Las Vegas

Mar 19, 2012

I'm not much of a gambler. The $10 minimum is enough to keep me away from the blackjack tables and that's the only card game I even remotely understand. If only they did Uno. Won a few dollars on the blackjack machines, but squandered it on $2 margaritas.

Gambling is risk-taking. It might be said the owner of a casino gambles, takes risks, but he has the odds in his favour, so that's intelligent gambling. If I wanted to gamble, I'd buy the casino. -Jean Paul Getty, Sr. (1892â€“1976), American oil tycoon.

In the absence of any real gambling we spent most of our time walking up and down the strip. With all the massive casinos you get the impression that the strip is very short. It's not -- the thing is almost 5 miles long. According to my girlfriends pedometre we walked about 15 miles without even trying.

Paris

Sphinx in front of the Luxor Hotel

Luxor's 30-storey pyramid is encased in 11 acres of dark bronze glass.The tip of the pyramid contains a fixed-position spotlight that points directly upward and is claimed to be the brightest light beam in the world at over 42.3 billion candle power. Apparently it is clearly visible from outer space.

New York, New York.

Casino floor at New York, New York.

Paris slot machine.

Paris casino floor.

Planet Hollywood, Grand Chateau and MGM Grand.

A word of warning to any photographers going to Las Vegas from Arizona: make sure you change your clocks when you cross the border. I had planned to watch the sunset from the top of the Stratosphere, but by the time I had realised my mistake, the sun was almost down already. I took the photo above from the elevator lobby of my hotel (Paris), before rushing to get up the Eiffel tower before twilight finished.

The view from the top of the Eiffel Tower is great. There's no space for tripods, but if you have a gorilla pod you can use it to hold an slr between the slot-shaped openings in the fence. Wish I'd got up there a bit earlier though.