Leaving Las Vegas

You know that scene in Pulp Fiction where John stabs Uma in the heart with a hypodermic needle full of adrenaline? Well that is a bit like how the last couple of days feel for me. The quiet grandeur of Big Sur and the gentrified bohemia of Santa Barbara's vineyards feel like an eternity ago.

In the last three days I've breezed through LA stopping briefly at Venice Beach (found the freaks and oddities no more freakish or odd than those of London), enjoyed a spot of surfing at the world famous Huntington Beach and necked a skinfull of free martinis courtesy of a heiress in Laguna Beach called Harmony who briefly mistook me for that "retarded Scotch guy in Notting Hill" by whom she meant Welshman Rhys Ifans. I think the American phrase 'dumb as rocks' would be an accurate epithet for Harmony.

My last 36 hours were spent in the proudly self-proclaimed 'sin city' Las Vegas. I stayed at the Luxor which despite being anything but lux did include the unexpected bonus of a view of a giant sphinx's arse. Words cannot begin to do justice to the dual emotions I experienced during my time there. Mostly I just felt discombobulated by the sheer grotesquery and syntheticism of the town but on occasion I was also guilty of obsessive prurience, of unwittingly casting myself as a latter day Attenborough tasked with observing the strange nocturnal creatures who inhabit Las Vegas' shadowy casinos. Suffice to say Vegas wasn't really my cup of tea.

The supreme gaudiness of the buildings, the obscene displays of extravagance and greed matched only by those of despair and pity are all certainly par for the course. Instead what I found most horrifying/depressing (not sure which) were the innumerable and subtle manifestations of willing human participation in all of the above. I watched as parents greedily gambled savings as their young children sat at their feet playing with cigarette stubs on the floor (who takes their kids to Vegas on holiday anyway?!). I saw infirm wheelchair bound octogenarians listlessly pumping quarters with shaky arthritic fingers into slots for hours at a time whilst sucking down oxygen from tanks on their backs. I observed excited young foreign couples rifling through credit cards with eager fingers determining which had and hadn't yet been maxed out. But most of all I found the "why do I now ever need to see the real thing?" attitude of many of those people posing for photographs in front of airbrushed replicas of Michaelangelo's David or the Trevi fountain to be the most distasteful.

So it is with a mixture of delight and relief to get back on the highway- to leave the noise and bright lights of Vegas behind me. Within a few hours I was watching a mercurially pink sun set over Death Valley's mountain ranges with nothing but the occasional joshua tree interrupting an otherwise endless expanse of rocky desert floor in every direction.

It's nice to be nowhere once again.