Four days in Las Vegas, and I was REALLY starting to hate the place.

Nothing to do with tube-named stops, I’d always planned to stay in Vegas at least one - possibly two nights - just so that I could say I’d been there, seen it, and indulged a little. In the end, it will also be remembered for me as one of the most depressing parts of the trip.

A little unfair? Possibly. Especially when lots of people that I know (Sorry Tami, Caitlin, Laurel) who I know have all been there recently and had good times … but it just didn’t rub off on me.

Ultimately I think it was because I was a novelty tourist in a novelty town. A town/city which has clearly been created in the middle of the desert, because there’s not a lot else going on in Nevada, which is why it is the state that has the most easy going laws on gambling and prostitution.

I think if you’ve saved up money, if you’ve made it your destination, and you know you’re going to lose (or maybe make) money on gambling, and are going to get drunk and party - and that’s your intent - then it’s fine. But for me it was a stopping off point - a chance to rest up, do a blog catch up, do some video editing and take it easy. Instead, it felt like everyone else was FORCING to me to party it up, and have a good time in the way that they were dictating, and I didn’t like it at all.

Now I can be a right pervy bastard as the best of times, but even the level of sleaze that was all around amazed me a little. “HOT BABES! DIRECT TO YOU!” screamed the giant billboard on a back of a truck - one of several trucks - that drove up and down the strip relentlessly. A phone number would guarantee a high class escort to your room straight away to enjoy some carnal pleasures, shameless.

It got even worst when you tried to walk down the strip, and found a line of (literally) twenty Mexicans trying to thrust cards into your hands advertising the same thing. I wanted to get a roll of cards, stick them together and shove them down their throats.

The ‘strip‘ of course, is the main-street of Vegas upon which is adorned by the major hotels - each with a casino in. The intensity compounded my misery. I think when I am used to American being so big anyway - and thus spaced out, and having seen even more wide open spaces in the last few weeks, to have everything suddenly condensed and compressed into one small space with big bright lights, noise and again - the feeling that you MUST enjoy yourself - or else! Was just terribly, well .. depressing.

I get a message from an old colleague of mine - Rich. A guy I used to work with back in Charleston. He quite back in 2007 and moved out west and ended up working in Las Vegas. Would we like to meet up for a beer and chat? Yes we would - ’cause if you want to get the lowdown on an area, then you go talk to a local - it’s a simple as that.

“It’s the called the MonoFAIL around here” was one of Rich’s opening gambits when we started on a conversation about what Vegas was really like. He’s talking about the LV Monorail which is a 15 minute journey end-to-end that takes you in seven stops along the length of the strip. “”A single ride ticket is five bucks, which is just too expensive”, and I’ve have to agree. He tells us that the trains are mostly empty, not enough people used them from the start which just made them … increase the ticket price in an attempt to make their money back which just meant that less people used them.

This is the start of a rather depressing conversation where he points out various failings about the city. Hotels which had been started construction on, and then the finance pulled and was never completed. About how one of the most successful business in the city is … U-Haul, where people are simply packing up and leaving town.

Residential foreclosures, expensive tourist traps bars and cafes .. in fact, in the 15 minute drive down to Fremont Street, the only plus I heard him say in the whole conversation is that there is free parking - everywhere. But that’s only because the hotels want to get you into their casinos and start spending money there instead.

Rich pointed out the Stratosphere, which from the outside looks shiny, bright and tempting. “But it’s a dump” he commented “Hardly anyone ever goes there now”. He also pointed out the site of the Desert Inn - the hotel where Howard Hughes had stayed during his time in Vegas. “Where he ran out the mafia, and brought in his own .. the Mormon Mafia”, he chuckled. I had to go off and google the whole story myself, as I didn’t know that there was so much more to the eccentric aviators life.

Rich drove us up to Fremont Street. Past wedding chapels, tattoo parlours, strip clubs and casinos casinos casinos - the never end bright lights and noise and people and casinos.

Fremont was slightly better than the main strip. It’s what used to be the ‘main’ Vegas before the strip was invented, and it felt like it once had maybe had some character, before that too had been eradicated.

“You know it’s not a real place, don’t you?” comments my friend Jono on my facebook. “I found Vegas very surreal too. There was something quite depressing about the shallowness of it all in a way” emailed my friend Zoe back in England to me. Couldn’t agree more.

This is a false town. With enforced happiness. And zombified people with glum souls but being told they should enjoy themselves - and so they were enjoying themselves in a false way - wandering round. With inflated prices on food and drink practically lifting the dollars from your pocket at every opportunity.

I did gamble in the end - just to see if I could get into the spirit of it a bit. I set aside $100 in cash, and spent just over an hour slowly losing it all on a blackjack table. Paul did not last as long as me - my only consolation for the night.

I did consider another angle too which was slightly worrying. What if I’ve just got used to NOT being in a city now? What if/when I am back in London one day will I hate it? Have I seen to much of the beauty of the Colorado mountains, or the Arizona desert for me to hate a city? Will I ever want to live in a city again or has my mindset on that changed?

And at the end of the four days, as we drove out of town and my mood instantly improved - “Your mood has improved noticeably” said Paul, and it was because in my head I could see the word on the screen as I wrote this blog post in my mind - and realised at that point something quite drastic. I have no photos of Vegas.

I hadn’t taken any photos - none, at all, whilst in Vegas. From hitting that shutter button over 3,000 times almost relentlessly at times on my Nikon in the best part of ten weeks, Vegas has completely inspired me to … NOT … want to take any photos, which is why this blog post looks depressingly bland, but is also depressingly honest.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under Underground : USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Share this post on Facebook