Coming out of the hotel (more properly, casino resort) this morning, a guy walked past with a slogan on his T-Shirt which I thought nicely summed up many people's experience of Las Vegas: "One Casino, Two Casinos, Three Casinos, Poor"

Actually, though, Vegas it quite an easy place to visit on a budget. The casinos seem to make something of an assumption that anyone coming here is going to be spending tons of cash and therefore should be enticed into doing so with lots of freebies. I found that it was quite easy to walk into the restaurants within the casinos and tuck into three course meals for silly prices - the longer they get you to stay under their roof, the more the casinos will make out of you in the long run. Or so they figure. Hang around long enough and stand in the right place and eventually a pretty girl with a tray of drinks may well come up and give you one for free. I probably could've phrased that better, but you get the idea.

If you're looking for free entertainment, you can do a lot worse than check out the range of shows on offer to anyone simply walking the length of the strip - every hour or so, most of the casinos put on some sort of spectacular display outside their main entrance to draw the crowds in. In fact, with Vegas being the size it is these days, I reckon there are probably enough free attractions outside the casinos to keep anyone occupied simply walking from each one to the next for a couple of days - I can only hope to list my favourite two or three here and leave the rest for you to discover for yourself. The Mirage, for example, has a giant volcano in the middle of the forecourt surrounded by ponds and covered in vegetation, palm trees and cascading waterfalls. Every hour or so, there is a deep guttural roar from within the volcano followed by a full scale eruption - flames leap high into the air, the waterfalls turn to steam, lava pours down the sides of the volcano and turns the water in the ponds into a lake of fire. This is all quite a shock if you happen to be walking past at the time and aren't expecting it! The Treasure Island Casino stages a mock sea battle hourly in which the British Navy takes on pirates on a large lake next door. The ships, which are each probably several times the size of a car, sail out onto the lake and start hurling cannon balls across the water at each other for about eight minutes before the pirate ship suddenly bursts into flames and the British ship splits in two and sinks out of sight beneath the waves.

My favourite free attraction, new since my last visit, is the fountain display in front of the Bellagio casino. This really is one show which it's impossible not to stop and gawp at. Every fifteen minutes or so, to the sound of various well known tunes, a line of coloured fountains begin to shoot jets of water over two hundred feet into the air in time to the music. It really is spellbinding to watch the quarter mile of jets pulsing with colour and creating intricate patterns in the air to the sound of popular hits. The best way I can describe it is to compare the fountains to the visualisations that come with computer music players such as Windows Media Player. Except that you're watching an actual live visualisation right there in the air in front of you - it's like fireworks made out of water. The Bellagio fountains cost over forty million dollars to construct, contain one thousand nozzles from which the jets can be shot to any pattern or any height by specialised computer software behind the scenes, and five thousand multicoloured lights to bring it all to life. They were built by the amusingly named WET design who specialise in fountains and are also responsible for my other favourite water display - the leaping fountain at EPCOT centre in Florida, where a jet of water from a nozzle appears to repeatedly bounce at various angles across lily pads on a lake and over the heads of passers by to disappear down a hole on the other side.

Also worth a visit in Vegas are the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace. This massive shopping mall has been constructed as miles of Roman roads underneath the casino itself, and entry is via a moving walkway which quite literally makes you feel as though you are being transported back in time into the days of the roman empire - except that there weren't quite so many branches of Planet Hollywood open back then of course. Wandering the authentic streets below the casino, the most striking thing you notice is that the ceiling is curved and painted to look like the sky - or at least, you think it's painted until you realise that it's all done with clever lighting which changes throughout the day so that the sky always feels like the sky and not a static image. As with all things in Vegas, the Forum is hard to describe without seeing it. There are streets of cafes, market squares dominated by roman statues within circles of pillars in the middle of each market square and stretching up to the sky that isn't a sky, paved walkways and roman pillars along the walls. The effect is simply mind numbing and it really is easy to forget that the sky isn't real and that you're not in some old town that has been carefully preserved for two thousand years. The Forum is also home to a fifty thousand gallon saltwater aquarium where you can watch divers feeding the sharks twice a day. And there's even a free show at the Forum. Using unbelievably real robotic characters, the story of Atlantis is told right in the central square by the statues of King Atlas and his children, scaring the willies out of everybody in the area. The voice of Atlas booms out without warning, echoing across the courtyard and causing people sitting at coffee shops to choke on their cappuccinos and small children to dive behind the nearest statue. These statues then begin to move and creak into life, an arm twisting here and a leg lifting there until they appear to be under their own free will as though in a scene from Jason and the Argonauts. The children argue over who is the better ruler and, unable to decide which of his greedy children should govern over Atlantis, Atlas orders the destruction of the city and we watch it first burn to the ground (Vegas seems to like fire illusions) and then sink beneath the waves as a twenty foot animatronic dragon appears over Atlas shoulder to watch the destruction. Lasers, steam and fountains are used to great effect to create the impression that Atlantis is sinking into the depths, and then another disembodied voice announces that the next show will be in one hour and everything returns to normal. Or at least, as normal as anything can be in Caesar's Palace.

Today, I went along to see the new Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton, something I had seen advertised on television before I began my trip and had then totally forgotten about until I got here and saw it being advertised everywhere. In true American style, this is another attraction which is so fabulously over the top that I don't really know where to begin. Stepping through the back of the ticket office, you find yourself rather spectacularly standing on the promenade deck of the Star Trek space station Deep Space 9, complete in every tiny detail and curving off in both directions - it was actually like being in the show. Strange creatures scuttled up and down speaking gibberish, and the windows looked out into space. In Quark's bar, I had my evening meal from the Star Trek menu, served by a Dabo-Girl (sexy casino hostesses from Star Trek) and surrounded by Ferengi waiters and bartenders. Of course, if you've never seen Star Trek: Deep Space 9 or have no interest in Science Fiction then this will all mean nothing to you, but just take my word for it that it's all totally immersive and one hundred percent realistic in every detail. And if you happen to be engaged to a fellow Trekkie, and the two of you really have stepped across the fine line between fan and fanatic, you can actually get married at the Experience - they'll set you up with alien witnesses, you'll be married by a character from Star Trek, and you can even have your reception at Quarks bar. But let's be honest, if any of this really gets you excited then you're probably not likely to be getting married any time soon anyway!

When I had taken my fill of the Promenade with its shops and restaurants, I was led through to board my shuttle for a quick ride around the galaxy - and this is where things really got seriously good. Before boarding the shuttle, my group of sixteen people were led into a small, square, unremarkable room with four doors in the opposite wall and a single television monitor mounted in the corner. Anybody who has been on a motion simulator ride at any of the major theme parks in America will recognise this setup: they line you up in four rows of four in front of the doors, and then after watching a brief introductory film on the monitor, the doors open and you shuffle forward into four rows of seats inside the simulator to begin your ride. However, something quite different and unexpected happened at the Star Trek Experience - something so remarkable that I'll probably spend the next ten years trying to work out how it was done. As our group stood in our four neat rows in our bland little square room watching a guy dressed in a Starfleet uniform telling us on the monitor about what a fantastic shuttle trip we were about to have, all hell broke loose. Mid-sentence, the monitor suddenly flickered and died. A second later all the lights went out, plunging our featureless little room into pitch blackness. Immediately, there was a jabber of voices in the dark: "Emergency. Get those people out of there!"

We felt compressed air shoot across our legs and faces, followed by millions of blue twinkling lights all around us and the sound of a Star Trek Transporter being operated. The lights came back on. Less than five seconds after the lights had gone out, we were all now standing in the transporter room of the U.S.S. Enterprise. The grey featureless walls and the monitor had gone, the doors had disappeared, and the room we were in was much larger than the one we had been in five seconds previously. More to the point, we were now standing on a totally different floor - something which could not possibly have been changed without lifting us from it. (1)

With a swish, the transporter room door slid open and a bridge officer came in. He explained hastily that we were no longer in the 20th century and were instead on board a Starship in what we would call the future. He told us that the commander would explain things, and proceeded to lead us out of the transporter room and along the corridors of the enterprise to the actual bridge from Star Trek: The Next Generation. As bridge officers bustled about, we were lined up around the room and told to watch the viewer. Riker, the Enterprise first officer from the television show, appeared and explained that one of our group was an ancestor of Captain Picard. The Klingons, it seemed, had attempted to kidnap us from Las Vegas in order to change history and the Enterprise had rescued us. The crew would attempt to return us to the temporal rift from which we came in a shuttlecraft, and so get us back to the 20th century. When the message had finished, an officer led us to the turbolift where an exciting ride to the shuttle bay ensued - including a mid-ride lights-out power failure which caused the lift to go into freefall and drop several floors, tilting on its axis and throwing us all around. We were then taken into the shuttle bay and placed on board a shuttle where the motion simulator ride we had been expecting in the first place began. I'll say it again - the Americans don't do things by halves.

Las Vegas really is a compact entertainment oasis in the middle of an otherwise forbidding desert. People either love it or hate it. Some people talk endlessly about what a den of vice Vegas is and how anyone coming here is a terrible person, others cannot resist the pull of its bright lights. Whatever you think, the idea that Vegas is all about throwing your money away on Craps tables and Slot machines is old fashioned - the strip contains more entertainment venues and shows than you can shake a stick at, and you can easily spend as long as you want here without seeing half of what it has to offer and without spending a penny on gambling. There's even a Wet and Wild water park here, so you could spend a day riding the flumes and ignore the rest of the town completely. On the other hand, if you like a bit of a gamble, they don't exactly stop you - there are slot machines in the toilets, slot machines on your table at breakfast, slot machines in the car parks for people who can't wait to get inside. The casinos don't have any windows or clocks, because if you knew what time it was you might go home. Photography and videotaping inside the casinos is strictly forbidden because the management is scared that you might capture on film somebody whose wife doesn't know he goes to Vegas, and he might get in trouble and not come back. Seriously. And it is possible to win - a woman with whom I used to work came to Vegas once, put a quarter in a slot machine and was immediately surrounded by flashing lights and the sound of running feet - she'd won ten thousand dollars.

There is, of course, a seedier side to Vegas as there is in any city - but it's easy to ignore. To see what I mean, just walk along the strip at night and accept every magazine, flyer or brochure that is offered to you by guys standing every couple of hundred yards along the way. By the time you get to the other end, you'll probably be holding about three years worth of pornography, courtesy of Vegas - mainly adverts for massage parlours, out of town ranches and any other vice you can think of. Although prostitution is legal in Nevada, it seems that it's not legal to do it within the city limits - so everywhere you go you'll find guys peddling places out of town. The first time I came to Vegas, I naively assumed these peddlers were handing out leaflets for fast food restaurants and electronics shops or the like - and as you can imagine, my jaw nearly hit the ground when I realised what they were actually doing.

(1) The Star Trek Experience finally closed its doors on September 1st 2008 after 10 years boldly going - but there is already talk of moving it elsewhere. Although the news that the Experience was to close came as a major dissapointment to all those who assumed they would someday get around to seeing it for themselves, there has been one big advantage - finally, all those members of staff who were sworn to secrecy about the inner workings of the attraction have now been able to spill the beans, and I finally know how the transporter was done.

To start with, the video we were watching on the monitor of the guy in the Starfleet uniform was nothing but a distraction. Behind us, a panel was very slowly descending from the ceiling to cover the door through which we had entered. Our guide, at this point, was standing next to a release trigger on the floor, and once the video had finished and the panel had descended into place she pressed it with her foot to signal that all her visitors were standing in lines waiting to board the shuttle and that nobody was in contact with the walls. Here, the lights went out and people started shouting at us in the darkness, a further distraction. At this point the entire outer shell of the room, weighing over 3 tonnes, shoots upward at 60mph - the walls and ceiling are all attached to a pulley and 4 tonne counterweight which whips them 40 feet into the air in a little over 2 seconds. The sound of this happening is covered by the incredibly loud sound of the transporter effect which is played through speakers close to our ears. The compressed air which I felt being blown on my face and legs wasn't compressed air at all - it was simple physics. As the walls are pulled up at 60mph, a vacuum is formed and air rushes in to fill the void from the larger room beyond the fake walls. Finally, the ceiling of the transporter platform slides in above our heads to replace the ceiling that was there before. The floor on which we were standing, probably the most puzzling part of the whole experience for me, is covered with a glass-like material which appears solid until light is shined through it. To complete the illusion of being transported to the USS Enterprise, an illuminated display of the transporter floor is simply switched on underneath the glass and causes the whole floor to change in an instant. The lights come on, and the effect is complete.

So now you know - and if the Star Trek Experience really does move to a new location, they'll just have to come up with something even more puzzling...

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.