Bright, spooky, has mole people.
Two 21-year-old students visiting Nevada as part of a foreign study program recently turned up after being lost and presumed permanently weirded out after nine days in downtown Las Vegas.
Adele Bauer and Gutav Klimt, both Austrian, were disoriented when found but otherwise appeared to be in good shape, police reported.
"We had no idea," Bauer said. "It was so overwhelming. Absolutely, like from another planet. It took us days to realize we were not having the hallucination. And even then we could not find a way out. The laws of the real world, they do not seem to exist there."
Bauer and Klimt have been studying environmental science at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, but wanted to hike and camp in a desert landscape to get a better feel for the variety of "the real America".
"We have no desert country in Austria," Klimt said. "Just trees and mountains and a few mutants like you see with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Nothing at all like this though. We had the great fear."
"Ja," said Bauer, "this is the very spooky place. Lizards and snakes we handle OK, snowstorms and so on, but we could not believe a place like this can exist."
Rescuers speculate that a sudden dust storm may have disoriented the hikers and steered them out of Red Rock Canyon and into a nearby suburb, from where they were sucked straight into the Las Vegas Strip, possibly dazzled by the lights.
Although ill prepared to survive in downtown Las Vegas (the couple had little cash, and no line of credit at all), they did have some carrots, peanut butter and trail mix, according to Police Sgt. Sam Judd, who coordinated rescue attempts.
These meager rations, and the lucky break of finding a discarded copy of the "Las Vegas Direct Buffet Survival Guide" gave them time enough to find their way to a food source.
"We sat through a timeshare presentation and then they gave us the food," said Klimt. "We did this over and over, to eat. It was like hell, but we managed to keep up our strength this way. We would not do this again. Better to die maybe."
Night after night the two students wandered aimlessly under buzzing neon signs, wondering if they would ever make it home again, until finding temporary refuge among the estimated 14,000 Las Vegas tunnel people.
Mike, who's hooked on meth, says tunnel life was an adventure at first. But eight years later? "What a big mistake I made," he said. "I wanted Adele and Gutav to make it out alive."
With a crude map Mike drew on a scrap of paper, and after being pointed in the right direction, the two students were able to hike out to safety.
"I believe for going into the bush you need the proper preparation," Bauer said. "We paid the price for our mistake, but in the end we walked and now we are free again."
This incident comes just one month after three Oxford University students visiting New York were devoured by a credit default swap that broke out of its cage in the Wall Street area.
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