This is a city impossible not to love – so long as you play your cards right. CONOR POPEpays a whistlestop visit to the place Hunter S Thompson called 'the meanest town on Earth'
IT’S 7AM and things are getting messy. “It’s Vegas baby, Vegas!” my somewhat flushed companion bellows to no-one in particular. He’s ordering another round of cocktails off the bemused waiter working the breakfast shift at the Casino Bar in the Mandalay Bay Hotel on the southern end of the most famous Strip in the world.
We’ve been in this black and chrome bar for eight blurry hours, but the hangovers and the horrors are still some ways off. After flying more than 6,000 miles to spend 48 hours in the world’s wildest party town, going to bed at this early stage of the, er, evening, seems like surrender, so I nod, reach for the frozen margarita and hope I don’t marry a hooker or wake up with a tiger in my bathroom.
“For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on Earth,” Hunter S Thompson said as he barrelled through the desert in 1971 on his drug-fuelled search for the American dream. He was right, of course, but that’s nowhere near the full story. This is the ultimate bi-polar town – both cruel and pitiless, and hilariously exhilarating and utterly intoxicating, a city impossible not to love – so long as you play your cards right.
With more than 145,000 hotel rooms, including 12,000 at the $8.5 billion CityCenter hotel, apartment and casino complex which opened at the start of December, finding a place to sleep for less than $70 a night is not a problem. Finding the time to sleep might be.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Authority wants people to look beyond the gambling and see the city as a family-friendly destination. Family friendly might be stretching the point, but their basic message seems to be getting across – today the tourist spend is split almost 50-50 between gambling and other activities, down from 95-5 in the 1950s and 1960s when the Mob ruled the city.
It’s easy to spend money outside of the casinos. First up is the helicopter ride over the Hoover Dam to the Grand Canyon. It’s worth every cent of the $350 ticket price. Flying over, and then into, the Canyon on a warm and sunny December morning is a memory that will long be cherished by anyone with half a soul.
Often the world’s wonders disappoint and seem smaller than anticipated. Not the Grand Canyon – if anything it exceeds expectations and is grander that I could have possibly imagined. Be careful though, the drive from Vegas goes through the Mojave desert and it’s as long as it is boring – an eight-hour round trip at least – so the 30- minute helicopter ride is the only way to go.
Love, the Beatles-inspired Cirque de Soleil show, is one of six Cirque gigs running on the Strip – a seventh based on the life of Elvis will be added next year. Love is, by all accounts, the best of the bunch, and while there could have been more death-defying high-wire tricks and less incomprehensible interpretive dance moves, the music is familiar and it's a pleasant, if not exactly rock'n'roll, way to pass part of an evening.
In the 48 hours at our disposal, we also saw the Lion Kingmusical in the Mandalay Bay, had excellent treatments in one of the same hotel's two lavish spas, went on several shopping trips to upmarket malls bathed in false twilight – the casinos are not big on natural light – and were witnesses at least two weddings presided over by "Elvis".
These activities are not cheap – a show will cost around $100 – but you can equally spend a happy and penniless afternoon wandering through the casinos, people watching and marvelling at what happens when the human imagination runs riot without sparing a thought for cost or taste.
There are the canals with serviceable and rideable gondolas which snake through the Venetian, the half-sized Eiffel Tower in the Paris casino, the black pyramid of Cheops in the Luxor, the New York skyline-shaped hotel with its terrifying roller-coaster ride and, of course, Caesar’s Palace, the Strip’s most famous, must-see casino.
With all this to take in, it’s a wonder there’s any time left for decadence, but there is. Vegas would be nothing without gambling, so, despite the depressing sight of people hopelessly feeding the slot machines in a joyless triumph of hope over bitter experience, I gamble, in order to, in the words of Hunter S, “cover the story”.
“Put $10 on 17 at the first roulette table you see,” a Vegas veteran who calls on the morning I hit town suggests. In the absence of a more sensible strategy, I do. The odds are long – 37-1 against – but a small part of me thinks the bet will come good.
It doesn’t. Slightly shamed by this mindless optimism, I take a more conservative approach and place a couple of $5-dollar chips on red. It comes up black. Another couple of chips on even and the ball hits 17. Just 90 seconds into my gambling odyssey and I’m down 60 bucks, or more than the total I’ve gambled anywhere in the last two years.
I need a drink. At the bar, poker machines are sunken into the counters. They swallow 15 of my dollar bills as I wait for a beer. I remain upbeat. The roulette tables and poker machines are unskilled games of chance for the clueless, with the odds stacked in favour of the house, The card games, on the other hand, are about skill and tactical nous. And I have both in spades, or so I think.
I hit the blackjack tables where the minimum bet is $10. I’m down $100 in 10 minutes. I need to find an ATM machine, so leave the table briefly. When I return, my place has been occupied by a fellow hack on the trip and the cards have turned. It’d be unseemly to hustle her out of my seat, so I sit beside her and watch, miserably, as her chip stack gets higher off the cards which should have been mine while my own stack vanishes. Within minutes another $80 is gone, and so am I.
The Strip is no more than two or three miles long and, as it’s a warm evening, I decide to walk back to the hotel. “We’ll take in the atmosphere,” I say to my companion, who is relying on me for directions. Instead, we take a wrong turn and cross almost immediately onto the wrong side of the tracks.
The high-end casinos give way to low-rent dives and the razzmatazz of the feather boa-clad showgirls are replaced by seedy-looking bars touting €10 lap dances. Cheesy wedding chapels sit in the parking lots of sleazy motels offering “Porno & Pool” for $29 a pop. Ah, the romance of it all. And, instead of Armani or Gucci outlets where high rollers assuage their guilt at winning, losing or sleeping with call girls – there are pawnshops and repo stores where the broken go to flog the last of their possessions before hitting the tables again.
With the boys in the hood circling us – on BMX-style bikes, oddly – the penny eventually drops and I realise we’re in a bad place. We flag a cab. Or try to. Taxis follow the money and that’s in short supply in this part of downtown. Eventually, a kind-hearted cabbie flies past, does a spectacular u-turn, and picks us up. This Vegas native laughs hard at my shocking sense of direction and tells us we were just a few metres from serious trouble, and he drops us back to the hotel, where a proper mugging takes place.
In the Mandalay poker room, Texas Hold ‘Em holds sway at all the tables. It is the one card game I think I’m good at, so my confidence is high as I take my seat. It goes badly from the get go. A mean, ugly drunk sits to my immediate left and we eye him like starving vultures. You can almost hear the 10 other players at the table think, “Come to Daddy”, as he stumbles into his seat. He plays loose and wild with a huge pile of chips. For some unaccountable reason, the poker gods are smiling on him and frowning on me and, against all the odds, his useless 10/4 pre-flop combo takes my A/K suited after I’ve gone all in, leaving me broken and furious. “You can’t beat a loose drunk,” the dealer says sympathetically. “Now you tell me,” I say, and storm off in a strop.
My gambling allowance is all but gone in a couple of miserable, fun-free hours. With the losing streak getting me down, we head to the Bellagio, one of the most upmarket casinos in town, where enormous fountains dance to music in a spectacular fashion every half-an-hour through the night to lift flagging spirits.
Water fountains and tequila sooth a troubled soul and a couple of excellent frozen margaritas in, a final throw of the metaphorical dice – on the slots this time – seems like a fine idea. Initially, I had thought the slots, with their gaudy lights and annoying jingles, were for losers, but now that I am a loser with only $5 left before my gambling ceiling of $400 is reached, I give them a whirl. Ninety seconds later, I’ve won $300 and, suddenly I love the slots. Love them to pieces.These gods of fortune are clearly a fickle bunch, so rather than test their patience, I immediately cash in and we take a cab from the Bellagio back to the Mandalay.
Less than 10 hours later, we walk, ashen-faced past the hideously loud slot machines on sentry duty in the airport departure lounge, silently cursing the men who invented tequila and all-night casino bars. That’s Vegas, baby, that’s Vegas.
Where to eat, shop, go and... fly
Where to eat
Vegas is a surprisingly good place for foodies, where top-notch burger joints compete with Michelin-starred restaurants for the tourist dollar.
Stack in the Mirage (mirage.com/restaurants) offers dozens of draught beers, a range of milkshakes and excellent Kobe beef burgers. The Michelin-starred Mix, at the top of THEhotel next door to the Mandalay Bay (manalaybay.com) offers top-class food as well as some of the best views of the Strip the adjacent bar is one of the coolest places in the city to sip a cocktail.
Texas de Brazil (texasdebrazil.com) runs a chain of steak houses across the US and the quality of the beef in its Vegas joint is superb.
Where to shop
The Forum mall attached to the Caesars Palace is excellent for designer outlets as well as more everyday shops like Gap and Calvin Klein. While the prices may be higher than in the outlet malls off the main drag, it is a whole lot easier to get to and the prices are a whole lot less than home.
If you want to find real bargains, the Premium Outlets mall about three miles north of the city’s hub is excellent and can be reached in a taxi for a cost of less than $15.
Where to go
The Colosseum at Caesars Palace plays host to two women who appear to have conquered the aging process, at least if the posters all over the city advertising the residencies of Cher and Bette Middler are anything to go by.
The French-Canadian Cirque du Soleil has six shows on the strip and plans to add a seventh, focusing on the life of Elvis – what took them so long?
Donny and Marie Osmond are into the third year of their Vegas run at the Flamingo, but the big draw at present is the Garth Brooks’ out-of-retirement show at the Wynn hotel on the northern end of the strip.
Where to fly
No visit to Vegas would be complete without a trip to the Grand Canyon. You can drive there, but it’s a long, boring journey with little by way of interesting scenery to look at. At more than $300, the 30-minute helicopter trips with Papillion (papillon.com) are not cheap, but are well worth the money. They fly you into the Canyon, feed you champagne and take you home, all in under three hours. Helicopter trips over the Strip at night are also a wheeze and, at $99, considerably more affordable .
Where to club
It’s easy to be distracted by the bars in the casinos, but Vegas’s club scene is hopping, too. Lavo, a Roman bathhouse-themed nightclub at the Palazzo, and Tao, at the Venetian, are apparently happening, as is Tryst, at the Wynn Hotel, which features go-go dancers, waterfalls, and more beautiful people than anywhere else on the strip.
How to get there
British Airways (ba.com) flies from London Heathrow and Virgin Atlantic (virgin- atlantic.com) flies from London Gatwick to Las Vegas.
Conor Pope was a guest of British Airways and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, visitlasvegas.com