Viva Las Vegas, and numerous other well known phrases

"You will surround yourself with warmth and riches". "Bollocks", thought I, "This casino is freezing and I'm already down fifty bucks". Not that you should pay attention to fortune cookies.

Vegas, of course, has surrounded itself with warmth and riches. The temperature was a persistent 35 oC, dropping to 31 oC at night. As for the wealth, well it speaks for itself. Indeed, much like LA, so powerful is the city's self-publicity engine that there is little more to say about it, except that in the big V, if you can't buy it, spend it, consume it, shoot it, or have sex with it, it can't be worth having.

The bail bonds businesses, pawnshops, wedding chapels and discount stores that litter the areas off the Strip are easily overshadowed by the six block television of Freemont Street in Downtown, and by the Strip itself. They are part of Vegas too of course, but are easily forgotten, like Elvis, who seems to be drifting quietly into the city's past, along with my hopes of winning back my money.

I did not marry the Elviss (Elvii?) that I did find, nor did I impersonate a stripper or tuck one dollar bills into anyone's underpants, but I did meet two semi-professional poker players, a country singer whose name I have totally forgotten and watch the Bellagio fountains next to an old chinese man. Most certainly it is hard to engage with Vegas properly on any kind of limited budget, the city wills you to be irresponsible and you feel that you are letting yourself, and everybody else, down by not spending. But you can get some cheap food, a succession of drinks and take it all in without pawning your shoes, or feeling too dirty. You're never alone for long in Vegas, even if the buxom blackjack dealer in cowboy boots and a corset is taking your money throughout the conversation.

Of course, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, as the sign at the airport proudly reminds you. So, I will remain tight-lipped about the whole experience. Is it worth going if you only have a few hundred to blow? Coming out of a bar at six, to greet the Nevada sunrise with a headache and a smile, you will tell yourself that it is. It all makes sense in Vegas. All of it except the fortune cookies.

Los Angeles, and the endless quest to get your beans (coffee)

"Compton, Long Beach, Inglewood". Dre's sweeping grouping ringing in my ears, I wonder whether there is enough California Love to spare me from a mugging, as a police officer orders a Japanese tourist to put away his iPhone before it gets stolen. Having taken the wrong bus from LAX I find myself sitting at the train station in Long Beach at a quarter to twelve, waiting for a connection from LA's mediocre train system. I need a coffee.

Eventually I found the hostel with no loss or personal injury sustained, but still without a coffee, or even dinner. I can see the Hollywood sign from my bed. I can also the the back of a nightclub, a parking lot, and a couple groping each other up against a graffiti covered wall. But that's by the by.

First impressions do count for a lot. Which might explain why the clerical error that led to me being put in an already occupied bed was never recovered from (get over it arsehole, it happens). I decided to start my acquaintance with LA more formerly than with my disgruntled roomie; Hollywood seemed a good place to begin. Around central Hollywood is a strange mix of theatres and malls, tattoo parlors and wig shops, interspersed with guided tour booths and the occasional shop window holding mannequins with enormous fake breasts. Not that any mannequins have real breasts of course.

Head west out of Hollywood and it starts to become rather nice. The Sunset Strip is small but showy, a range of bars and restaurants sitting perversely close to the multiple lane highway that constitutes Sunset Boulevard; the area is a fair contrast to the road's earlier offerings of motels, drive-throughs and slightly disheveled, purposeless buildings on uncertain leases. Head further along Sunset and you reach the city of Beverly Hills, which in this area amounts to little more than an enormous housing estate, full of equally enormous houses and driveways you could never pull out of, such is the traffic. Further west lies Bel Air and the city of Westwood, UCLA, and the sea, the road only punctuated by small, elite but nondescript commuter towns full of opportunities to sip a Starbucks and ogle the tanned, jogging women that pass you, and oddly, who ogle back.

Ogling is the only real activity to do for the tourist in LA. There are museums, and galleries, and of course the beach, but if you aren't eating, drinking or shopping you may as well find a Starbucks and sit yourself outside (and do find a Starbucks, it is the most reliable coffee in town, unfortunately). In a city so full of paparazzi there is surprisingly little to photograph, unless you love Downtown's handful of towers, are perving on Venice beach, or are doing a human interest story somewhere in South Central. When people think of LA they think of the city's powerful, almost unavoidable self-image, the area between Malibu and Venice beaches and their rows of fanny-magnet property, and east to Downtown. Moreover, as the city is more of a region than a cohesive unit, nobody comes to see all LA; the boulevards stretch out like brambles and in between the areas like Beverly Hills, Downtown and Hollywood lie thickets of patchy, meaningless, non-fruiting tangle. As a result, there is little to sightsee, and almost none of what there is can be done on foot.

Such is the predicament that I found myself in off Rodeo Drive, in Beverly Hills, pondering how to get to the beach without a car in the most expensive, exclusive and distinctly unbusworthy area of town. After another insipid coffee served by another melancholic waitress, and fighting the distractions of the parading plastic soccer moms, I did manage to find the right bus, but if I lived here I would have given up long before. If you have a car, or a taxi, and have the money and the time to shop, eat, club, drink and pardy, then LA is great. Except for the coffee. The problem occurs when it is the time of day for none of those things, and you must resort, again, to ogling.

In a last attempt to waste the half day before my flight, I went sightseeing, up into the hills, along Beachwood Canyon towards what was once the community of Hollywoodland. All I wanted was a better shot of the sign, and maybe, if possible, a decent coffee. There I found that the public land ended just inside the old walls of H-land, and that I could only get a marginally better photo here than from my bed. It was here that I also suffered the indignity of paying $4 for a woefully-served cappuccino delivered in a styrofoam cup, sans chocolate, by a waitress whose vacuous expression was matched only by the emptiness of the streets themselves. It seems that the celebrities left here long ago. Unfortunately, the waitress seemed to think otherwise: in the ensuing conversation with the next customer, a returning one it seemed (poor fool), it transpired that the waitress had some shows coming up on cable. Hopefully she wasn't playing a barista.

I do like LA, surprisingly. But much like any place where its main selling point is the weather, if you have time and money to waste it is great fun. If you grow weary of the search for decent coffee outside Starbucks, or can only handle two or three nights out a week, or one night stands, then you can get bored here easily. It's not that LA society is soulless, my cappuccino was soulless. But it is a bit frothy, which my cappuccino was not, and I'm not sure I could wake up to that kind of city every morning.

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Sunny / Foggy Frisco

I am undecided about San Francisco. I am unable to comment on the weather, aside from noting that it is foggy in the morning, sometimes later, and that occasionally searing heat moves through the city, before being replaced by a cold ocean breeze, depending on where you are. The downtown is flat, the rest is not. Despite being a strategic location, I maintain that whoever thought of building a city here, rather than just a fort, is a lunatic. It is the hilliest place I have ever been, and I refuse to live here.

The reaction to the populace is seemingly hard to pin down. We arrived over the Bay Bridge in the evening, stopping for dinner on the edge of Chinatown and the fashionable strip-club district, a strange mix of seediness running into bistros and restaurants. Crackheads and beggars abound throughout the city, though are far worse in the shopping areas and are almost non-existent in the suburbs over the water like Sausalito. Mind you, it is hard to tell who is a beggar, who is a beatnik, and who is just dishevelled; many of the homeless read works of literature, many of the council workers wear ripped, unwashed clothes and sport rough beards, and many of those pushing shopping trolleys are clean shaven. It is impossible not to judge the city without taking into account the number of homeless, or apparently homeless. It is not a bigotted view, or one with any agenda, the fact is that the number of wandering, muttering people along the streets is far higher here than anywhere I have ever been in the world.

Not that all the people mutter of course. At a baseball game, the tickets to which a lovely man on the bus gave away for a mere $10 (he had bought a load months before, and they were $50 on the door), we were seated behind a large man who periodically lept from his seat to roar "YEEEAAAAARRR! GO GIANTS!", before high-fiving his slightly shaken wife. And not all of the people are that dishevelled; a very high proportion of the city is unfeasibly muscular (mostly the gay proportion), and an awful lot of the womenfolk are very attractive, regardless of whether they are dressed 'alternatively' or not. The whole experience is a shock to the system, and it is very hard to register whether it is a nice one.

California itself is a shock of course. The moment you enter the state, everything changes: Audis appear from nowhere, the driving standards plummet, fruit trees spring up across flat land and the population becomes very, very orange. The old ferry terminal in San Francisco is very nice, now hosting a range of organic and high-end nibbles and healthy options amid florists and gelatoes. There is the occasional rummager of course, in San Fran, bins appear to be far more temporary storage facilities than waste deposits, but the overall effect of the ferry building is very nice, very clean, very Californian. Quite what Californian is, not culture or refinement, a little more like self-awareness, but not quite, is yet to be decided. San Francisco should not be taken as a standard of course. It is far from normal.

On that note, having drifted through Castro, (I intentionally avoided the word 'cruised' there) and its rows of boutiques, coffee houses and occasional group of men frolicking in tutus, we went off to Golden Gate Park, to meander around the Japanese Tea Garden while moronic tourists attracted squirrels and rats with little nibbles of fortune cookie, only to be surprised when one of the filthy rodents nips them. We took the bus back. You could take the cable car, but these days they only do a small, show loop, and do occasionally get stuck on the corners uphill, necessitating a push from an enormous pick-up with a rubber bumper.

If you can navigate the multiple suburbs there is a wealth of places to see that will pull you back into affection for this difficult city. There is sunny Sausalito, reached by bike over the Golden Gate Bridge, where a marina full of yachts bobs around before rows of expensive houses, hotels and restaurants interspersed by the occasional fish and chip shop, art gallery or coffeehouse. Or there is the west side, full of chinese but without the tackiness of Chinatown, the long Ocean Beach and its dunes, or any number of the uphill neighbourhoods. Throughout the city are bars, restaurants, shops, views, walks and spaces that would be perfect for a date. Until a smack addict tells you about the pollo loco that sent him crazy, and demands his panda back.

Perhaps the most unexpected thing that happened throughout my stay in San Francisco was in the beer garden of a Beach Chalet in the park's ocean side. While sipping a real lemonade and recovering from the hike up the dunes, we were approached by a musclebound thirty-something and his rampant, blonde toddler. Having passed a wry comment about the young ladies that had just been talking to my brother and I, the gentleman sent his slim yet buxom wife to the bar with the child, placed a thick joint, half-smoked, on the arm of my chair and winked, "here's a little home grown to get your evening started. You boys have a good night, it's good shit". It certainly smelled like it, everything it touched turned to weed, including my bag.

Very cool, very Californian, right up until the moment that the police did a ticket check at the station and requested to see my hostel key to prove that I was indeed foreign, and had not used an overdue ticket to cheat the fare. Somehow managing to flirt our way out of a fine, and not wave a stench of marijuana under the policeman's nose, I got home without any trouble and dumped the offending item in the nearest bin; even in California, some things are more trouble than they're worth.

Next stop LA, and having only heard bad things about it, I expect to be pleasantly surprised. Bracing myself for security, I have already been scanned, x-rayed, finger-printed and retinally checked. Hopefully they don't have drugs dogs, my bag still stinks.

Nevada, Ruby Mountains, California and Yosemite

The Ruby Mountains are yet another undiscovered wilderness, and have been described as "the only thing worth seeing in Nevada, if only anyone knew about them". A series of spiky peaks, punctuated by beaver dams and containing a wholesale abscence of rubies (though they'd named them by the time they released their mistake), they provided another pit-stop on the long road to Frisco.

Hiking up the trail to a plateau that I'm not sure ever really existed, I came across a well made up lady with very clean blonde hair, bedecked in full camo and brandishing a pair of large binoculars and a very large bow. She looked dejected, apparently, despite the mountain goats, occasional doe and multiple beavers, she wanted a big buck to impale. Not entirely knowning what to make of this strange coupling of mascara and bloodshed, we pointed out that we were wearing brown and would be walking on the left side of the stream, then made a hasty retreat.

Heading downhill the following morning, I can concur with the nameless quotation at the beginning of the post. Nevada is a state of dust-devils, occasional downpours, jagged mountains, roadside brothels and military bases where America practises bombing itself. Of course, there is Vegas, and moreover, there is Reno.

Like a garish Blackpool of the desert, Reno rears up after the salt flats as a fluorescent mirage, promising stimulus of every kind after the monotony of the road. Pottering about after checking in to a dubious-looking motel, I stumbled into a pawn-shop, to be greeted with racks of guitars, DVDs, and a wall of guns from .2o to .50, and a row of eager looking hispanic gangbangers admiring the array and making notes of the prices. Having determined that we would only buy a gun if we won loads on the slot machines, we took off to the Grand Sierra Hotel and Casino, for a grand buffet indeed, including very unlocal crabs and a disappointing steak. Then, to the bright lights and clockless interiors of the area's second most famous town.

Having won a handful of cuddly toys and lost several dollars, I wondered whether I could reinvest my winnings at a bar. The only one with any people inside, due to the fact that it was Wednesday, and Burning Man was soon, was a grubby rock bar, where to my disappointment they did not take cuddly toys as payment. They did serve one dollar pints however, and the locals were so amused by the arrival of foreigners that multiple free drinks and chasers were forced our way. Reno really is a bit horrible, but it works for it, to paraphrase the description given of me by a very attractive girl in a sailor's hat. I think I would have to agree.

Following the mild debauchery of Reno we headed away from the fallen of civilisation, back into the wilderness and to Yosemite and Tahoe. Several highways, winding mountain roads and impressive vistas later, we arrived in Yosemite, to find half of it on fire, the rest filled with smoke. While it made for some very nice sunsets, it meant that we could not access the valley, and all of the most attractive scenery. We made a sweeping tour of the smoke-filled sequoia groves and left, but not before being warned by a patrolling man in camp that Sasquatch would come through our camp tonight, like every night. This was made funnier by the fact that the gentleman looked like Sasquatch himself. It was only later, when a bear ran about the camp, that we realised that the man was a ranger, and that Sasquatch was the bear's name. Apparently, this bear thing was not a ruse after all.

Jackson Hole, into Utah

Jackson is a lovely ski resort, almost surrounded by a curve of mountains, forming its titular 'Hole'. Wooden boards line almost every shopfront, and covered walkways shelter the sidewalks moving out from the central square and its four arches composed of shed Elk antlers. It's very western and almost painfully cool, an image exaggerated by the numerous boutiques, art galleries and pricey restaurants that cannot serve local elk because the law forbids the sale of wild game in restaurants, which serve Canadian farmed elk instead.

Nowhere is more Jackson-Holey than the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, a fantastically kitsch establishment on the square that manages to blend tourist nonsense with actual quality: saddles replace barstools, (they don't rotate, so you only face beerwards); cases contain the stuffed remains of local wildlife, including two mountain lion that frame the dancefloor; the rearing form of a grizzly bear bears a plaque remembering the story of C. Dale Petersen, one of only two men known to have killed a bear without the use of weaponry. Apparently, after encountering the already rattled creature, Petersen and it became engaged in a scuffle, whereupon he forced his hand down its throat, and bit its jugular. It having passed out, he clubbed it to death. Not a tactic I'm planning to try, but each to his own.

Continuing southwest, we moved towards the Great Salt Lake and Salt Lake City, home of mormons in suspiciously short skirts and the fantastic Polygamy Porter, its label showing a carousing group with the slogan "why have just one?". As for the faith, they use the words journey, trial and promise in a manner that is almost retro Old Testament, while the emphasis on family unity and hard work in the face of adversity is pretty understandable given the location they chose for their city, which smacks of tiredness and resignation in hindsight, considering California was in their path.

Mormons are terribly nice, in an inoffensive, evangelical way. I don't find any of the religion any more difficult to believe than any other brand of Christianity. It is clearly a rehash of ancient, particularly old testament ideas, branded rather clumsily by archaic haths and believeths that litter the early scriptures and points to a backward-reaching attempt at self-justification. The questions as to why there is no alternative record for the lost tribes of the americas, or indeed any record here, and as to why it took a european to discover the lost scriptures, remain awkwardly unanswered. Is it any more difficult to believe that angels spoke to a man two hundred years ago than it is to believe that it happened two thousand years ago? Not for me. The religion itself as well though, is not for me. The porter meanwhile, is another matter entirely.

Gangsta Rap and the American Dream

Listening to TB's mixtape in the woods, as you do, I was struck by how much certain generic rap reflects the American Dream. TB, named after Tuberculosis cos he is proper catchy I presume, was handing out his twenty-four track demo on the streets in New York, but we had yet to play the preposterously overlong item in question. While the actual tunes were alright, the rhyming was decent and the level of bass satifactory, it was some of the most uninventive music I have ever had the non-reaction to listen to. Guns, money and hoes, the simple lives these guys are living, represent the American Dream though: capitalism and the right to bear arms, making money, making money, shooting things, doing as you please, forging a path, making money, shooting things, manifest destiny, making money, spending said money. Just because the money they make is from drugs, the things they are shooting are each other, and what they are spending the money on is hoes and drugs, with a smattering of jewelry and presumably some bullets, nothing could be more traditionally American than gangsta rap. But this argument probably wouldn't fly in Wyoming.