Deal, or no deal?

Las Vegas :: USA

About these young brothers in the city of sin.

Places: Las Vegas, Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon.

Coolest thing I did: Drove a convertible out to the Grand Canyon to watch the sun set.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: There are even poker machines in the airport in Vegas. The airport.

To be honest, besides gambling, prostitution and booze I didn't really know what to expect from Las Vegas, the home of my first annual 29th birthday (not one American has gotten that joke yet...). You first get an idea of what's in store for you when you pull up to your hotel and it's shaped like Camelot. Grant and I stayed in the Excalibur, whose theme you can probably guess from it's eateries having names like the Round Table Buffet and the Sherwood Forrest Cafe. If you like tack, you're in the right place. We then took a stroll through an Egyptian pyramid made of black glass and guarded by the Sphinx and a Malaysian garden. Giant golden Lions, the Eiffel tower, the statue of liberty, fountains that dance to adult middle of the road adult contemporary music: this place has it all.

I'm not much of a gambler, so Grant, who seems to be a bit of a blackjack guru, did most of the gambling for us on the first night. The Star Wars pokies were just the start. Here's a tip for those going to come here, it's very expensive to go out after half a litre of Vodka each. Despite many deleted scenes (more from memory loss that anything else) we managed to work out we blew quite a bit of money playing blackjack at the Bellagio and got separated when I went to the toilet and couldn't find my way back to the table. To be fair, these places are designed to get you lost when you're sober, so being drunk makes it impossible to find out where you were before you last turned around in a circle. We did discover that people will bring you “free” beer when you gamble, but I reckon somehow the Casinos come out ahead. The rest of the first evening involved Grant being asleep at McDonalds and me being thrown out of the MGM Grand for sitting on the escalators. And asking lots of people if they'd seen Grant, usually responded to by “who the hell is Grant?”.

There were more nights like this. Besides our best intentions I learned that it's not a good idea to make your first meal of the day a buffet lunch. I don't care how hung over you are, pork ribs and fried chicken for breakfast is a terrible idea. We went for an ill considered walk to find the famous Welcome to Las Vegas sign but gave up once we got to the end of the strip and had entered deep into dodgey-ville (pop. 1.5million). Despite the fact that we were staying in what we thought was white trash city, it gets far worse the further north you go. Lots of people with 19 kids trailing behind them with no shoes and mullets. Despite the rumored glamor of the place, the whole city lacks any level of class at all, even in the high end places. It's just more concentrated at one end.

The weather was tops and we actually spent some time in the sun by the pool during the days. The day after Grant left I also managed to find a golf driving range and hit a few balls without having to front the $500 it costs to do the same thing in the Wynn hotel. It was nice to think we didn't spend 24 hours a day in front of a poker table or slot machines, as appears to be the done thing here.

My actual birthday was probably the quietest night we had, being in bed by 2am and having drunk very little. I guess there's only so much you can take if you aren't a huge gambler. There is a definite lean towards the male here, meaning nightclubs are pointless as the only women in them are topless waitresses, many hired because they are women, not because they should be topless. I did have the best steak of the trip on the evening of my birthday, which is good because the night after Grant left I'm pretty sure I had nothing but Margaritas for dinner, which would explain my trying to get into nightclubs by tacking myself on to the end of big groups going in the VIP lines and fighting off hookers by asking them for outrageous acts for unreasonably low prices. Drunk single men seem to be a pretty good target so I think I had more women talk to me that one evening than in the rest of the week. In a place that prides itself on the fact you can order strippers to your room out of a catalogue I guess you can expect that.

I wonder about the fascination with animals though. If it's not caged tigers it's sharks or lions. I'm sure it's not good for them to be exposed to all the bright lights and noise, even if they are in a show or two. I guess that kind of explains why the eventually turn on their handlers, ala Sigfried and Roy.

I hired a car for the last day and thanks to a $10 upgrade, ended up with a convertible. As you make your way out of Vegas you can see just how barren the country this place was planted on is. Jagged cliffs and boulders jut out of miles of scrub and sand, and after a few hours of eating dust I decided that the convertible wasn't that good an idea after all. Still, it makes a cool story and I have sunburn that will soon look like a tan. The first stop was the Hoover Dam, which as far as I can tell was built so people who didn't need electricity in the depression due to being too poor would have jobs to provide electricity. It is, however, a pretty cool dam, as dams go. You can tell it was built in the 1930s by all the art deco touches everywhere, its kind of like the Chrysler building but rather as a feat of electrical engineering than a commercial tower. I was impressed, but didn't stay long as I woke up far too late and had to drive far and fast to make it to Le Canyon Grand.

Another 3 hours through the desert and I found myself face to face with another one of those tourist attractions that's either going to live up to the hype or suffer from the Mona Lisa Syndrome (“I thought it would be bigger”). It's hard to describe the place, especially at sunset but I was so glad I went. The colours are just radiant and almost seem to glow when reflecting the red in the background. It's a pity I took all my pictures a half hour before sunset and didn't remember to recharge my camera battery, but it's going to be hard to forget all those torn up cliffs and rifts glowing in the deepening sky. Oh, and it's also bigger than you think it's going to be, which is a nice change.

I have to say, after all yesterday's driving, I'm not as up on the whole Las Vegas thing as I was even 48 hours ago. I'd say a weekend is about all you can expect to stay here and keep your dignity intact. I guess when you found your country on the protection of liberty above all else, you're eventually going to end up with a Las Vegas at some point. It's one of those places that point out the frailties in human nature, the need for pure decadence and just plain sinning that we all have inside us, but some of us repress better than others. Practically anything you want to do that is bad for you can be done for a price here, sometimes in combination with other bad things. It's a spectacle thats worth seeing, but probably not for this long.

Charlotte airport is full of Nascar fans

Breckenridge :: USA

First a capital, then onto the snow.

Places: Washington DC, Charolotte, Breckenridge & Vail.

Coolest thing I did: Came to play in the snow.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: You can't even get within spitting distance of the White house but you can almost breathe on the original constitution.

Despite showing up to Washington DC on a long weekend, when much of the cities business has closed down, it did manage to live up to the hype of being a lot like Canberra, only less crap. If America is as much a set of ideals as it is a physical place then Washington is where these ideals are carved into stone. It's easy to admire the purity of the basic tenets of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that are the basis of the American nation, and looking up at all those monuments to the key figures in the countries history it becomes even easier to get swept up in the seductive simplicity of having hard, fixed principles govern a country.

Well, that's how it works in theory, anyway.

Neo-classical seems to have been the order of the day when the three big arms of government were getting their homes set up, and despite not being able to get at all close to the White House you can't help but be impressed that so much of the world's business is decided in that one little building. I guess it's also a tribute to the strict separation of powers that the Capitol building and the Supreme Court are housed at the other end of town, with the court sitting on top of a hill, kind of fitting for the final arbiter of the laws made and executed in the other two.

That the great monuments (and the associated reflecting pools) are all either to presidents or war dead says a lot about the country. It's history has been forged into a complete narrative that can be used to tell school children the heroic and often bloody story of how the country came to be and what had to be done to keep it from all falling apart during it's many crises. I liked the elegant simplicity of the Vietnam war memorial and was most taken aback by the Jefferson memorial, even though it's less popular than Lincoln's due to location. All those enlightenment ideas that flowed from the man's pen into the founding documents of the US are emblazoned on the walls and despite having read quite a bit about his being a slave owner sprouting large about freedom and liberty, I admire those words.

The Smithsonian isn't so much a museum as a small town of museums. It's the repository of the nation's history, and like most nations, also it's spoils of war. I only went into the original institute and the American History museum but both have an impressive line up of stuff. I've read they are showing about 1% of what they have in their archives so what's in storage must be impressive. From Lincoln's top hat to the puffy shirt from Seinfeld there really is a large chuck of American history to learn about. What I did learn is that despite the positive narrative, when you look into the details the Americans have done just as despicable things in their history as many nations, they just choose to tell these as footnotes to the main story. I think one of the best things about Australian history is the self criticality that's built into it. I'd hate to see us end up with a grand narrative of our own, despite what Mr Howard would like.

The best thing I saw there was the national archives, which house the originals of those magic documents that house American's ideals. In one small rotunda is the Declaration of independence, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, all it's written amendments and just outside is one of the four remaining copies of the original Magna Carta. If this is a country built on ideas then these are the blueprints.

Washington also has a nightlife of Saturday night, which surprised the hell out of me.

It also has a staggering homeless problem. In the shadow of all these halls of power, hordes of people struggle around in the cold, pushing shopping trolleys and begging for change. Without the politicos in town it becomes obvious that everyone is either a tourist or homeless and these people get very aggressive if you don't give them your loose change. It's a reminder that despite the lofty ideals set in stone in this place, the reality is that in practice, they don't work to enrich everyone.

So, my next stop was to the ski fields just outside Denver. Grant has set up shop in Breckenridge this year and has been kindly putting me up in the large household he's acquired this year. The town itself is large enough to support a whole ecosystem of shops, eateries and nightlife so it's a damn site easier for someone to live in than little Banff would have been. Despite only having got a few cm of snow on the first night when I arrived there has been a record base this year and I've spent day after day boarding down these ultra wide runs under a brilliant blue sky. I was impressed enough with Breckenridge itself but we also borrowed his mate's car and took a trip out to Vail, which is a world of it's own. It took us about 2 hours to get to the most distant mountain in the park and the scenery is just breathtaking. While Breck is very windy, and it's soft white peaks appear smudged at the edges due to powder drifting off into the wind, Vail has a variety of scenery that takes the breath away. From soft hills to jagged peaks that look like British teeth, brittle twigs of deciduous trees to lush pines covered in snow, it's what you expect from the Rockies.

I'm intrigued by the seasonal lifestyle that all these guys and girls live, mostly doing jobs they'd never consider otherwise for a lift pass. I feel a little inadequate trying to keep up with these people when I can barely link my turns, but I have to say that trying to keep up with Grant at slow pace has forced me out of the comfort zone I built up in Tremblant and improved me no end. Breck is much younger than Vail as far as workers and visitors go, so I feel a lot like an old man going out at night, but the fact you can get a jug of gut rottingly horrible beer for a mere $4 more than makes up for it. I can't help but people watch as these early 20-somethings go about eagerly making the same mistakes I did back then, just starting out on their irresponsible globe trotting runs. All that enthusiasm helps remind me why I started doing this in the first place.