Las Vegas: Magic, Buffets, and a Helicopter to the Grand Canyon

Our next stop was Las Vegas.

Most of our time there was devoted to eating and drinking. We sampled buffet after buffet, watched show after show, and tried the gaming tables downstairs at our hotel. Both sides of the Las Vegas Strip were essentially one enormous entertainment complex, with each casino resort packing rooms, restaurants, gambling, and performances into a single building. For people like us, who had no serious plan, it was possible to spend an entire day without even going outside.

The show I remember best was David Copperfield’s. When I told the others about it, someone asked, “Was it really him?” I said, “I think so. Probably.”

At the time, I did not yet understand Las Vegas’s place in the entertainment world. I had no idea that so many major performers held long-running residencies there, so I genuinely was not sure whether we had seen Copperfield himself. I compared the man onstage with his photographs. Probably him.

The show was excellent and full of the enormous stage illusions for which Copperfield was known. Making a person appear would have seemed almost too small. The things turning up onstage included cars, motorcycles, and a dinosaur skeleton.

It also reminded me of something I had once heard: no magician could possibly perform for an entire career without making a mistake, so when something went wrong, the trick was to talk your way around it. I have no idea whether anything went wrong that night. There was, however, a great deal of talking.

That created a problem. My travel companions from China could not understand the English. What were they supposed to do?

I stepped in to provide live simultaneous misinterpretation. Yes—misinterpretation.

Unlike actual simultaneous interpretation, mine maintained only a loose and occasionally adversarial relationship with the source material. I simply could not keep up with Copperfield’s delivery, so the result came out in scattered fragments. I would translate the first sentence of background perfectly; he would then rattle through a long story; I would fall hopelessly behind and eventually offer this summary: “He just told a story that wasn’t very important.”

My companions still rated the show highly. Their reasoning was that magic remained watchable without understanding the dialogue, which beat staring blankly at a Broadway stage.

We also ate at plenty of buffets and tried several well-reviewed restaurants nearby. The largest trap we encountered was one buffet’s unlimited-alcohol package.

Unlike soft drinks, the alcohol had to be brought by a server. You could not pour it yourself, nor was there anywhere to do so. The server therefore became the system’s primary bottleneck.

The glasses were neither especially large nor especially small—perhaps 300 or 400 milliliters. For the northeastern Chinese contingent among us, that amount of beer was only a few mouthfuls.

What happened, then, was predictable. A beer arrived and vanished in two swallows. The server vanished too, and it might be another ten or fifteen minutes before the next refill. One of my companions grew extremely unhappy. Unable to express that in English, he picked up the glass and knocked its base against the table. The server responded with an irritated look and something roughly equivalent to, “I heard you. I’m busy.”

Wait, now you were unhappy too? The glass was empty, everyone’s patience was empty, and a prompt refill could at least have filled one of them.

Neither of the two understood what the other was saying. During a two-hour buffet, we probably managed only about five refills. And this was supposed to be unlimited drinking?

At this particular buffet, “unlimited” existed only in theory. In practice, the bottleneck reduced the throughput to something decidedly limited. I could not recommend paying for it.

Our only real excursion away from Las Vegas was to the nearby Grand Canyon. Driving there would have consumed far too much of our tight schedule, so we chose the quickest option available to us: a helicopter.

Helicopter trips from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon were already a classic local excursion, flying directly over broad stretches of desert and canyon country. For an itinerary in which time was tighter than money, it looked entirely reasonable—on paper.

We booked a tour that promised hotel pickup, a helicopter flight to the Grand Canyon, time on the ground, and a flight back. It was extremely expensive.

The hotel pickup alone was enough to astonish me.

A stretch Lincoln pulled up for us. A man who looked rather like a butler stepped out and invited us aboard. Inside, the car felt like a living room, complete with a refrigerator and a table.

It was my first time in a car like that. One of my companions observed that this was Las Vegas: apparently, if you supplied enough money, Vegas supplied the spectacle.

Then I boarded the helicopter—my first helicopter ride in years.

The important thing was that I did not yet know helicopters made me airsick. I climbed aboard in great excitement and immediately began moving around and taking photographs of everything. After takeoff, I photographed Las Vegas through the window.

From above, the already extravagant hotels and casinos around the Strip suddenly became a small cluster of buildings in the desert. The gold-covered Trump building was undeniably gaudy, but also, somehow, a little cool.

Five minutes into the flight, I began to feel as though I might vomit. I remained dizzy for the entire trip, but somehow held on until we landed several dozen minutes later without throwing up inside the helicopter.

Here are the precious photographs I took at considerable risk of making myself sick.

It had looked enormous from the helicopter. Once we were actually on the ground, the scale became even more absurd.

It was spectacular. The Grand Canyon was, in fact, very grand. And unmistakably a canyon.

There was also the famous Grand Canyon Skywalk, a horseshoe-shaped glass bridge projecting from the canyon’s edge, with the canyon directly beneath your feet. In theory, it should have been thrilling. After the helicopter flight, however, I had very little capacity for additional thrills left.

Then we flew back. Once again, I very nearly threw up.

I learned my lesson. From then on, whenever I take a helicopter, my rule is to keep my head pressed firmly against the seat and minimize unnecessary movement, in the hope of keeping the airsickness to a minimum.

And with that, our Las Vegas visit came to an end.