Traveling America Cont

---

After Spending Three months Traversing America I managed to end up driving about 15 000 Miles. After Hitching up to Santa Cruz with a couple of German Tourists, I flew up to Portland and Brought a car. I then drove back down to San Francisco, then drove through Yosimite and Death Valley National Parks, before stopping the night in Las Vegas.



Stopping in Las Vegas proved to be a very interesting one night stand and I'm very glad I did, but I can't say there is any desire to go near the place ever again. Driving into the city at night was definately a blowout. You can see the glow of the city off in the Desert for miles before you arrive and driving into the city is enough to give one epilepsy from light exposure.



Las Vegas is definately a unique city that is like no other city in the world. Everything is lit up by masses of lights, Huge electronic Billboards, fire, fountains, and Casinos the size of City blocks. Everything is one fantastic representation of true useless expendeture in the name of making money from useless expenduture, from the thousands of punters stuffing pocker machines with their hard earned cash. And everything is designed with their cash spending very much in mind. The streets of a night time are full of entertainment and free shows, but by 10 at pm everything including the fountains come to a stand still so that everyone gets sucked up into a Casino to make back the cash spent on free entertainment.



After having our free onstreet intertainment shut down, my friend who was travelling with me at the time and myself decided it was time to head in and check out some of these monolithic complexes with some free drinking in mind. To keep the addicts and happy holiday makers happy whilst throwing their money away, all the Casinos give away free drinks as long you're gambling. To get these drinks as a non gambler takes some skill and I swear that the poker machine you're sitting on is linked up to some electronic system that notifies the waiting staff of you're intensions. The waiting times between getting served and the times it took to receive our drinks seemed to grow with every minute sitting at a poker machine, putting in the smallest of coins and doing our best to look like we were actually gambling. I can almost garruntee that if I was to put in 50 dollar bills, I'd be waited on like royalty.



After actually winning about 12 bucks, boardem soon set in and the novelty of sitting infront of a slot machine for hours to receive a few drinks soon wore off, so we set about walking around. This is when we discovered the joys of people watching in Vegas. Every Stereotype of person you wouldn't want to talk to but would want to laugh at, in our case for hours on end, is out in true force. And it really is a nights worth of shear entertainment.



After leaving the poker machines behind, we started off wandering around inside some of the never ending mazes of poker machine pleasure, all theamed in some way to enhance ones visual experiance. the most impressive being an enterpritation of the Eiffel tower, complete with a scaled down yet very large Eiffel tower sticking up out the top and another casino that even contained mini Canals that you can joy ride around in boats on, and looks like the indoor pool version of Venice. Although very tacky there is some sort of child like wounder that comes across you when you stumble across such things.



Linking many of these Casinos together are shopping complexes, bars, resturuants and night clubs. The shopping complexes sell everything designer and expensive, the resturuants offer everything from cheap fast food to first class dining and the night clubs offer an allsortment of various aged bogan drunk americans fist pumping to cover bands playing Creedance Clearwater or Dj's mixing up Sexy and I know it with 90's pop hits. Heading to the toilet outside one of these clubs always seemed to ensure entertainment. if there wasn't young males verbally or physically threatning each other for egotistical superiority, there was bottle dyed blond slappers getting them selfs ready to go prowling for the buffed young males.



Leaving the internal chaos and walking the the streets was the next point of interest. Foot paths in Las Vegas only run along designated areas along the main strip making going from point A to point B a mission in itself. Crossing the street or going from one end of the strip to the other will have you zig zagging in and out of Casinos and through the temptation of poker machines every time. Unless you want to run with the traffic down the middle of the road, which at one stage due to my beligerance we ended up having to do there is no other option. Again taking these trips seemed to take you past more interesting individuals typically only found in Vegas. During these little detours through casinos, you end up walking along open aired sky walks where you find some unexplainable street bumbs that I've seen nowhere but in Vegas.



I have no idea whether these people came to Vegas Sober and with good intensions of making money through busking. Came as wasted and psycologically unstable as they allready seemed to be with intensions of busking and making money. Came sober or unsober, with high hopes of making millions by gambling and had no choice but to revert to busking and begging. Or were a mixture of all of the above, but had amalgemated into one big bunch that had lost reality so much through their enviroment and drug use it seemed impossible they would ever get it back. What ever the case they all had one big thin in common. They were FUCKED up.



We hit the streets with the Mission of witnessing one of Vegases most famous sights, which is a fountain that shoots massive amounts of fire and water every 15 minutes. Unfortunately by the time we got there it was gambling time and it stopped doing what ever it did for the night, so we decided to sit on the street for the night and people watch. This prooved to be the prime time veiwing spot as not only did people want to come up and chat, but you also got to see people excitedly on their way to party it up for the night in Vegas, or on their way home from partying it up and showing their true messy sloppy drug induced sides.



I went from watching an old man get abused by his wife because he refused to get in the Taxi to take his drunken arse home,to talking to a bunch of Australian's over on buisiness trip, buying up other peoples realestate misfortune's in Mid Western American citys. They told me they frequented Vegas as it was the only thing in America worth going to because of all the drugs, prostitutes and gambling. I was also told by these enlightened induviduls that the rest of the entire continent consisted of nothing remotely worth visiting and that I came from a place in Australia where there was no reason for ever going to as there iss nothing to do there. Aka Tasmania. Not suprisingly they all came from the gold coast except for one of their friends who was reffered to as "poofter" because he came from Sydney.



These hours of people watching was absolutley priceless. You couldnt possibly make a movie that could provide me more entertainment and laughter than a night out in Vegas.



The next day we dragged our groggy heads out of bed and drove non stop for 24 hrs to Kansas city. If theres one reason to ever decide to go to Kansas city its Blues and Barbeque. It has the best BBQ I've ever eaten and while I didnt witness the best Blues I've ever heard, I did get to listen to some great blues while eating BBQ ribs. A truly priceless American experiance.



After a few days rest in Kansas city I headed for Indianapolis where I caught up with a friend from Aus who was working as a private there. Unfortunately there wasn't any motor racing to check out and for the first time in my travels all the reports of Indianappolians being bogans very much seemed to run true. I did have possibly the best Hamburger I've ever eaten there tho, and I found the City Centre to be quite clean and beautiful.



My next stop was Chicago where I checked out the American Field Museam. I wish I spent more time in Chicago but, unfortunately through a lack of planning I forgot to seek out couch surfers or cheap accommodation until it was too late, leaving me with few options but to leave or spend up on good motels. After spending the morning before I arrived desperately trying to scout out some affordable accommodation and coming up with nothing, I decided to go check out some drive in only accommodation when I arrived.



Driving into the Suburbs where two of these Hotels were, was like driving into the slums of America and that's because it was. After deciding to give it all the benefit of the doubt I continued driving through an orray of police gangs, gangs gangs, homeless and terrible housing estates. I arrived at my proposed Hotel and parked my car. Walking into the reception saw me join a line of crack heads waiting to get room keys from a women inclosed behined a plastic screen. After waiting for 5 minutes and thinking that the stuff in my car was far more valuable to risk by skimping on cheap accommodation, I decided it was a good idea to leave. After again lining up for a coffee at Mcdonalds with Junkies and crack heads I decided I had posssibly landed in the most dangerouse place I had ever been in and left for the city. I decided at least that it was a good reason to get some decent accommodation so booked myself a 100 buck room for the night. Waking the next morning I left feeling like I had spent way over my Budget only to find my car had gone from the carpark I'd left it in. After a few minutes contemplating whether it had been stolen or towed, I realised that as I had slept in and had gotten there 2 hours after my ticket expired, it had probably been towed, so I rang the tow company which confirmed my suspicions. After a 20 dollar taxi ride back out near the suburbs I'd been in the day before, I walked up to another women inside a plastic box where I kindly donated her 200 bucks and got my car back. After getting my car back I headed back into the slums and did my laundry at a laundrymat full of very funny and kind but terribly poor people, before setting off into the country where I spent a few days Camping in peace.



From Chicago I made my way to Detroit Which is one of the most Intersting places I've ever been to. Detroit is an amazing example of how Capitilism can completley fall on its head and as result it has turned one of the richest City's in the world into some crazy human experiment thats producing some really amazing new ideas.



To be Cont.

---