From the Latter Day Saints to Sin City

I've been tardy again, and have fallen behind on my blogging. So much to tell, so little time. Well, to be honest I can't really claim that time is at a premium, but I had important things to do in the last few days - I had to watch a lot of football, think about football a lot, and occasionally blog about football.

As I watched the Germany Ghana match a few days ago, with Germany still potentially facing elimination, it occur ed to me that this is not how football is meant to be. I was sweating, despite the excessive air conditioning, my pulse racing well above anything it had reached in two months of holidays, and I couldn't even hold my beer steady. When they win, I only feel relief, when they look like losing a deep dread. Football is meant to be little more than a form of entertainment. Every rational bone in my body knows that the outcome of this Sunday's game between England and Germany will have no more bearing on my life than a movie or sitcom, but the heart refuses to follow the head. I think after this World Cup I will have reduce my interest in football for a while - I am like an addict that needs to get his habit under control.

While this is the non-football blog - if you are looking for the football blog, click here - I can't help mentioning the World Cup because its having a fairly large impact on our travels.

Camping has been postponed in favour of motels with ESPN. We had a motel without ESPN the morning of the Germany - Serbia game and I found myself leaning out of the window of our room, at 5.30am, holding out Kate's laptop in an attempt to get the office's Wifi signal and watch a live stream of the Spanish language version online. I shouldn't have bothered.

It was difficult for the first week after Salt Lake City because we were driving through a large expanse of desert, dotted with national parks, but not well endowed with people who care about football. So lets put the football aside for a moment and concentrate on the things we came here to see.

On leaving Salt Lake City the mountainous backgrounds very quickly give way to desert, first brown, then an increasingly deep red colour. Southern Utah strongly resembles outback Australia, and is about as densely populated. Our first destination on this desolate route was Arches National Park, which takes its name from the sand stone arches that dot the landscape - the highest concentration of sandstone arches in the world. Quite a claim to fame. The arches themselves are curios rather than fascinating, but the true highlight of the area is the general landscape. The red earth is punctuated by sheer sandstone cliffs that rise straight out of the sand, some of them over a hundred meters. They are not cliffs leading to a plateau, but cliffs for their own sake, only a few meters wide at the top before falling straight back down.

From Arches we headed to Capitol Reef national park, a few hundred kilometers south west. Capital Reef's claim to fame is that it is the location of the final scene in Thelma and Louise, where (spoiler alert, but who hasn't seen Thelma and Louise?) they drive over the cliff and plunge into the canyon. So you can picture it is primarily a giant canyon, with the scenic drive taking you through the valley floor. By now the desert had turned from red to almost pink, which turned to a bright orange around sunset. The heat had also begun in earnest. Where Salt Lake City was warm, and Arches got warmer, by the time we reached Capitol Reef it was hot - to the point that tar was softening on the road and we spent more time in the car than outside of it. (This was also the scene of my attempt to stream the Germany - Serbia game)

From Capitol Reef we rounded out our trifecta of Utah National Parks in Zion, near the Arizona border. Like the previous two, Zion is known for its stark desert scenery, high cliffs and deep canyons. Like the park itself, the features in the park were named by the Mormon settlers. So the sandstone spires have names like Mt. Moroni and Angel Peak, and the word Virgin is sprinkled about liberally; there is Virgin town, next to the park, the Virgin River, and Mt Virgin. Most intriguing (if that is the word) is the sandstone cliff with a large dark red blotch near the top, the looks distinctly like blood running off the surface. That is called the Virgin Altar. I think Sigmund Freud and Germaine Greer would each have their own interpretations of the Mormon's early expressions of faith.

Zion has one standout highlight, which is the river walk along a canyon called (surprise surprise) the Virgin Narrows. It is a canyon that is only as wide as the river which has formed it - not more than 20 meters, and as little as 5 or 6 in some places. To walk along it means, simply, walking through the river, in water which is sometimes ankle deep, sometimes waist deep, and flowing rapidly in the opposite direction to the walk. At the start of the walk there are literally hundreds of people who have gotten off the park shuttle bus and have begun wading. As you walk on the crowd slowly thins out, as people decide they have had enough of the bitingly cold water, or that their children have reached a point in the river they cannot pass. Eventually we beat the crowds and found ourselves almost alone in a gorge with cliffs that would make a base jumper salivate either side of us, separated only by the 5 meter gorge. It is another of Utah's quite unforgettable sights.

That was it for Utah. In a way it also marked the end of the first of three sections of the USA roadtrip. The last month has been about national parks, camping and hiking, and the sights provided largely by the natural world. The next phase of our journey, in the break up I've been using in my head, takes us across the South West, through Texas, and then from New Orleans north through 'the South' (in the USA the South is actually more central east than geographic south) eventually arriving in Chicago. It will be a phase defined by the small towns, the unique cultures of Texas, New Orleans and the South, and hunt for so many iconic American images. Chicago will mark the beginning of phase three, through the North East to the big cities like Philadelphia, Washington, Boston and New York.

So from Zion we headed to New York, which was only a three hour drive from Southern Utah, and where we checked straight into a room on Park Avenue, with great views of the city skyline and the desert behind it. I'm sure anyone with an even elementary knowledge of US geography already suspects that I am of course talking about Las Vegas, where we stayed in the New York New York hotel, complete with Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge and a roller coaster.

The approach to Las Vegas is an experience in itself. From Zion the desert theme continues uninterrupted, and in fact the desert becomes more sparse than before. An hour outside of Zion and the last small trees and shrubs have been replaced by the first cacti, and the stark sandstone cliffs give way to hills of sand and rocky outcrops. It is hot, dry and dusty - utterly inhospitable, and with nothing to suggest that there could be a major city lurking around the corner.

But then it happens. As we rounded yet another sandy hill a city suddenly came into view. Approaching from the North the first building to stand out is the Seattle space needle, 1800 km from Seattle. The other hint that you are approaching something unusual comes from the billboards. While until this point the occasional billboards on the interstates were advertising upcoming fast food outlets and lodging opportunities, there is suddenly a large billboard exhorting you to come and try a real machine gun. As you get nearer the city the billboards switch their promotional vigour to, in decreasing order of quantity, strippers, magicians and casinos.

As we reached Las Vegas Boulevard, the famous strip, other structures emerged from the hazy horizon. First the pirate ships of Treasure Island, flanked by Caesar's Colosseum, which sits across the road from the canals of Venice, which in turn are in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. From the Eiffel Tower it is only minutes to the New York Skyline, which acts as the gatekeeper to the gatekeeper - the Sphinx and Pyramid emerge shortly after the Statue of Liberty. Not to be overlooked are the turrets of Excalibur castle, nor the theme less but gigantic towers of MGM Grand and the brand new City Centre, the Strip's newest and biggest development.

There are many things that strike you instantly about Las Vegas, but the one that most impressed me is the pure scale of the place. Las Vegas is not a collection of 10 or 12 big resorts, dotted along a strip in the desert - it is a big city. Ignoring for a moment the suburbs, in which generic housing for the workers of Vegas stretches for kilometers out from the Strip, the central area itself is huge. New York was our hotel, and is by no means the biggest. Still, in recreating the New York skyline it houses several 20 story towers full of hotel rooms. Caesars Palace is a village in itself, while the towers of the Bellagio and Mandalay bay would easily rival Chifley Tower in Sydney for size. In total I am told that Las Vegas contains 125 000 hotel rooms, and welcomes 36 million visitors per year. To put that in context, Australia welcomes just over 5 million international arrivals per year.

All this in the middle of the desert - there can be no more obvious symbol of man's eternal contempt for nature. The searing heat lets you know it is a desert, but apart from that there is little to give it away. Palm trees line the boulevards, water features define many of the hotels, and golf courses surround the entire city, each providing a few acres of perfect lawns surrounded by sand and rock.

Once I adjusted to the size of Vegas, and came to terms with the impossibility but reality of its very existence, I managed to take in the details. Las Vegas' modern reputation is as a place for casinos, nightclubs and stripshows. It certainly has no shortage of any of these things, but there is a great deal more to it. Contrary to the stereotype, it is possible to visit and enjoy Las Vegas with no intention of gambling or indulging in the seedier side of the town, and millions of families come intending to do exactly that. There is the good food, the myriad of shows in the evenings, the golf, the pools and the bars, not to mention the enjoyment you can get just from walking around the place.

Each hotel is a tourist attraction in itself. The Bellagio lobby is decorated as a giant magic garden, with oversize flowers, pots and insects decorating every space from floor to ceiling. The sound is provided by fake birds and the dripping sounds of giant water cans hanging from the walls. It is such a complete illusion that it would be no surprise to come around a corner and stumble upon the mad hatter inviting you to an unbirthday party. When you take a photograph outside the Paris hotel, if you compose it to leave out the glittering casino signs, you could easily be taking a photo of the real Paris, but for the close proximity of the Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower.

The question is what to make of it all. Unquestionably, each hotel on its own would be tacky in the extreme if it turned up in a normal city. But when it all comes together in one place it is no longer so absurd. It may never be a place you would describe as classy, but this is America - a society founded on the principal of abolishing the very concept of class. Las Vegas seems to me the place where the mankind has indulged its wildest fantasies. The whole thing seems like it could have been created by Willy Wonka, and I would not have missed a step if I'd seen little orange figures running around singing cautionary tales of morality (though I suspect that in Vegas, their theme would have to be adjusted slightly). For its very audacity, its originality and its sheer scale, Las Vegas is actually a remarkable and very impressive place.

Having said all that, the traditional images, of girls and gambling, are never far away in Vegas. If you sit at the counter in almost any bar, there will be a little poker machine built into the bar, so you don't need to pause your gambling for drinking, nor indulge in any excess conversation while you drink. There are trucks that drive up and down the Strip promising 'Girls eager to meet you, in your room in 20 minutes'. Twenty minutes? They must be really eager.

As you walk down the strip everyone tries to hand you a flyer. Some promote the shows, some promote nightclubs, but by far the most common are little business cards handed to you advertising the aforementioned eager girls, complete with photograph. Many people seem to take these flyers and drop them straightaway, either in shock at the contents or because all they wanted was a quick look at the girls. The result is that for 20 meters either side of the stocky hispanics who hand them out the footpath is transformed into a mosaic of buttocks, breasts and sundry bare bits. I wonder what the many people who bring their young children to Vegas do about this.

The flyer distributors also reveal the curious ethnic hierarchy of Las Vegas. It seems that in Vegas, if you are hispanic you are likely to be handing out flyers for girls. If you are black, presumably because of your better language skills, you can hand out night club invitations, which come with a quick promotional spiel, while being white qualifies you to hand out flyers for Cirque du Soleil and other shows. Asians, it seems, do not hand out flyers at all, but they make up the overwhelming majority of dealers in the casinos.

Those are my descriptions of Las Vegas - I know it is remarkably short on any detail about what we actually did in Sin City. Well, they do say that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but that would not make for very good blogging at all. It will come, but its getting late, and I still have a football blog to give some attention to. So check back in a couple of days for details of our adventures.