-of-hand at work here, though. The elevations are tallish but rarely more than thirty storeys, wide and thin. Face on, they look imposing but almost two-dimensional with no depth to them, a metaphor for the entire town if ever there was one.

South of Tropicana Avenue, the strip becomes a little quaint with a kitsch version of New York, complete with shrunken replicas of the Chrysler Building, Empire State, Statue of Liberty, and Brooklyn Bridge.

There is also the Big Apple Coaster, a Coney Island rollercoaster that threads its way through the fake skyline. Not that you’ll notice: it’s $25 and two minutes and forty seconds of pure, unadulterated, controlled terror and one I wouldn’t have missed for the world.

At 15:20 on the dot, I’m picked up by the Maverick Helicopters courtesy shuttle and whisked to the airport, only five minutes out of the city. I've booked their signature 'Wild Dancer Sunset' helicopter tour, over the Hoover Dam to touch down in the Grand Canyon for drinks and snacks.

The 45-minute return flight is scheduled to arrive just as the sun sets and the strip lights up for the night. The whole experience is as magical as it sounds. If you find yourself here with $679 left to your name after Vegas has had its way with you, I can think of no better way of spending it.

A week ago, in Telluride, I thought I’d chanced upon heaven on earth. In Las Vegas, I’ve found a rarified version of hell. To my slight surprise, I rather like it, albeit with reservations.

The sheer bonkersness of it all, the excess, the fakeness is something that rational, sentient humans should, by and large, resist. And on the whole, I sense most people do, apart from the odd couple of escapist days…

But - and it’s a bit, hypocritical ‘but’, given it’s undoubtedly cross-subsidising my stay - it’s the gambling that is so infinitely, crushingly, tragically depressing and the abiding memory.

I can’t judge as I neither understand nor trust the hidden law of a probable outcome, so have never had the slightest inclination to gamble. Like drugs (never done those either), they both scare me: I’d be terrified about getting it wrong and ending up in the mire with no way home.

In the miles I spent walking, trying to find my way out of one hotel or another amidst the din of the machines, I would scan the faces of the people playing them. I promise I saw not one happy soul. Occasionally, I would catch their eyes and they all screamed the same, silent, solitary word: “Help”.

PS: I wouldn’t usually comment about something I’ve written or a photograph I’ve taken but the shot above is a bit different and of interest to anyone who likes taking photographs, with their phone (like this one) or a ‘proper’ camera.

On all the pedestrian bridges over the strip, there is a 6-foot bronze-tinted glass wall. Presumably, this is to stop the punters that have been cleaned out from hurling themselves into a torrent of oncoming traffic as a means of ending the misery. It might be salvation for them but bad for business overall, so best discouraged…

From a photographic point of view, every daytime shot was ruined by reflections and an unnatural colour cast (see example to the right) but at night, these same reflections captured the lurid insanity of the place perfectly, right down to the vacuous ‘couple’ toasting each other on the giant screen.

I love this photo and I think it’s one of the best I’ve taken on this trip or any other. Particularly as it departs substantially from my usual ho-hum perspective of tasteful, over-saturated colours, zero traces of humanity and languid composition.

I’m still undecided about Las Vegas though.