Backpacker Post 5: Las Vegas, Nevada

Oh Vegas. Ridiculous ridiculous Vegas. It was 40 something degrees centigrade, and just about the most bizarre place I have ever been. And that's coming from someone who has stayed in a town that was 8 blocks by 8 blocks with one house to each block in the middle of the Argentinian wetlands..It was hard to know quite what to make of such a bizarre totally artificial place. We met a guy hitch hiking who described it as the place where all of the ultimate craziness of America, its gluttony, its money hungryness, its in your face hedonism comes to point in a kind of pressure valve out here in a strip of mad casinos in the desert. I was fun though. Again we had an amazing host (a lawyer for a casino no less!) who took us to a great dive bar where I tried something called "ass juice" (it was great!). We also made it to the much publicised Heart Attack Grill, where you are served by nurses, there is no diet drink whatsoever, if you are over 350 lbs you eat for free and everything is fried in lard, oh and you have to wear a hospital gown! Would I return to Vegas, probably not, but I'm glad somewhere so strange and crazy exists.

I WISH I had bought something from this machine! It dispensed pieces of art and comic books!