Day Twelve - More Vegas

It was an easy morning in sunny Las Vegas and we set out late around 11 in our morning ritual of trying to find a decent coffee. We failed. Miserably. There are somethings that Vegas does well, mostly; Margarita's the size of a small African country, beer in every shop including pharmacies, large scale shows and performances etc etc. There are something that it does very poorly, namely coffee and any type of healthy food. Everything here is designed for eat big, drink big, bet big and party hard.

Outside the massive Monte Carlo Hotel & Casino

Today we walked the strip from end to end (almost) in the blazing heat. We started off at our hotel The Venetian and then crossed over the road to Caesar's Palace which was beautiful inside and full of the spendy shops. Next door is the Bellagio, also beautiful and very elegant. We lined up to pick up tickets as we booked to see Cirque du Soleil's "O" here tonight. It's the one with a huge pool as the centre piece - more on that later.

Jo posing in front of the fake Trevi Fountain outside the Monte Carlo

The Monte Carlo Hotel looks really good from the outside, I don't think we went into this one yesterday as we just ran out of time. The strip is deceptively long, you think that you only need to walk to the next hotel, but when you factor in all the people, traffic lights or going up and down escalators to get across the walkways it can take you at least 20 mins to half an hour!

The Bellagio hotel - cool water show every half an hour

We continued walking, avoiding the annoying people 'flicking' flyers at us and everyone for call girls, people selling 'ice cold waaaater' for $1 and everything in between until we reached New York, New York. We took a walk around the fake streets and took some pictures of the lunatics on the roller
coaster there. Opposite is the Paris hotel which we really liked. It has a fake Eiffel Tower (below), a fake Champs Elysees and inside the streets and cafes are really well done.

Fake Eiffel Tower at Paris

Across the street is the MGM Grand and once inside we saw two magnificent female lions in the exhibit. We also took a peak at Treasure Island at some point, I forget when but it was by far the crappiest and tackiest of all the casino's so far.

Vegas by night....

The round trip took a couple of hours to complete and by the time we were back at our hotel we needed a little rest from walking. We decided when we were at the Bellagio that we'd eat at a Noodle restaurant there so we needed to leave at around 6pm to walk there, have dinner and be at the "O" theatre for 7.15pm. The noodle place was awesome, I had the best BBQ Pork noodle soup and Jo enjoyed a Vietnamese Seafood Pho. The timing was good so we headed to the theatre just in time to get our front row seats......

More on Cirque du Soleil next...