Worth a look-see (Luxor Hotel)

Member Name: ermintrude

Product:	Luxor Hotel
Date:	21/06/01 (432 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Huge, cool building, lots to do

Disadvantages: Expensive, on the end of the strip, ripoff "yard" margaritas

Are pyramids your thing? Can you walk like an Egyptian? Can you tell your Cleopatra from your Nefertiti? Well, whether you can or you can't, the Luxor is worth checking out, and, if you can, checking into. This is a bit of a mammoth review, but it's a bit of a mammoth hotel!

Now, I hardly made an exhaustive survey of all the Vegas hotels, so you'll have to see this as an isolated opinion, but I loved the Luxor. For a start, who can deny that a pyramid-shaped hotel is cool? We were lucky and got a room in the main pyramid itself, rather than the boringly cuboid West Tower, and I just loved it, despite banging my head on the sloping window every time I looked out.

Let's start from the start. A big Sphinx forming a covered entrance. Free valet parking, complete with friendly exclamations of dismay that my friends' little Beetle had been driven all the way from Arkansas, and someone to relieve us of our bags. So, unencumbered, we walked into the hotel to check in... and I really felt like my jaw hit the floor. The place is *huge*. It looks big from the outside, sure, but inside it's just amazing. The rooms are in the "wall" of the pyramid, leaving the space inside as, well, 30 floors of space. Some people find that boring, but I really liked it. Inside that space is the buffet (in the basement), entertainments (upstairs), and the main gaming floor, which greets you on ground level in a dazzle of lights and wall of bleeping, chinking sound. Neatly avoiding the machines (for now), we went to one of the many check-in desks, and in a few moments, had keycards and directions to our "inclinator".

Ah, inclinators. Built to travel up the four corners of the pyramid, they of course have to travel on a slant - most people, when they first take a ride, are almost thrown off-balance by the unexpected sideways motion. So hold on! Also, the four inclinators each serve different floors - 2-8, 9-16 and so on. We wer
e a bit disappointed to note that our room was on the opposite corner of the pyramid to the inclinator that served our floor, but at least on floor 22 it's less of a trek round than, say floor 3.

Baggage service to the room was very fast, and although they lost one bag, it was brought up a few minutes later with a sincere apology and an assurance that it had never left the baggage room (it was only dirty washing, so hardly stealable). The bellman who brought it was extremely chatty, and gave us a few tips about the hotel, including the fact that if we went one floor down on the adjacent fire escape (non-alarmed, thank goodness!), we would find a much closer inclinator to whisk us to the lobby. The room itself was huge, with plenty of space to spread out all our stuff... nothing hugely special, but very nice nonetheless. In the bathroom, the shower cubicle was *massive*, and the free toiletries smelled fabulous (kind of fruity-spicy).

So much for home comforts - what about the rest of it? Well, we managed to spend just about a whole day in the hotel (and not playing the slots, at least not all the time :), which is great when it's 115 degrees fahrenheit outside and you can't face walking anywhere. After a rather dismal breakfast in the buffet ($9 for food that most roadside chains would be ashamed to serve, just greasy prepacked stodge), we spent the morning by the pool, signing out huge towels to the room, and bagging a spot in the shade while a couple of people went off for "yard-long" margaritas ($13). They're not a yard long, and they're not very nice either - too much margarita mix, ice and lime, and not enough alcohol, dammit! Avoid them and just get regular or frozen margaritas (about $7) from the waitresses who pass by.

Disappointingly, the pool didn't open until 9am, and closed at 7:30pm, which we thought was a bit off for the city that never sleeps. It got really busy about 11am, which was when we
began to think about getting out of the sun and heat. Heading inside, we went for the "museum" ($5), a reconstruction of Tutankhamun's tomb, complete with audio guide - it was a bit short considering the price, not exactly in-depth, and of course you spin out into the gift shop, but this is a casino, not the British Museum! Worth checking out if you have a bit of time to kill, but not really a priority.

In the afternoon, my friends checked out the spa, which was about $20, but included free drinks and fruit, as well as steam rooms, saunas, plunge pools, showers, and all that stuff. Massages were available, but about twice as expensive as any normal place (I don't remember the exact amount), so they declined. Not being a spa kind of girl, I went to see an Imax film ($8), something I've never done before. The Luxor actually has a choice of films, including the 3D show-off piece I saw (no real plot, just lots of cool effects, including 3D Simpsons and sequences from Antz and A Bug's Life), and a "ridefilm" where the seats move about as you tear off in an Indiana-Jones-style search for some lost Egyptian treasure or something. My tip is to get there early - I arrived 5 minutes before the start of the 3D film, and had to sit on the lowest row, so got a bit of a crick in my neck watching the 7-storey screen, not helped by the heavy headset. You really want to be at the top or in the middle.

We did leave the hotel in the late afternoon, once the worst of the sun had gone, and wandered down the strip to the New York, New York hotel and casino. Actually, I lie, we took the air-conditioned monorail shuttle to the Excalibur (next hotel along), and walked from there, using the footbridges over the road which (of course) have escalators. Why the New York? We just *had* to ride the Manhattan Express - a $10 rollercoaster that zooms around the hotel's New York skyline front, and includes a couple of big drops, a loop and a
corkscrew. Re-rides are $5 - I could happily have gone again :) It is hard to find the entrance to the coaster in the maze that is the New York casino, but persevere and you'll get there.

After that, it was back to the Luxor for dinner. The previous night we had treated ourselves to the all-you-can-eat buffet at Bellagio, further up the strip, and had been extremely impressed (everything from wild boar to sushi, and the desserts... ohhh... chocolate tart that just melted on your tongue), but since that experience hadn't been repeated at the Luxor's own buffet at breakfast, we went to the Japanese restaurant, Hamada. We were not disappointed. It was my first taste of Japanese food, and I'm hooked! I began with a delicious chicken teriyaki ($5), and somehow managed to handle it with chopsticks - maybe the fact it was so good helped me to avoid dropping any! That success continued with the main course, where I chose shrimp and vegetable tempura ($19). Unlike the chicken (which had been sliced), some of the pieces were a little large for chopsticks, but for the most part it was manageable. I remember onion rings, mushrooms, sweet potato, and other veg, plus big, juicy, tasty shrimps; all this came with grated white radish and a dipping sauce, and was preceded by miso soup and a salad. Sake was $5 ($10 for "premium"), and pretty essential to the whole experience I guess.

After that, of course we played the slot machines. There are hundreds, arranged in confusingly similar, disorienting patterns (although less claustrophobic than, say the New York or Bellagio), and varying between video-based and traditional "bandits", and from 5 cents minimum to $1. Cars and motorbikes are suspended tantalisingly over some, usually the higher stake ones. For the serious gamblers there are tables of all kinds, but unsurprisingly we stayed on the slots. We played on the 5c ones to make our cash go further, and somehow I managed to fin
d myself one that was "in the mood" for paying out, and after putting in $10, I cashed in $22.50 - all in nickels. My tip? Well, after watching my friend (who also won), and from my own experience... On most machines, you can play between 1 and 6 (or more) coins on each spin - bet the maximum amount, to win the maximum when the reels do line up, and you also seem to win more often if you play larger amounts. You can build up a hefty number of credits this way if you're lucky.

I have to admit, I kept cashing in every credit I won, mostly just to hear the coins hit the tray! It's a noise that surrounds you in the casino, and it can feel like everyone is winning but you, so you want to put more in... ooh, slippery slope. I just took $10 and left the rest in my room, just to avoid temptation. One last thing - you can't imagine the state of my hands after feeding coins for an hour or so! Grey, smelly... there are moist towelette things by the cashier booths, but you really need to attack your hands with soap and water to get rid of it. The taste of metal seems to fill your mouth too, but happily the waitresses are on hand serving free drinks to all players. Oh, they'll do anything to keep you there, spending your money!

Other things that we didn't take advantage of, but that are there to take advantage of, include the Ra nightclub (with girlie dancers), a theatre which is currently showing the Blue Man Group (from the Intel adverts), a food court including Mickey D's and the like, and a whole bunch of shops selling things including general schmaltzy Egypt-themed gifts, sweets, alcohol, fresh pearls and Egyptian artifacts. Definitely plenty to keep everyone occupied, as long as you have the cash to part with. Speaking of which - room rates. I'm afraid I don't know how much it was, as the stay was a gift and it's rude to ask, but all I will say is check for special offers (e.g. on Travelocity), go out of seaso
n if you can (apparently the rock-bottom cheapest time is between Thanksgiving and Christmas), and try to stay midweek - I do know the price for our stay was lower on the Thursday night than the Friday.

Overall, it's definitely worth checking out, even just to see the sheer space inside the pyramid. Everything else just adds to the experience - if you have the cash!

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