To Las Vegas and beyond

Where to begin with the adventures of Las Vegas? Perhaps with some assurances of what we did not do. Despite the impressive offering of girls to the room in just twenty minutes, we decided not to test that particular service. It's an element of Vegas that will have to be left to mystery.

Apart from the adult industry, we tried to get to all the typical Vegas experiences. First and foremost there is obviously the gambling. A trip to Las Vegas would surely be incomplete without a trip to the casino. The first step was to try and learn Craps, which is the game with the dice that everyone seems to play on television. This was moderately successful at best. After watching the table for a while and making little progress in understanding the in and outs of it, I was approached by some random guy who offered to show me how to play. It did not take a genius to figure out that his plan was to show me how to place a few bets and then ask me for a tip or a share of any winnings. Being aware that you are being hustled is one thing, but finding a good reason to get out of the conversation, without being overly confrontational or accusing him of being a hustler, is quite another. Before I knew it I was following his instructions and betting on the 'pass line' and the eight and nine. I still don't know how to play craps, but on the upside, I avoided any awkward conversations about sharing the winnings by quickly losing my money.

Next stop was the blackjack table. At the Luxor (inside the Pyramid) some of the blackjack tables had a World Cup theme. Finding a table with a Germany chair, and a dealer in an England shirt, seemed to good an opportunity to resist. Now, I am not a superstitious person, but it does seem that, given events in the real world game between England and Germany, England's luck was all used up in the casino. In the end things turned around on one of the other blackjack tables and I ended up winning lots of money. Almost as much as I lost.

Vegas is about more than the gambling though, and we did do some of the other typical things. The evenings are all about the shows, and we saw two. The first was Penn and Teller, a magic act. West Wing fans would recognise Penn and Teller as the magic duo that may or may not have burned an American flag in the white house for the President's daughter's birthday. They did some absolutely unbelievable tricks. My favourite one saw Teller somehow conjure about twenty goldfish out of his sleeve into an aquarium.

The other show we saw was Zumanity, one of the many Cirque du Soleil shows in Vegas. On a tight budget, we picked Zumanity because it was the cheapest of the Cirque shows. Zumanity markets itself as the 'adult side of Cirque du Soleil'. It is a concept that seems obvious enough. You have all these athletic, beautiful performers, just remove a few more sequins and dim the lights, and there you go. This was not how Zumanity approached it. Orchestrated by a six foot three transvestite, the show was mainly composed of a series of lewd skits based around the idea that, if sufficiently exaggerated, the grotesque will eventually develop artistic merit. It's an old idea, but Picasso this was not. There is no other way to describe Zumanity - it was awful. Actually, if you can think of stronger words than awful, then there are other ways to describe it. The lowlight, from a long list of contenders, was the scene in which two of the performers began duelling with large rubber dildoes. The highlight was the largely applause free end, as the bemused audience hurried out of the theatre.

The nightlife was on the menu too, of course. New York New York had its own Coyote Ugly bar. For the older generation amongst my readers, Coyote Ugly was a movie about a bar with obscenely attractive bar tenders who dance on the bar and liberally hand out free shots. If you are wondering how you make a whole movie out of this, the makers of Coyote Ugly probably don't have much of an answer for you. It was really more about being marketable than having any merit as a movie. A similar thing might be said of the bar. Again, the concept seems simple, but the execution left something to be desired. Chief amongst the problems for the Vegas version of Coyote Ugly was the focus on audience participation. There was one dancer who acted as ring master, and spent most of her time trying to get girls from the crowd to jump up on the bar and dance. Proof of two things. One - sufficient alcohol makes anyone think they are both attractive and a good dancer, and two - alcohol does not actually make someone either of these two things.

As Kate and I pondered in what way this was not degrading to both participants and bystanders, our attention, and that of the ring master, was drawn to a couple who had just walked in. She was in a white dress, he was in jeans and a white jacket, and they both wore large fake roses on their wrists. "This is my wife" he yelled in response to questioning from the ringmaster. "We just got married!"

Just married, a few hours ago, and they were spending the evening at Coyote Ugly. What better place to have your first dance than on the pedestal at Coyote Ugly, for an adoring audience of leering single men and awkward looking couples you don't know? Well, it wouldn't have been a complete Vegas visit without a Vegas wedding would it?

Apart from that, I played golf, Kate shopped, and I watched at least two games of football every day. All in all, not a bad week.

From Las Vegas it was on to that other great American icon of the South West, the Grand Canyon, via a drive across Hoover Dam. Hoover Dam is not somewhere I would recommend to future travelers. The dam is actually part of the highway, and driving across it is the only way to get from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon. The problem is that it is only wide enough for one lane in each direction. The highway either side of it was six lanes, and the squeeze from three lanes to one causes a traffic jam of several kilometers. For over an hour we sat in the 35 degree heat, coming to the unfortunate conclusion that Yes Man's air conditioning only works when the car is moving at a reasonable speed. In a traffic jam, it just blows hot air.

The Grand Canyon was a more successful trip than the dam. It is difficult to really describe the Grand Canyon, because, to be honest, the name says it all. It is a Canyon, and it is enormous. Despite the descriptions in guide books and the like to this effect, it's size still took my breath away. Standing at the edge of the Canyon we could barely see the other side. Between us and the distant north rim the Canyon plunged over 1500 meters straight down to the Colorado river that is responsible for the whole show.

The miles were starting to add up now, and after a night at the Grand Canyon it was on to Monument Valley. Yet another site famous for its rock shapes, I'll leave it to the photographs to describe the site (check facebook soon!). If you've ever seen a John Wayne movie, it was probably filmed in Monument Valley, and they still show one John Wayne movie every night at the campground. You can even visit the cabin where he liked to stay. I thought that was kind of interesting, but Kate was not impressed. "Who's John Wayne?" she asked. Like Star Wars, apparently John Wayne didn't make it to New Zealand.

With miles to go before we slept, from Monument Valley we headed to Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was no more than an overnight stop on the way to Roswell. Fans of the X Files, or those who want to believe in the paranormal, will be well familiar with Roswell as ground zero for alien sightings. Roswell has certainly cashed in on its reputation, with everything from alien shaped street lights to the International UFO Museum and Research Centre.

Despite the grand title, the museum is really just a large hall dedicated to telling the story of the Roswell incident that made the town famous. On July 4 1947, a rancher named Mack Brazel discovered the remnants of a crashed vehicle on his property near Roswell. Unable to identify the material, and curious about its origins, he took a sample of it in to town to show to the local sheriff. That much is undisputed, but from there things get controversial. The sheriff called the air force, and shortly afterwards the air force turned up, took Mack into custody, and confiscated the sample he brought in. They then headed to his ranch and cleared the crash site.

There had been enough UFO sightings in the USA in the previous year that they were already an issue in the public mind, and Roswell quickly attracted national media attention. At first someone from the military announced that a flying disc had been recovered. The next day that story changed, as a superior officer announced that the item that had crashed near Roswell was a weather balloon. In the official version, that was the end of the story.

The reason for the enduring interest in Roswell is the large number of people involved, from the military and other sources, who claim to have been first hand witnesses to a cover up. The museum exhibits countless sworn affidavits from people involved in the clean up on the site swearing that they found a flying disc with three dead bodies in it, and that the bodies were not human. There are also claims from officers, several recanting on their death beds many decades later, that say they knew it was not a weather balloon but that was the cover story the were told to use. The recovered material was never released again, and it seems no one ever heard from Mack again either.

I don't know what to make of it, but at the very least it seems clear that something crashed in Roswell, and the military really did cover it up. That doesn't mean there were aliens, but there is no proof that there weren't aliens either. Personally I thought the alien story was at least as likely as Joseph Smith's.

With aliens behind us it was down to Carlsbad, possibly the worst town we've stayed in. The influence of the recession could be pretty clearly seen in the number of boarded up businesses, and the fact that, to judge by the state of the footpath and roads, the council was out of money. The two hours of moderate rain we'd had were enough to flood the main street in knee deep water. My opinion of Carlsbad might be biased by the fact it was also the site of our (my) first run in with the traffic police. I will simply say that if they want people to stop at stop signs, they should make the signs slightly more obvious. Not an excellent use of $66.

Still more miles were covered today, as we left New Mexico and entered Texas, which will surely merit its own entry soon. We've added a lot of miles in the last few days, and our odometer now tells me we've covered over 6000 miles so far. To see the latest map, click here