USA - Viva Craps Vegas

July 14-15

Hello everyone!

Welcome to ‘Fabulous Las Vegas’. Home of whatever you want, whenever you want. Sin City.

The famous fountain show outside the Bellagio Hotel

The Hand of Faith Nugget, the largest golden nugget on display in the world, found in…The Golden Nugget casino. They had to buy it, didn’t they!

I have been here once before, with my parents when I was a teenager. Las Vegas is cool (in a metaphorical sense, not in terms of temperature) to visit at that time…but you can’t have the full Vegas experience at that age. 

Wedding chapel - THAT DID NOT HAPPEN

Casinos - as you’ll see, that did happen…

Not that I came back out of choice. I’ve signed up for a two-week trip that leaves from Nevada’s biggest city. I therefore needed to be here.

Paris is the City of Lights. Vegas is probably the City of Neon Lights.

One new addition since I last came is Sphere, an entertainment centre with the largest exterior LED display in the world

I don’t think Vegas needs much of an explanation. You’ve seen it in movies. How accurately Ocean’s Eleven, 21 and The Hangover portray the city is questionable in some parts, but much of what you see there is what you get - can get - here.

A section of the Strip surprisingly lacking cars

The Flamingo Hotel and Casino has a flamingo habitat - of course it does

Following an overnight bus from Sacramento, changing in Los Angeles, I had two days to fill. I managed to get an early check-in, filled my sink with ice (a good way of getting around the don’t-touch-the-fridge-if-the-hotel-has-one issue), and got to exploring.

This pylon is where the rapper Tupac Shakur was fatally shot in 1996, and is now a graffiti memorial to him

Within reason. Vegas has changed in some ways since my visit in 2002. The frankly frightening temperatures have not. Hilariously, I have arrived during a ‘heatwave’. That meant that the temperature hit 47C on the first afternoon. I spent some time at the pool of my hotel, the Golden Nugget. I didn’t realise until getting into the water that there is a shark tank in the centre. With real sharks. Quite a few of them.

You’ll notice that the temperature stays high at night -

this is due to the ‘urban heat island effect’,

as the infrastructure traps the heat during the day

I lasted about 5 minutes in that sun before going into the water!

So exploration of downtown Las Vegas was limited to walking in the shade for as much as possible. Luckily its main non-casino draw, the Fremont Street Experience, is covered with a huge, curving screen, painting pretty and bright patterns whilst protecting you from the fierce sun. Still felt very hot, mind: I felt for the street performers. Particularly the one dressed as King Kong. Must’ve done some solid perspiring.

Fremont Street was once known as ‘Glitter

Gulch’ due to the amount of neon signs

Skydancers - who had more clothes than many - performing on a stage

Downtown Las Vegas has some quirky parts to it. You can (almost) pee on part of the Berlin Wall in one hotel. There is a small bar dedicated to the life and work of Evel Knievel. There is the’Big Rig Jig’, a structure made from two repurposed 18-wheeler trucks.

It’s unknown how it ended up in Main Street Hotel; at least they’ve had the decency to put glass around it

The daredevil became globally famous after

attempting to jump a fountain outside Caesars Palace;

he cleared it but broke many bones in the process

The sculpture was erected at the famous Burning Man Festival in 2007

The end of the Fremont zone also hosts a restaurant where you have to wear a medical gown at your table and you eat for free if you weigh more than 350 lbs (158 kg). I didn’t go in but did stuff myself at a lunch buffet nearby. It was my only meal of the day, a good way of saving money (and ensuring I had a nap immediately after to catch up on sleep).

Not tempted

Much more tempted - I had cherry pie and carrot cake

Though this area is historic Las Vegas, it isn’t the Vegas you would picture. That area is called the Strip, and is a few miles south on the same road. This is where the glitz and glamour is: the MGM Grand, Caesars Palace, The Bellagio, The Venetian, et cetera, et cetera…

New York New York hotel - it has an amazing rollercoaster that I remember from the 2002 trip

The fountain show at Bellagio is iconic

The inside of each hotel is almost like going into different worlds of a huge theme park. MGM Grand is hosting a big boxing bout later in the week so has a boxing ring and the world title belt on show. Caesars Palace has many Romanesque monuments. The latter also has one of three spiral escalators in the United States. I still don’t get how that works. Amazing science.

Manny Pacquiao is fighting. He’s 46, and shouldn’t be, but is.

The cost of one spiral escalator is estimated to be 1 million dollars - four times the price of a normal one

The Bellagio, for example, has colourful shells on the ceiling of its lobby, a manicured garden and what was the world’s biggest chocolate fountain.

The glass art cost $10 million to create and install

It has 500 feet of stainless steel piping

What the Bellagio also has - which makes it now my favourite hotel on the Strip - are free daily lessons for craps. Unless you are watching the stupidly unrealistic poker scene from Casino Royale, this is the casino game. I had had a brief introduction to it from a friend a few weeks ago, but spent almost an hour getting detailed explanations and tips from a croupier who has worked in a Vegas casino for 31 years. 

I took this knowledge back to my casino mid-afternoon, where the buy-in was cheaper, and armed with $200 of the $300 I had said I would use for this purpose. I was told this was the amount you needed for a $15 table game (places like the Bellagio only had $25 table games, for which I was told you need $500). There are obviously no photos of me playing - very much against casino rules.

The casino opened in 1946

On a craps table, you aren’t against other players, so camaraderie quickly develops. So what I can tell you is that on one of my rolls, I rolled…and rolled…and rolled. A man had put money on a frankly ludicrous bet - that every other number would be rolled before a 7 - the statistically most likely number with two dice - was rolled. His odds were 150 to 1. I kept rolling, kept on ticking off numbers for him, until he had three of them left. “What do you want?” I asked him. 10 was the reply. 10 was what I rolled. The odds of that happening are 4 out of 36. We laughed. “12 next then,” I said. I rolled…a 12. That’s even less likely. We all cheered. “I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you get me that 4,” he roared. It wasn’t the next roll - this ain’t Hollywood - but I rolled a 4. High fives and whooping all around. The man won $3000. He chucked me 100. I immediately saw why some people are addicted to the game.

360 from a 200 stake

I left soon after, returning to the same table a few hours later with the same friendly croupiers who reminded me of the rules (and my strategy if I forgot to put certain chips down). On one of my rolls, I decided to flick a dollar on that crazy bet the other man had won…and got 10 of the 11 numbers, with only number 11 missing when I scuppered myself by rolling a 7.

Despite Sin City being the legal gambling capital of the world, the lottery is in fact illegal in the state of Nevada

The rush that people talk about is certainly real. I’m happy that I don’t have the kind of personality that would keep me at a table for hours and hours. I had fun, and I think I would have enjoyed it even if I had lost.

Beginner’s luck!

Even with all of that, Las Vegas isn’t my kind of place. Very hot, crowded and in-your-face. It was nice to have a truer Vegas experience than one can have when a teenager, but I’m looking forward to kicking on to see the reasons I had to come to Sin City: starting with quite a large canyon…

Love you all,

Matt