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Published: September 13th 2012
BM Tickets
Happy Nena with BM tickets!Our first flight was delayed by a couple of hours, which meant we missed our connection. Thankfully they were through the same airline, so they put us onto the next plane, and also gave us a meal voucher. When we finally arrived in Las Vegas we picked up our car (refusing the offer of a "larger and more comfortable ride", and sticking with a normal sized 4-door, and then proceeded to get slightly directionally challenged finding out hosts house. It was around midnight, we had been travelling all day, and we weren't used to the GPS system that was in the car. That's our excuse anyway...
In the morning we dozed for a while and then headed out to the post office to get our Burning Man tickets, which thankfully were there! Yay! We also discovered the best ever Goodwill store. It was huge and had a crazy range of stuff - great for fancy dress and Burning Man. After spending a few hours in the store, we dropped into Sammy's Pizza for an amazing pizza and salad (rocket and quinoa). Sooo good!
That evening we drove in to MGM Grand Casino on The Strip to see Cirque Du
Salad and Pizza
Best pizza in USA. Amazing salad too. Soleil's performance entitled "Ka". It was... amazing. Comparing it to any other performance you'll see is like comparing a modern computer animation movie with a hand drawn stick figure drawing. The performance was all around you with industrial looking pipes hanging all around the audience, performers running across the rails in the crowd, and then there was the stage. If you want the full details - look it up on the web, but basically the whole stage was composed of two seperately moving stages mounted on HUGE hydraulic systems which allowed them to move up and down, backwards and forwards, and also to completely rotate through a wide variety of angles including completely forwards to form a vertical wall. This allowed for some astounding choreography and design. The stage started as a barge floating down a river (moving forwards towards the audience), it then sank down slightly so you could see what was going on on the roof of the barge. Later in the performance it was a cliff which characters attempted to scale while fighting each other. The stage also had a huge pit and when characters fell off the cliff they fell out of view from the audience
Pre-performance entertainment
Playing strings suspended up over the foyer. which was very scary to watch. Of course, as usual for Cirque du Soleil, the acrobatics were superb, and the costumes stunning. Anyway, this whole journal entry could be filled with a description of the performance, but words would not do it justice. Wow.
After the performance we met up with our host, had some late Pho for dinner and then wandered around The Strip getting overwhelmed by the vast number of pokies (the ultimate designer drug!). We walked through New York, Paris and Venice (why did we even bother travelling?), saw a remarkably good Captain Jack Sparrow impersonator, and were overcome by the smell coming from the flamingo garden in the Flamingo casino. Weirdness abounds.
On Sunday we went shopping for some more Burning Man supplies. Firstly we hit Wholefoods which is a very large chain store here in the USA. It sells lots of healthy food, organic items, and also ready to go pay by weight meals which you self serve. It's a great shop, but it's interesting to consider the ethics of the store. When they open in a new area, they offer to buy out (for a good price) any local health food stores.
The Ka auditorium
Amazing. Looks like some weird steam-punk industrial building. Look how huge it is compared to the crowd. Any small store would have difficulty competing as they can sell items at very low prices. By being a larger store and cheaper they open the possibility of healthy eating to a larger number of Americans than a smaller local store would, so that's a good thing. But it's a large chain, so small stores can't compete, so that may not be a good thing. So, overall are they good or bad? Who knows, but we shopped there anyway... We made our way to a large outlet store centre, which included Crocs, and Bose (drool!). In Walmart we found frozen alcoholic slushies for $1.88 each. Crazy - we had to try the pina colada and the Pomegranate Acai Daquiri. Not bad - very sweet, but do NOT under any circumstances read the ingredients list!
In the evening we caught up with our host again and he took us to Downtown (a seperate section of Vegas) to show us around. The most impressive bits were the $1.75 glasses of beer from the casino brewery (pretty tasty), and the astonishing giant display screen which forms a canopy over several blocks of pedestrian mall. It's around 450 metres long and full colour
Pho
Tasty. (composed of 12 million LEDs!). We forgot our camera on this expedition, so here's someone elses shot:
http://www.fodors.com/images/experiences/Nevada-Las-Vegas-Fremont-Street.jpg Every 30 minutes they play an animation which goes along with music blasted through speakers (a 550kw sound system!). We saw two of them - one based on the music of The Doors, and the other based on Jefferson Airplane. It's funny that they are really focussed on the music and themes of the hippies, but Vegas is so money orientated... What was fun was looking around and seeing everyone's faces as they craned their necks back to watch. There was also a zip line (flying fox) which right down the middle of the pedestrian mall, but it was ridiculously priced at $20 for one go!
Monday morning we had a few more bits of shopping to do before heading off, but first we fuelled up by going to a local chain called "Hash House a Go Go". They are famous for their massive serves. Ridiculously large would me accurate. We had to get half of ours as take away and that ended up being all we ate ALL day! One of the shops we dropped into was an
army surplus store which was run by a slightly bonkers super keen cyclist guy. He was a bit of a character and dragged Chris out to his car to show off his mountain bike (which was a pretty swish one!). He gave us a fairly decent discount though, so we put up with his endless ranting and failure to listen to pretty well anything we said back to him!
We left Las Vegas in the early afternoon and briefly visited Hoover Dam. It was incredibly hot so we didn't stay for long. We then drove through an intense storm complete with lightning and heavy rain, before arriving at the south rim of the Grand Canyon just as it got dark. We borrowed some McDonald's wireless from the carpark to book our helicopter flight for the next day before putting up camp in a free campspot just north of the town.
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