Las Vegas
1st-3rd of July 2002

It’s not true about women and maps. Jascha will vouch for that. I'm excellent at map reading and manage to navigate us easily through LA and on the road out to Las Vegas.

I know it’s going to be hot in the desert. I love hot. Give me a heat wave and I'm happy. 34ºC - bring it on. But I am not prepared for the bone-dry heat that envelopes us an hour out of LA. We stop on the side of the road for a while, just to experience it. My skin feels paper-dry. It’s like being desiccated in a medium oven. It’s insane. Four utility workers sit outside the toilet block, drinking coke and chatting, as if this was normal:

And it keeps getting hotter:

We stop at a weird diner on the outskirts of Vegas called the Mad Greek. We drink Cypriot lager and wonder what ‘Gyros’ are.

We deliberately left LA in the late afternoon so that it would be dark by the time we first caught sight of Las Vegas. In fact, what you think at first must be Vegas, isn’t Vegas at all but some upstart outpost of Vegas that tries to cash in on the Vegas phenomenon by luring motorists off the road early. I mean - why would anyone drive for five hours all the way from California to Las Vegas and decide to stop at some piddling little facsimile of the place five miles outside? You’d have to be really desperate.

Vegas is, of course, full-on. Totally. It’s like a frantic, unsettling, drug-induced hallucination. It’s just gone 9.00pm and the temperature gauge in our car reads 110º, yet the strip is full of people strolling around like they’re on Blackpool Pleasure Beach:

Look at those people. What the hell’s the matter with them?

We’re staying at the Bellagio, the newest and biggest hotel on the strip. The Bellagio is the size of Crouch End. It has around two thousand bedrooms, several hectares of gaming rooms, two shopping centres, ten restaurants, seven bars, an art gallery, fountains, twelve swimming pools and a theatre. Walking into the lobby feels like arriving on Mars. That’s the ceiling, and that’s the casino, just behind reception.

The receptionist (one of a phalanx of about fifteen) attempts to sell us a room upgrade when we check in, by showing us floorplans of a room that’s bigger than our flat in London. Since the economy room we’ve booked is actually the same size as our flat in London, we can't really see the attraction of an extra 200 sq feet of floor space and turn down her generous offer. Our room is on the eighteenth floor. We are taken there in a high speed elevator and are ejected two point three seconds later into the longest corridor I have ever seen in my life. This picture doesn't really do justice to the perspective of it. That corridor is actually about half a mile long, and we feel grateful that our room is only thirty doors down:

This is the view from the floor to ceiling plate glass windows of our room, of some piddling little hotel across the road:

We shower and change and head down for our first ever casino experience. We wander around the hotel in a daze. It’s absolutely jam-packed full of people, literally thousands of them, mainly families and groups of young people. We get very pissed, very quickly on a very strong Long Island Iced Tea in a weird space-age bar:

We see Rio Ferdinand, fresh from his World Cup heroics, walking towards the lifts and wonder if he's staying here. On the plane on the way home five days later we read about him in the Mail. Apparently he’s abandoned his girlfriend to go gambling, drinking and womanising in a Las Vegas hotel, but he looks pretty sober and un-surrounded-by-women to us. And then we have something to eat in a weird, space-age Chinese restaurant:

After (an excellent) dinner we circle the gaming tables, watching the players, and trying to get up the nerve to sit down and have a game or two. But everyone looks too professional and we’re too chicken so we play the slots for an hour instead and go to bed with that hollow, slot-machine feeling, realising sadly that we’re in Vegas and neither of us is a natural-born gambler:

*

We venture out of the hotel the next morning with the badly misjudged intention of doing a spot of sunbathing and swimming. The minute we open the door and exit the cool, air-conditioned interior of the hotel, the heat swallows us whole. But yet again, the rest of the world seems oblivious. Look at these people. They’re actually doing an aquarobics class - in 115º:

Sick.

The twelve pools are all surrounded by bizarre, fire-proof people, sitting on loungers, reading magazines, pointlessly slapping on the factor twenty and luxuriating in deluxe cabanas in the desert heat. I feel physically ill and have to collapse in a poolside restaurant where we’re cooled by a fine water spray while we have our breakfast. By the time I've eaten I feel like some pathetic Edwardian lady with the vapours and am close to fainting. We stagger back to the hotel and I vow not to set foot outside again.

We drive across town to the Elvis-a-rama Museum:

We’re expecting it to be shite but it’s actually really good. They’ve got some truly unique Elvis memorabilia, including two whole cars, a speed boat and his actual genuine Blue Suede Shoes.

I spot an Elvis look-alike in the shop area and surreptiously take his picture:

I would make a terrible paparazzi snapper

Then we head into the tiny theatre at the back of the museum where we’re going to watch an Elvis impersonator. And I have to say - this ‘Elvis’ is pretty damn charismatic and sexy for an impersonator. He’s around the same age as Vegas-era Elvis, he's in good physical shape, he's got a wicked sense of humour and I find myself experiencing a glimmer of excitement every time he twitches his hips. He does justice to most of the numbers, and some of them even have the hairs standing up on the back of my neck, but his version of My Way is the most painful thing I have ever heard in my life:

Jascha has somehow managed to persuaded me to take a ride on the Manhattan Express Roller Coaster on top of the New York New York Hotel. I always always wanted to go on a rollercoaster until I actually went on one for the first time about six years ago. And then I vowed I would never get on one again. I'm only doing this because I love my husband:

I think my expression says everything. I come off vowing never to get on a rollercoaster again. I've turned into such a goddam girly-girl.

Next stop is the Vegas Hilton where we pay $25 each for the Star Trek Experience, which consists of a wander through a museum full of old costumes and plastic space gadgets, a somewhat truncated virtual reality space adventure followed by a drink at Quark’s Bar where I have a Romulan Ale, which is blue, and Jascha has a Mind Meld cocktail, which is disgusting:

Anyone who knows what I'm talking about probably thinks this sounds really cool. Anyone who doesn't will stop reading my books immediately when they find out.

Jascha’s brother Seb is a true Vegas aficionado so we phone him at this point because we don't like gambling and we’ve run out of things to do. He recommends the Carnival World Buffet at the Rio, followed by a trip up to the Voodoo Bar on the 51st floor to see one of the best views in Vegas. We head over there obediently in a cab.

Now, when it comes to food the buffet is my Achilles Heel. I just have to see the words ‘all you can eat’ and I put on half a stone. The funny thing is that I always start out pretending that I'm a normal human being with a normal appetite and delicately spoon a few morsels on to my plate. I kid myself that I can control this, that I don’t have to walk out of here feeling like I've eaten three sheep, two children and a large donkey. But it’s no good. The lure of the buffet is too strong. I go back five times. I eat ribs, noodles, pasta, chicken, shrimp, sushi, spring rolls, pizza and frozen yoghurt. The man at the Italian counter doesn’t seem to be paying any attention and says ‘hi, how you doin’?’ to me every time I walk past, like it’s the first time he's ever set eyes on me.

Jascha and I roll out forty five minutes later feeling sick and hating ourselves.

We just about manage to find room for a beer at the Voodoo Bar fifty-one storeys up and take them outside on to the terrace. At this time of night the temperature has dropped to a refreshing 100º and we stand and stare at the quite dizzying view while we sip our beers and feel relaxed for about the first time since we got here last night:

The water show at the Bellagio is just about to start when we get back to our hotel so we stand and watch it with the massive crowd that gathers here on the hour every night:

Water fountains dance in time to a specially composed piece of music. It’s like water ballet - very graceful and utterly charming. Vegas suddenly seems like a very civilised place.

We head back towards our room, but because all Vegas hotels are designed such that the only way you can get anywhere is via the gaming rooms, we’re drawn back to the nasty evil slot machines again. Jascha disappears for a while and I find him a few minutes later sitting proudly at a Blackjack table - he's finally got the nerve up to have a game. I watch him for a while and he seems to be winning so I go back to the slots and suddenly hit a winning streak. Every time I win, I put the winning coins in a big pot and by the time Jascha comes to find me the pot weighs a ton and I'm $25 up. I have made $25 out of these nasty little money-grabbing machines! I have made $25 out the Bellagio! I have screwed $25 out of Vegas! I have beaten the system and I'm jubilant! Jascha too has made a small profit on the Blackjack table so we cash in our chips and tokens at the cashier’s desk and go to bed that night feeling very smug indeed.