Las Vegas travel info

At 9pm the railing in front of the Bellagio lake is packed. When the music starts, hundreds of jets shoot up to the height of the hotel's third floor and sway in time, while across the boulevard a half-size Eiffel Tower glitters. Every time a casino door opens, air-conditioned air and the chime of slot machines spill out together. Step outside at midday and you remember you're in the middle of a desert: July afternoons average 40°C.

Along roughly 6 km of Las Vegas Boulevard, the stretch everyone calls the Strip, hotels imitate a pyramid, the canals of Venice, the New York skyline and Roman temples. They look next door to each other on the map, but each one is the size of a neighbourhood, so walking takes far longer than you'd think. At the north end, in Downtown, an LED canopy roofs over Fremont Street, a casino street going back to the early 1900s, and every night the whole ceiling becomes a screen playing songs. To the east, the Sphere concert venue lights up its entire skin as a giant eyeball or the Earth.

The food runs to extremes. You pile crab legs at a buffet whose counters stretch for dozens of metres, eat dinner at a steakhouse with a celebrity chef's name over the door, then queue at a taco stand at 2am. The classic plan is two days on the Strip and one day out to the Grand Canyon or Hoover Dam.

Harry Reid International Airport (LAS)