Some cool vegas deals images:
Victory yet?
Image by koalie
I missed the Las Vegas - Boston flight of 4:01 pm. They booked me on the 22:10 pm. I walked, camera in hand, from the airport to Las Vegas (45 minutes, not a big deal), where I had a gourmet dinner at Wendy's.
The Statue of Liberty in front of the New York New York has donned the colours of the East.
Best viewed tiny. This one too was taken as the selector was on "manual focus"...
Frank dealing baccarat
Image by UNLV Libraries Digital Collections
Frank Sinatra dealing baccarat in the Sands Casino in Las Vegas (Nov. 1959).
Digital Publisher
University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries
Access and Ordering Information
Contact UNLV Digital Collections and provide digital ID number below
Digital Collection Name
Dean Martin: Dino at the Sands!
See this item at UNLV's Digital Collections
Digital ID dms000023
Image by wakingphotolife:
* We got a cab at Chiayi. It was complete luck. Because of the landslide, they closed down a section of the Alishan Highway beginning at three every afternoon. Dorie and I knew this from the day before. We came thinking we'd be able to just buy bus tickets in the middle of the afternoon but found out that the last one left at two. And even then, it had been sold out by noon. We stayed the night at a hotel down the street and waited for tomorrow morning.
We planned to wake up at eight, but that didn't happen. By the time, we got to the ticketing window, it was sold out again. Just our luck. I didn't mind staying another day and another night in Chiayi, but it wasn't what we had in mind. The city was dirty. It was the best and worst of Mong Kok in Hong Kong. I would have stayed anywhere she was.
Seeing the frustration on our faces, especially mine, an old auntie approached us and asked if we were interested in buying tickets for a cab that would take us up the mountain. She was a veritable street business woman with a fanny pack, a dark vest, running shoes, and bronze skin gained from spending hours in front of the ticketing window hawking down stranded people like us.
My Mandarin would never make it with her so I stood to the side as Dorie and her arranged a deal. It was a good one. She always got the good ones. We'd also realize that woman worked for the hotel in Alishan that we were interested in and gave us a hefty discount. Just our luck. Likely hers too. The cab would be arriving soon.
We waited at a bench outside the restaurant that was apart of the train station. The bus area and ticketing window were a few meters away. We watched the human traffic come and go, waving in droves between buses, scooters, mini-vans and cars. There were only two of us, and the auntie needed to find another passenger to fill the extra seat. Cab holds five and it was an hour and a half trip. This one was the last for the day before the roads shut down. We watched her weave back and forth looking for another person to fill the extra seat up front. Not many people were traveling solo.
In the end, Dorie and I got into the cab with just one other woman. We had saw her earlier in the day and she had also lucked out on not being able to get a bus ticket. For convenience and to save the auntie the trouble - we felt bad for her - we offered to make up the difference on the unfilled seat. It was still a deal.
We rode through Chiayi. The outskirts of the city was nothing like its center. This is true for every city, but most of the time, you're able to pick out where things and end and things begin. Not so. After only about five minutes of looking through the backseat window, we were in complete wilderness. The cab sped down narrow country lanes surrounded by palm trees, tall grass, and rice fields alongside. Bamboo canes and cypress trees rose up alongside the edge of the road as it began to climb upwards.
It twisted and turned. Hairpin after hairpin. Dorie began to feel dizzy and feverish. I never took her to be the type of person to get carsick, she traveled much more than I had, from scaling Mt. Everest to driving over a hundred miles an hour along a dirt road in inner Mongolia, so it surprised me that I when feel the slight weight of her head touch down on my shoulder. I put my arm around her and held as the car swayed back and forth. Asked her if she was okay until she feel asleep.
The driver was talking in Taiwanese with the women in the front seat. He was telling her about how his brother, also a cab drive, had driven drunk before. But he never had. He was use to these roads. He could manage two beers and be alright. The conversation carried on. He spit chewing tobacco into a clear plastic cup next to the transmission. I wasn't worried at all when he turned his head away from the road to spit. He was use to these roads.
The cab came to a stop about halfway up. We were alone the entire way there. Besides a few vans, there were no other cars. Now, along this section, cars were lined up along the mountainside like it was 8:50 am in Los Angeles. But only across one lane. There were only two lanes total. One down coming the mountain and one went up.
Landslides happen all the time in Alishan. The mountains are steep. Though not as steep as the Sierra Nevadas, there is much more earth, heavy rain and typhoons. The last landslide took a sizable section of the road along with it. It even took out the train tracks and shut down the old fashioned rail that took people around the town and resorts. Crews worked night and day to get it back up, but it'd be a while before then. Even my dad mentioned it when we were at the airport talking about Teresa Tang and her song about Alishan.
Some people got out of their cars. It would be close to half an hour before they opened the road back up. Dorie was sleeping in my lap. I tried convincing her to take some Tylenols that I brought with me but she declined. "I'll be fine," she said. I set her down gently on the seat and stepped out of the cab. The woman reclined her seat back and closed her eyes. The cab driver also stepped out. I asked him to open the trunk for me so that I get some film for my camera. I had finished a roll on the way up.
I walked up and down the line of traffic. The road was blocked just at the edge of the tunnel. Large yellow construction vehicles and men with pick axes and shovels moved here and there, shoveling dirt or laying down metal spikes. Setting up new guard rails. At the tail end of the cars, along a clearing that extended slightly past the cliff line, people gathered around and tried to see where the landslide was. Cab drivers stood around and chatted with other cab drivers. Most people though were not interested in the view and just slept in their cars.
I walked back to the cab to get a pack of Winstons from my bag. Dorie was still sleeping in the backseat. I shooed a fly out and rolled the window up so that it was only a creak. Dirt was being blown down from the construction site to where we were. I wanted to get back inside and take a nap with her but didn't want to disturb or move her. I was worried the entire way up and I was still slightly worried. I knew it wasn't a big deal, but well, even the slightest issues for her are enough to make me care a lot.
I stood up on a pile of rocks and looked down the valley. I could see Alishan Township down below. It wasn't even big enough to be called a town. The mountain road would take us east. From there, it'd leisurely wind down, the descent becoming gentler with every few kilometers we traveled. About forty five minutes left. It made me think if this was how it would be, if she and I were driving to Santa Cruz and a mountain slide its way across Highway 17. The view wouldn't be as nice, but we'd probably be doing the same. She'd sleep in the car and I'd walk out along the side of the road with my camera. Only difference would be the faint ocean breeze combined with the scent of redwoods and pine cones instead of cypresses and bamboo.
There was a commotion as the cars started to move and people hustled back. Our driver threw stubbed his cigarettes on a road post and flicked it over the cliff and got back behind the wheel. I woke Dorie up. She rubbed her eyes. "Hey, it's time to go," I said, "Are you feeling okay?" I resumed my place and she resumed hers. The rest of the way there, I regretted not taking my jacket from the backseat for her to use as a pillow. The road churned for a few minutes more.
