The outward journey was long and uneventful until the lights of Las Vegas appeared, glistening, on the horizon as we approached. Our arrival entailed driving back and forth along the Strip and phoning various hotels inquiring about accommodation (my plan had been to see the Strip and then park in a campground beside Lake Mead but this was not well received and so we found a cheap hotel instead). Despite our long journey, we did not immediately go to bed and spent the night walking through the Strip admiring the impressive light displays, from the classy to the downright tacky.
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| Christmas Tree beside 'St Mark's Tower' |
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| The 'Statue of Liberty' |
Las Vegas is disgusting. To be fair, it was almost exactly what I expected but there was no atmosphere that served to proclaim Vegas as anything other than a destitute palace of sin. Barely two minutes after exiting our hotel, my friends and I were offered cannabis by a man on the street, who didn't take hints and proceeded to try to sell cocaine too. Everywhere there were large bouncers in black overcoats handing out (or more precisely, shoving into one's hands) cards advertising strip clubs, with offers like 'a free ride in a limo to the strip club). One gentleman, who is presumably very intelligent and in the running for a Nobel Prize, had a sales pitch involving the line, 'it's cold outside, come and warm up with some titties in your face.' Elsewhere, the streets were riddled with either scantily-clad lost young women whose fathers were giving them a lift, or prostitutes. My hope is that they were in the former category but I suspect they fell into the latter.
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| The Bellagio Hotel, which contains more rooms than there are people in Bellagio, Italy. |
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| Casino Royale - one of my favourite anecdotes about Las Vegas is that when Ian Fleming was researching for his book Diamonds Are Forever in 1955, he and a friend gambled in every casino in the city but left as soon as they had made $1, thus being able to claim that they had taken on every casino in Vegas and won! (As under-21s, my friends and I had no such luck...) |
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| The city's iconic sign |
And yet, it was hard to argue that there was not some kind of magic about Las Vegas. Never mind the drunken rabble that scattered across the streets, the scores of homeless people, the lonely, bored and tired men mindlessly pulling levers to fritter away their money in hot, sweaty casinos at four in the morning, the drug dealers, the bouncers and the prostitutes. For despite all this, the glitz and the glamour still shone through and many of the lights were frankly mesmerising. I still think I have no real love for Las Vegas but the city was definitely an enjoyable place to go. Certainly, I would not recommend travelling specifically there on holiday from the UK, but it's undeniably a spectacle that is worth seeing from the nearby area.
After a short night's sleep, we set off for the Hoover Dam and then the Grand Canyon, having allocated a little time in the morning for some retail time. The Hoover Dam was for me, far more spectacular than Las Vegas because of the sheer human effort needed to construct it and the wonder of the design. Without it, Las Vegas would not be what it is because it requires water from Lake Mead (the reservoir behind the dam) and hydroelectric power to fuel the lights and run the casinos. Migrant labourers during the Great Depression expired in fifty degree heat in some of the tunnels and risked their lives scaling the cliffs just to create this majesty to human ingenuity. It was thought that the Colorado River could never be tamed, but an army of low-paid workers living in caravans in Boulder City gave blood, toil and tears to preventing flooding and providing electricity and water to Nevada, Arizona and California. This to me was infinitely more incredible than some neon and tall buildings made to look like other cities.
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| Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the USA, created as a result of the Hoover Dam's construction |
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| 'High Scaler' statue, depicting one of the men who risked their lives scaling the surrounding cliffs during the dam's construction |
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| The Hoover Dam glowing in the afternoon sun |
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| The sun sets behind the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, opened in 2010, with the dam and its intentionally rocket-like towers, which were supposed to reflect the modernness of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s |
As the sun set, we moved off east towards Arizona and after a couple of hours it became apparent that the weather was to be a major cause for concern. I had looked up before and ensured that the Grand Canyon would be open and accessible but an unseasonal snowstorm was pushing in from the west and created terrible driving conditions between Flagstaff and Grants in New Mexico. The Interstate became a sea of white and we were lucky to be doing thirty through north-central Arizona. All the roads north of Flagstaff were completely impassable and to avoid the roads turning icy, we pressed on and made it back to Albuquerque before we suffered serious problems. It was a tremendous shame not to reach the Grand Canyon as this was just about the only major attraction that I had intended to visit before coming to the USA that I had not succeeded in visiting. However, it has been there for millions of years and will still be there whenever I manage a return trip to the Southwest.
The snow was ultimately the cause of this problem, but I profited from it later in the week when I went to Santa Fe on the Friday before I returned home. I had completed my exams on Thursday so Friday was a day on the ski slopes. My friend Antonio was snowboarding and I was on skis and because I had more experience, we stuck together to begin with before I ventured higher up the mountain onto some more challenging pistes. Santa Fe is not a large resort but there was enough skiing to have enormous fun, and the weather was almost perfect. It was sunny but very cool on the lower runs and higher up the mountain was in cloud and barraged with an icy wind, although this cleared later on. The views were beautiful off across the desert and totally different to the purely mountain vistas of the Alps.
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| Winding down on the slopes at the end of the term! |
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| Glazed pine trees and an icy wind at the top of the mountain |
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| Looking down from the pistes to Santa Fe and beyond |
After our final run, we returned our equipment and started the hour-long journey back to Albuquerque. It being a Friday the 13th, something had to happen and I had been apprehensive about skiing but felt safe once off the slopes. Unfortunately, as we were passing through Santa Fe, we suffered a car accident whilst crossing an intersection. We had been turning but a larger car trying to make it across the intersection before the lights went red rammed us at about thirty by my estimation. As the passenger, I bore the brunt of the impact but it luckily only hit the side of the bonnet and the front of my door and I sustained only a small cut to the head. For me, the most lasting effects have been the shock of it and the image, engrained in my mind, of a large white vehicle cruising towards us and knowing I was utterly helpless. I had turned to shout at my friend to brake and before I looked around, we had been t-boned. I feel sorriest for my friend because of his wrecked car, but I was almost unscathed and so it was another American experience, albeit one I had never wished to have and hope never to repeat.
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