Las Vegas wants to cater to you.
Not to say the place is indiscriminate. It’s just that no matter your social circle, be it personal helipad or public transit, everyone’s covered. The late Hunter S. Thompson declared Las Vegas the very emblem of the American dream, and who would dare contradict him? There is something about the place which takes all that is brash and hungry and concentrates into a sizzling sink-hole in the desert…
I’m sitting in the shade of a cabana and when I look up from my sugar-frosted mega-alco-pop and gaze up into the high wild blue skies over Las Vegas, all I see is planes. Dozens of them. Skimming over the Strip. And just a quarter of a mile east of here, on the tarmac of McCarran airport, they are taxied a dozen deep, a wagon train heading back East.
The airport juts out at a 30-degree angle at the south end of Strip, so planes flit by the edge of my vision, glimpsed between glazed hotel towers and unnervingly near. (On the penthouse floors of the Four Seasons, I watched the planes land through the tinted windows; they flew right past me and I waved to the pilots — but I doubt they waved back.)
The average stay in Las Vegas is 2.5 days. The visitor comes for a weekend of giddy promise, shot through with a blistering hangover, and tied off with a nap in coach class on Sunday afternoon, jetting back into the cloudless sky while someone new sits poolside and watches that plane leave, as she sips on her pineapple mojito.
The Strip is cut off from the rest of the world. They want it that way. Also known as Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip essentially is Las Vegas. When people compare Vegas to Times Square, this is what they’re thinking of, and it is superficially apt. Consider: the hypnotic lights, the surreal disregard for scale, the shameless branding. But while New York is a nerve cluster humming and pulsing, Las Vegas is more like a weird, sparkly tumour that sprang up from the desert floor.
It’s hard to overstate how bizarre the Strip is. Staring into the Luxor’s featureless, black glass, 110-metre high pyramid, I have trouble accepting it is there. The structure is utterly alien.
The combined effect of the excessive architecture is that of a monumental playground, perhaps dreamed up by Salvador Dali. And like Dali’s surrealism, the metaphors are always mixed. Your eye casts across the gold towers of Mandalay Bay, the marble of Caesar’s Palace and the cartoonish castle Excalibur. Elsewhere, Donnie & Marie Osmond’s 20-storey high smiling faces beam from the front of the Flamingo Casino, bikini-clad pirates aboard a man-o-war pitch fiery battle, and the Bellagio fountain bursts into song (in fact, every 15 minutes in the evening).
One evening, while watching the pirates skirmish once again (daily at 6pm) from the balcony of an 18th century-style Palazzo, I briefly wondered if I was suffering from a massive brain injury — perhaps my gray matter was spitting out its last hallucinatory electric fizzle.
Las Vegas is North America’s girlfriend experience, and she knows what gets you off, no matter where you are from. The daily ritual of gaming, eating and entertainment is endlessly supple so it’s not hard to find the casino that suits your taste.
The Bellagio, famed for its Gallery of Fine Art, is filled with soft, airy light and evokes art nouveau nostalgia, while the Wynn is the height of contemporary glamour. Swimming pool clubs, such as Wet Republic and the Hard Rock Café, cater to a barely legal daytime drinking crowd looking to get their rocks off, while the Wynn Encore’s premier night club XS is a velvet rope oligarchy with long lines and a devoutly observed dress policy.
For the conscious foodie, Las Vegas can be a frustrating experience. Your average upscale fine dining place isn’t much better then an expense account restaurant in your neck of the woods, and the Strip has no local or traditional foodways to exploit to make up the shortfall. What it has instead is sheer flair. Not only do they have what you want, they have things you didn’t even know you wanted until you saw them
The Four Season’s Verandah has a comfortably sophisticated breakfast menu featuring morning classics like mellow heuvos racheros, yolkless omelets, and exquisitely cut fresh fruit catering to the relaxing executive (and, no doubt, his wife). But fruit is forgotten in the face of, say it with me, the “personal donut chef.” Verandah has a contraption that wheels out to the tables and—glory be!—fragrant golden donuts pop out, ready to be garnished with sprinkles, syrups and sugar powders.
Simon, at the Palms, features an indulgent brunch where staff and patrons shuffle about in pajamas, wishing away their midday hangovers with the Bloody Mary buffet (regional variations honoured!). Oh, and if that’s too rough on you, for dessert it’s candy floss, spun off in shiny pink ball.
It’s this endless novelty that creates the experience of everything being crafted to your pleasure. It was the stunning Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay (open daily, $16.95 adult ticket) that got me thinking this place smacks of imperial Rome, bringing home the booty of foreign shores to display to the basking Romans. The exotic and the rare yanked from their context and placed on display, as examples of power really, universally approved. Of course it’s wondrous. I wonder what those sharks could be thinking in their six million-litre aquarium, some 400 kilometres deep in the desert.
Do you detect a sting of anxiety, a sliver in all this soft tissue? It’s the damn helicopters, frankly. As one lounges in the back of a limousine, stuck in the heinous traffic of Las Vegas Boulevard on a Saturday night, one can’t help but notice the helicopters buzzing overhead, far above the gridlocked earthbound, leaping from one glowing palace of excess to another.
One can’t help but realize: No matter how many urges you indulge here, there will always be a higher roller than you.
