Accommodation in Las Vegas
The fundamental choice for Las Vegas visitors is whether to stay one of the colossal mega-casinos on the Strip, which is home to twenty of the world’s 27 largest hotels. Between them, these hold over 75,000 high-quality, and often very luxurious, rooms, but stays inevitably entail long queues to check in, a lack of personal service and endless walking to and fro. Downtown is smaller and on a more manageable scale, while finding a room elsewhere in the city is not recommended for anyone hoping to experience all that makes Las Vegas unique. Note that every room changes in price every night. A room that costs $49 on Wednesday may well be $199 on Friday and Saturday, so it’s best to visit during the week rather than the weekend. Most hotels also charge so-called “resort fees”, which cover internet access, phone calls and the like, and all hotel bills are also subject to an additional room tax of twelve percent on the Strip, and thirteen percent downtown.
Caesars Palace
Still a Las Vegas headliner in its own right, Caesars Palace remains arguably the biggest name on the Strip. Cobbled together for just $24 million, it opened in 1966, complete with clerks dressed as Roman centurions and cocktail waitresses kitted out like Cleopatra. White marble Classical statues are still everywhere you look, from Julius Caesar forever hailing a cab on the main driveway to the Winged Victory of Samothrace guarding a row of gently cascading pools. While the central bulk of Caesars Palace is set back around 150 yards from the Strip, all the intervening space has been built over, most notably by the vast Forum mall, in which a domed false-sky ceiling cycles between “day” and “night” at hourly intervals.
Burning Man Festival
Nevada’s legendary Burning Man Festival is celebrated in a temporary, vehicle-free community known as Black Rock City, way out in the Black Rock Desert, twelve miles north of tiny Gerlach, which is itself a hundred miles north of Reno. It takes place at the end of August each year, in the week leading up to Labor Day. That’s a very, very hot time to be out in the Nevada desert, particularly if, like perhaps half of the fifty thousand revellers, you’re completely naked.
The festival takes a different theme each year, always with a strong emphasis on spontaneity and mass participation. An exhilarating range of performances, happenings and art installations culminates in the burning of a giant human effigy on the final Saturday. After that, in theory at least, Black Rock City simply disappears without trace.
For full information and the latest ticket prices, for which the standard rate is around $380 for the week, access burningman.com. All visitors must buy tickets in advance; you can’t pay at the gate. Only those who can prove total self-sufficiency are admitted; that means you have to bring all your water, food and shelter. The site holds no public showers or pools and its economy is almost entirely based on barter. No money can change hands, other than for coffee and ice.
Las Vegas drinking and nightlife
Every Las Vegas casino offers free drinks to gamblers. Sit at a slot machine or gaming table, and a cocktail waitress will find you and take your order; tips are expected. In addition, the casinos hold bars and lounges of all kinds; very few tourists venture further afield to drink. Strip bars tend to be themed, as with the Irish pubs of New York–New York; downtown they’re a bit more rough- and-ready. A new generation of visitors is responsible for the spectacular growth in the city’s clubbing scene. casinos like the Cosmopolitan and Wynn Las Vegas now boast some of the world’s most spectacular – and expensive – clubs and ultra-lounges.
Eating in Las Vegas
Las Vegas used to be a byword for bad food, with just the occasional mobster-dominated steakhouse to relieve the monotony of pile’em-high buffets. Those days have gone. Every major Strip casino now holds half a dozen or more high-quality restaurants, run by top chefs from all over the world. Prices have soared, to a typical minimum spend of $50 per head at big-name places, but so too have standards, and you could eat a great meal in a different restaurant every night in casinos such as Aria, Bellagio, the Cosmopolitan and the Venetian.