Vegas: The Street

Las Vegas is overwhelming. It has that fairground feeling of doing something exciting even if you’re just standing still. The crowd is watching the crowd.

Fremont Street is in the old part of town. It has been covered with a high curved canopy, a 500-yard-long projection screen with moving LED images and a near-deafening sound system. When you push the button for the pedestrian crossing a voice snarls ‘Wait!’ to snap you out of your disco daze.

Overhead are long zip lines. Once we saw three people cruising along in formation, like an aerobatic display where the pilots had forgotten their planes. ‘What if you took a penguin with you?’ wondered my brother; after all, they fly underwater…

There are sales booths scattered down the middle of the street - one of them advertises cigars and oxygen. On either side are a series of painted circles, for beggars and entertainers to use; they have to stay within the boundary. There is the occasional crazy wandering by, shouting and twitching, but generally the homeless are unobtrusively discouraged and rest their backs against the wall on quiet sidewalks a mile away.

Pairs of girls wander about dressed in little more than a red feather headdress and another on their behinds, like turkeys competing for a mate. They’re not allowed to ask but the expectation is that you will pay ten dollars to be photographed with them, as a memento and proof that you were having a good time.

It’s one casino-hotel after another down this road: the Golden Nugget (showcasing a massive lump of gold discovered by an Australian detectorist); Binion’s, where you can see what a million dollars in notes looks like; the Four Queens, named after its builder’s four daughters; and so on. Like Oxford colleges in the old days, you can walk in and out of any of them freely; they’ll all get a share of your money eventually. When you go back out you will often catch a smell like stale lager: weed, apparently.

One morning my brother wanted to show me the Downtown Container Park, a development created by serial entrepreneur and keen poker player Tony Hsieh to give fledgling businesses a starting-point. I strode off confidently in the wrong direction and we trudged the pavements in the hot sun, but it was interesting. As the smartphone continued to protest that we were getting further away from our destination we watched a construction site crane positioning a reinforced concrete pillar bristling with rods; we passed a couple of men completing a baroque steel mobile food van decorated with a metal fish; a row of silent, recumbent indigents; some private residences (at last) fronted by trees and bushes; shops and medical centres; and eventually reached our target, just round the corner from Fremont Street. The Park is made of adapted shipping containers, with one outside fashioned into a praying mantis. Inside were cafes - we had a cold lemonade to quench our pressing thirst - shops and a central adventure play area for children. It all had a homely feel, which is surprising when you learn the project cost $350 million to make; but then, land is at a premium here.

Not far away is a large branch of Walgreens pharmacy - lots of Vegas’ visitors are pill-poppers. I had been asked to bring back melatonin tabs, not so easy to get over the counter in Britain, so in we went. At the back of the shop were shelves of the stuff: tablets, chewies, drinks by different manufacturers; ironic, in a city that never sleeps and where there are no clocks to tell you how far you have overstayed your bedtime. I bought two bottles of capsules; and batteries for my camera that - wouldn’t you know it - had run out of juice just as I tried to capture the rosy desert dawn above the Four Queens from our bedroom; and of course, we didn’t get another start of day moment like that before we left.