The following blog entries from Las Vegas were originally written in February 1999.

I made arrangements with the hotel yesterday to be driven to Las Vegas by a friend of the Concierge, a guy called Carlos who acts as a tour guide and travel agent to groups or single travellers. I don't have the budget at this stage to be booking planes for these short journeys, and I figured that finding a ride through the hotel was probably the best way to ensure that I didn't end up being pushed out of a car in the middle of the Mohave Desert at gunpoint and being made to hand over all my worldly possessions. It also cost me a lot less than it would have done to get a plane or a bus the short distance across the California Nevada border - and, of course, I had the company on the way of somebody who was able to point out the sights of the desert.

"Look, there's a dead critter" - that sort of thing.

To be honest, there isn't a lot to see as you cross the Mohave Desert, unless you count mirages, dead things in the road and the occasional Joshua Tree. I was, however, slightly relieved when we stopped to take photos half way across that the desert isn't quite as littered with strange skeletal remains and skulls as it is when people get lost in it on television. The Mohave, after all, is home to Death Valley where the temperature approaches 120 degrees around July and makes it the hottest place in America - so this isn't the place to come without telling somebody where you're going first. Despite all this, I actually found the desert to be quite attractive in a strange sort of way, a bit of peace between the multimillion dollar lifestyles of California and Vegas.

I think I had expected the trip to take longer, knowing that we had to cross a vast expanse of desert to get to our destination - but it was a relatively quick and comfortable ride. Perhaps it's because I've done so much travelling in Australia recently but I had imagined the desert road would be bumpy and unpleasant - in fact, the road was paved all the way and apart from being surrounded on both sides by nothing it felt just like a normal trip along the motorway back home. Carlos collected me from the hotel at mid-day and we were in Vegas by six. We even managed to stop on the way for lunch at the last town before the desert began, and I was able to stand on the border with nothing but sand in front of me as far as the eye could see, and wonder if Vegas was really out there somewhere. Carlos turned out to be full of all sorts of suggestions for places to go and things to do around the Las Vegas Strip and I arrived in the city with a long list of shows to see and nightclubs to visit, far more than I could possibly do in the time or on my budget. Carlos also seemed like a regular nice guy - the sort of person it's always a pleasure to travel with - he'd brought his ten year old daughter along for the ride and had already made arrangements for them to stay overnight in the city so that he could take her to Circus-Circus, a casino cum circus where visitors can watch live big top performances around the clock on a scale only possible in Vegas. This certainly wasn't going to be a cheap trip for him, and I doubted very much that the price I was paying him for the journey was going to pay for everything he wanted to do. I was probably along for the ride to pay the petrol, which was fine by me.

At the Nevada border, there were literally a whole bunch of Casinos just sitting there on the state line waiting for punters to pile into them in their droves. Because gambling is only generally legal within the state of Nevada - unless you happen to live on a Native American Reservation - people come from all over the country just to throw their money at anything with a gambling license, and boy do the locals know it. Some people will travel tens of thousands of miles from across the world just to spend a single day in Vegas throwing some money figuratively down the drain - and this funds Vegas's apparent thousandfold size increase since I was here a few years ago. As soon as you are across the state line and into Nevada, flashing neon dollar symbols and animated signs depicting slot machines appear on all sides. Along the side of the road on the way into the city, there must be hundreds of billboards advertising casinos - all of them claiming to have the loosest slots in town! A loose slot is a slot machine which isn't so picky about who it pays out to, although the obvious play on words hasn't escaped me, considering the other thing with which Nevada seems to be associated by the rest of the world - semi-legalised prostitution.

The Las Vegas strip has indeed changed quite a bit since my last visit. I remember spending a relaxed half hour walking its entire length just to orientate myself when I arrived - but when we arrived this time it took nearly twenty minutes to drive from one end to the other so my driver could show off his favourite city. Vegas has expanded out of all proportion. Carlos spent the entire drive along the strip pointing out places that he insisted I absolutely must see while I was here - the nightclub in the MGM Casino; the MGM theme park next door; the Tower; Treasure Island, which was being built when I was last here; not to mention the Egyptian themed Luxor casino and its Ra nightclub. At night, you can see the gigantic Luxor pyramid for miles out into the desert because it shoots laser beams from the top which sweep the sky. In fact The Federal Aviation Authority, the national organisation in charge of making sure planes don't crash into mountains and investigating when they do, recently ordered the management of the Luxor to tone the intensity of the laser beams down as they were blinding pilots descending into the airport.

Carlos helped me check in at the Sahara, a hotel and casino complex at the far end of the strip and a place familiar to me as I've stayed here before, and we parted company as he took his daughter off to watch elephants and jugglers. My first order of business, after being shown up to my very expensive looking suite, was to make sure I had a ticket to the Siegfried and Roy Magic Spectacular. Last time I was here, I spent quite a while standing in a long line at the Mirage Casino for tickets before realising to my astonishment that the show had actually been sold out for days and I was simply lining up with hundreds of other people hoping to grab unwanted tickets that had been returned. I wasn't going to make that mistake again, and my intention had been to go straight over to the Mirage and book a ticket for the first available show. In the event, getting tickets to Siegfried and Roy turned out to be much simpler than I had expected. After dropping my stuff off in my room I headed down to reception to ask the way to the Mirage, and noticed that the Sahara had a tour desk which was advertising that they could get privileged tickets to local shows for their guests - and luck was obviously on my side because when I asked about Siegfried and Roy the woman behind the counter immediately made a phone call and secured me the very last ticket for that nights performance. But, she said, I'd have to leg it up the strip at pretty much the speed of light to get there in time.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.