The City of What?!

Not really wanting to get to know the British junkies and prostitutes that spent the day in the hostel kitchen, I went outside and saw a little bit of the nice part of LA. Just by stepping outside, I was walking in the footsteps of Mel Gibson. Literally. This is the main street for the stars and footprints in the pavements, and I had to walk carefully not to step onto tiny Japanese tourists looking for the stars of cereblities like Alnord Schwalzeneggel, Tom Cluize and Ervis Plesrey.

I spent a full day at the Universal Studios theme park, where the theme - surprise, surprise - is movies. For US$31 (after a four dollar discount) I was free to enjoy all non-edible attractions from opening till closing time. Not having tried anything like it before, I enjoyed myself tremendously. I won't bore you with descriptions of everything, but let me tell you that if you just can stop yourself from trying to figure out how they trick you into seeing what they want you to see, it'll be loads of fun for you. And the concerts and musical shows are excellent, too.

It can not be denied; Los Angeles sucks. Therefore I decided to get out of there, having had a nice day in the safe shelter courtesy of Universal Studios. My plan was to go to San Diego next, but when the people at the Sunset Blvd & Vine St. Greyhound Station told me that would mean I'd have to go to Downtown LA and wait there for four hours, I quickly voted against it. I visited that station a couple of years earlier, and that's one of those very few places in the world I just don't want to go back to. So instead I used my US$259 15 day Greyhound unlimited travel pass to get on the very next bus, whose front sign read "Las Vegas".

After short stops in Barstow and Baker, five hours later we came over a mountain pass, and there, right in front of us, I could see a large area bathed in light, and it could only be Las Vegas itself. Every small town in Nevada may have at least one giant casino, most often with a rollercoaster on the roof, but Las Vegas can not be confused with any other city. I found the only hostel in town, US$12 per night, and immediately won a t-shirt on my bed number. I was so happy to receive a new garment, it was my only clean piece of clothing, even though it had a really kitch Vegas look to it.

The hostel was almost at the end of The Strip, the long street with all the largest casinos along its sides, so I just started walking. I walked from casino to casino, one crazier than the other, and picked up all kinds of freebies they use to entice visitors to come in and spend all their money; decks of cards, dices, free pulls to win prizes, popcorn, mugs and so on. The fight for customers is pretty intense. I spent the whole day doing this, wasting US$2.10 on various gambling machines and collecting the junk they gave me. Another US$5 bought me an insane buffet meal at Circus Circus, after which I could only manage to drag myself through the Stratosphere, Sahara, Slots of Fun, Westward Ho, Stardust, Rivier and Frontier casinos before I had to go back to the hostel and digest everything I had eaten and seen. When I walked back it had turned dark, and with darkness came also lots and lots of small cards with pictures of scantily clad women and phone numbers, and apparently a call to any of these numbers would result in these women appearing, close to naked, very close to whoever would call. Judging from the looks of the rest of the people at the hostel, I was pretty glad there were no phones available in the dorm rooms.

The next morning I booked myself onto a daytrip to the Hoover Dam, and won a "free lunch" at McDonald's in doing so. Then I explored the rest of the big casinos; Treasure Island, Mirage, Harrah's, Imperial (who were kind enough to give me another buffet meal, but this time I knew when to stop eating), O'Shea's, Caesar's Palace, Bally's, Aladdin, Holiday Inn, Monte Carlo, New York NY, MGM, Excalibur, Luxor, Tropicana and Hard Rock Hotel. By now it wasn't much exciting anymore. There were a few people with nice looks, but most of the crowd were old people, and a lot of the younger ones were pretty ugly and fat, looking what most people who eat too many buffet meals will look like after a few weeks of that. In short; They were Americans. And nobody I talked to actually believed that I swam to the airport in Fiji, the same way they wouldn't believe that some exercise would make them lose weight, or, the same way they DO believe that they may have been abducted by aliens, who afterwards made them forget it. This made me like them even less than if they had been just ugly and fat. I guess the luxurious surroundings at the casinos made me pretty hostile, after having seen so much poverty and despair in the last few months.

A bit tired after all the casino-walking, I still got up in time for the Gray Line tour to the Hoover Dam, US$19 including 1 Big Mac. It's a pretty decent-sized dam, the largest one ever built "by hand" using cliffhanger techniques, but there are many much larger dams to be seen in many other countries all over the world. It does generate a bit power, which is transported all the way down to Los Angeles, but its most important function is as a flood control mechanism and as a water source for the dry surroundings. By all means, slightly impressive, but not much more.

On our way back to Las Vegas, the bus made a stop at the Ocean Spray production plant, near the city. A desert is a strange place to choose as the site for bottling soft drinks, if you ask me. Nevertheless, here they create their jams and juices, based on cranberries, apparently so called because the flowers of the cranberry bush at some stage looks like a crane's head and neck and some other secret ingredients. And that's all I learnt this day.

Back in Las Vegas I decided to have a look downtown, having had enough of the stereotypical casinos along The Strip. Guess what? Downtown is exactly the same. More casinos, except they are more run-down there, some with pretty run-down visitors as well, taking full advantage of the possibility of playing on the one cent slot machines. And there's the roofed pedestrian street, covered with 3 million light bulbs in various colours, on which they have hourly shows, using the roof as some kind of incredibly long canvas for showing movies on. It's good.

The last thing I did in Las Vegas was to have a 3 dollar breakfast buffet, which was enough to keep me going until I reached my next stop; Flagstaff, the gateway to Grand Canyon.