Monaco is the second-smallest country in the world, at 0.81 square miles in size, bigger than only Vatican City and a few of the smaller Sam’s Clubs. It would fit inside New York’s Central Park without even displacing any of the hobos. It’s surrounded by France on all sides but one, and hemmed in on the other by a Winnebago that some asshole left parked- wait, sorry, on the other side it’s hemmed in by the Mediterranean Sea.

It’s the most densely-populated country in the world, and one of the wealthiest, with millionaires accounting for 30% of its residents. That’s less because Monaco makes or does anything and more because they don’t have any income taxes, and so rich people move to Monaco to keep from having to share with the rest of us.

Why does Monaco exist? Why isn’t it just part of France? Though its history goes back further, Monaco as we know it today was founded by François Grimaldi (known affectionately to his friends and mom as l Malizia, “the malicious”), an Italian who bluffed his way into Monaco’s gates with his cousin and some drinking buddies, all dressed as Franciscan monks, in 1297. Once inside, they killed the shit out of everybody and took over the place. That’s possibly the most gangster origin story of a country I’ve ever heard. The Grimaldis rule Monaco to this day.

Over the years, tiny Monaco retained its independence Game of Thrones style, forming alliances with neighboring France and then betraying France when it was convenient to align with Savoy, and then France again, and then Spain. Spain thought this was so hilarious they made the Grimaldis for-real royalty. All this made France really jealous, and the Grimaldis expertly played rivals Spain and France against each other until France was so desperate to have Monaco back that they signed a treaty making Monaco an independent state, militarily protected by France, and also agreeing that the Grimaldis were totally a royal family, sure. This kind of thing went on and on for centuries and worked really well until the French Revolution, when the Monégasque royalty didn’t fare any better than the royals in France, and Monaco was absorbed into the new French Republic.

But amazingly, after the fall of Napoleon, the Grimaldis smooth-talked an invite to the Congress of Vienna and Littlefingered their way into being recognized as an independent country again, with the Grimaldis back in charge. Chaos is a ladder and all that.

Monaco today is basically a long French Riviera-style beach clogged with yachts, with densely packed hotels and homes built up the steep hillsides leading up from the beach. That’s it, really. And there’s also no room in any of this for any vegan food whatsoever.

My first priority upon arriving on the train from nearby Italy was to see the James Bond casino. That’s what I was calling the Monte Carlo Casino, because James Bond hangs out there in Never Say Never Again and Goldeneye and, well, because it’s the most James Bond place in the entire world. It also makes an appearance in Ocean’s Twelve, which doesn’t have James Bond in it only because they fucked up.

The Monte Carlo Casino has a bit of a funny history. It was built out of desperation in the late 1800s after two of Monaco’s largest towns revolted and then were gobbled up by France, the cherry on top of a decade when Monaco lost 90% of its territory, leaving it the bikini wax landing strip that it is today. What remained of Monaco had no real economy to speak of, so the royal family decided to roll the dice on building a fancy casino and luring in high rollers from abroad. They hired François Blanc, a gifted casino operator and bullshit machine from France, to come and make something out of their nothing.

Blanc was an absolute genius of bullshit, who embarked on a PR campaign publicising the casino’s gaudy losses to attract high rollers like blood in the water attracts sharks. He invented the name Monte Carlo and even used his connections to get a rail line built from Paris. Before long, Monaco was a booming vacation destination and the casino was making sloppy money hand over fist like David Hasselhoff trying to eat some Wendy’s.

But Monaco’s Prince Albert hated gambling, as the stink of disreputable money wafting from his family’s name had torpedoed his chances of marrying the first cousin of England’s Queen Victoria. He was royally pissed and he wanted the casino closed, dammit, even though it was Monaco’s only real source of income and was paying for all of the country’s roads, schools, utilities and everything else, and was the sole reason the residents didn’t have to pay any income tax. Albert was on the verge of closing down the casino in spite of all this, so hard was his ass, when one day a mysterious Englishman named Charles Deville Wells showed up out of the blue.

Wells arrived at the casino and promptly ran an absurd five-day winning streak on a single roulette table, betting so feverishly that onlookers observed that he looked like a madman trying desperately to get rid of all of his money. When this delirious streak was over, Wells had won the equivalent of 14 million dollars in today’s money. And then, poof, he was gone, like Keyser Soze or Kevin Spacey’s career. News of this amazing feat spread far and wide and gamblers piled into the casino so fast that nobody even noticed that this mystery gambler was in fact a known conman and former employee of the Blancs who likely had been parked at a fixed roulette wheel by Blanc’s son Camille, who had inherited the casino operations and book of tricks from his father. Regardless, the ploy was successful and so many people dumped so much money into the casino trying to duplicate Wells’ feat that Albert had no choice but to simmer down and settle for demanding that butterflies not fly so drunkenly.

Today, citizens of Monaco are not even allowed in the Casino’s gaming rooms, because Monégasquans themselves are forbidden from gambling. You take your wins where you can find them, Albert.

It was before noon when I arrived, which was inconvenient since the casino doesn’t open until the late afternoon. I decided to remedy this problem by just showing up and seeing what happened. The girl at the front desk seemed to like me and enthusiastically agreed when I asked if I could just wander around the closed casino and take pictures of shit for however long I wanted. Sometimes you just have to ask.

Inside, it was glamorous AF.

What I found most striking though, was that this classy old-world glamour was immediately offset by the most hilariously tacky gambling machines I had ever seen in my life.

In the clash of eras, I think the 1800s got the worst of this one. It did make me feel a bit like we’re living in a Wall-E world populated by diaper-wearing huge infants though, which was fun.

I continued to wander through the casino’s many rooms, remaining on the lookout for British secret agents or just casino employees who might ask what the fuck I was doing there.

Completely terrifying and evil faces stared down from the ceiling, looking like demons feasting upon the souls of the congregating gambling addicts. It’s classy of the casino to be so upfront about this.

One gaming room had some cool art in the corners representing the four times of day: dawn, dusk, midnight and beer-thirty. I somehow missed getting a photo of that last one.

A small dining room off to one side was modeled after a ritzy train car, in case the train ride to Monaco had been so fun that you didn’t ever want it to end.

After a few hours of taking photos of anything that moved and most things that didn’t, I bade the daytime casino staff a fond farewell, promising to return in the evening, when the gaming rooms would be full of fancy folk with far too much money.

When I did return that night, however, this didn’t go exactly as planned. First, I made it past the bouncer who was turning away drunken frat douches on the front steps of the casino. Score! Inside, I approached the two gentlemen who were guarding the doorway to the gaming rooms.

“I’m sorry sir,” the first one said to me with complete and wonderful politeness. “But I can’t let you in.”

“Oh really? Why not?”

“Uhm, it’s the way you’re dressed, sir.”

I was shocked. I had fully expected the ritziest casino in the world to have no problem with the fact that I was wearing bright orange trail runners and was otherwise dressed, as always, like I had just come in from a long, sweaty mountain hike and desperately needed to use the bathroom. I was wearing a running shirt and a pair of climbing pants. I was also quite dirty.

“Oh, what’s wrong with how I’m dressed?” I asked, looking down at my clothes and wondering if I could borrow a sports coat or something to class this shit up to an acceptable level. It’s not like I could fit a tuxedo into my one-little-backpack, free-spirited traveling style.

“Everything.” The second guy immediately chimed in, smiling.

I laughed and the ritzy bouncer guys laughed with me.

“That’s cool,” I hadn’t actually expected to get in and was just curious what would happen. “Have a good night guys.”

They wished me the same in genuine good cheer and I wandered off to look homeless somewhere else. To be fair to the dudes I had been traveling for months at this point and was looking pretty swarthy and questionable. I mean, not so much so that they didn’t name any streets after me or anything.

Rather than surveying the swank desperation going on inside the nighttime casino, I wandered the streets of Monte Carlo instead.

I staggered through the Grand Hotel Hairpin, the most famous turn in the Circuit de Monaco. One of the most dangerous racecourses in the world, the Circuit winds its way through the narrow streets of Monaco and plays host to the Monaco Grand Prix every May. This racecourse switches back and forth at absurdly sharp angles and runs right along the coast, which has inspired at least two drivers so far to F up so hard they actually ended up in the sea.

At the Grand Hotel Hairpin, drivers basically make a big fast U-turn before heading off in the opposite direction to terrorize the rest of the streets of Monaco with their being fast and giving no damns whatsoever.

The course also involves a tunnel, which is something Formula One doesn’t normally do, giving drivers a chance to be blinded by the sun upon exiting the tunnel and sideswipe an elementary school. It’s also where Mickey Rourke went all Devo on Iron Man in that one movie. The bad one.

The course is both too short and too dangerous to qualify by Formula One rules, but they’ve been racing here since 1929, back when rules hadn’t been invented yet and life was cheap, so it’s been grandfathered in. I was amused by the idea that Monaco is so small you can’t even fit a full sized racecourse in it. Nevertheless, the Monaco Grand Prix remains at the pinnacle of the racing scene, making up the Triple Crown of Motorsport with the Formula 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, all of which sound like something my dad would watch on TV.

I want to check out the waterfront! Getting from one vertical level of Monte Carlo’s hillside steepness to another is more difficult than you might expect, since you can either walk back and forth and back and forth and back and forth along the accordion folds of the city’s switchback streets, eventually getting to your destination just in time for the apocalypse, or you can seek out one of the well-hidden stairway shortcuts.

I wandered the streets for some time looking for one such stairwell that would take me down to the next level of shit further down the hillside, with little luck. Eventually, I found an elevator instead. Oh hey, now we’re rolling high class!

I stepped into the elevator and pressed the button. The doors closed and a recorded voice said:

“DEATH TO ZUVERT!”

I… what? Excuse me?

I didn’t know somebody was going to have to die in this whole elevator equation.

I think I just wandered into one of Monaco’s homelessness solution boxes.

The elevator took long enough that I had plenty of time to contemplate if it was going to be gas or giant sharp blades that shot out of the elevator walls that were going to do me in. I prepared myself to denounce Zuvert in the strongest terms possible if it was going to get me out of this situation upright. But instead, the doors did eventually open again and the elevator deposited me at ground level, still alive. I think. Huh.

“Death to Zuvert!” the elevator reminded me, cheerily.

Mmmm. I wandered off in a daze.

Down by the waterfront, there were boats. But not the kind of boats you know about. Not poor people boats. Rich people boats. REAAAAAAAALLY rich people boats. Yachts is too small a word. And yaaaaaaaachts just sounds silly. These were ultra platinum Megayachts.

I spent at least two hours just wandering around looking at these goddamned things, with their helicopter landing pads and two little boats on the back deck so the owners could always look at one of the little boats and say “Nah, fuck that little boat. Let’s take the other one.”

Being this into Garfield is a pretty good sign you're never going to be able to afford one of the really big boats.

And naming a boat this expensive after your dog is a good sign that you've never worked a day in your life.

This just seemed fascinating to me as the living definition of having too much money. What would life be like if I was one of these yacht people? It seems impossible that it wouldn’t change you for the worse. Either you had to have grown up with so much money that you were hopelessly messed up inside from the start, or you had to have finagled your way into such a position through your own maneuverings. Like sneaking into the city dressed as a monk and then going “the end of Carrie” on everybody? You did something. In today’s world, is that kind of wealth even possible to accumulate without taking advantage of a lot of people? I’m not sure.

On the outskirts of the harbor sat the Hall of Shame of pathetically medium-sized boats.

And beyond that, *sigh* the land of plain old boaty boats, which we will not even dignify with further comment here.

Once I was yachted out I wandered off to get a view of the royal palace all lit up at night. After a long walk, this proved impossible as the viewing path led through the zoo, which was closed.

But I did get to walk through pretty much all of Monaco and marvel at their outdoor escalators that are just out in the open for no reason, with leaves piling up at the bottom of the down escalator. I guess this is one ritzy way to deal with your country having a million inconvenient stairs everywhere.

During the daytime, Monaco was sunny and cheerful. I was renting a room in somebody’s house in what I think was technically France. It’s a blurry line but I think all the suns on the sidewalk meant I was sleeping in the adjacent town of Beausoleil, France, which is a very academic difference since it’s just what they call the top of the hill that Monte Carlo is on.

I wanted to take another stab at seeing the Prince’s Palace and this time was much more successful, after a walk that was surprisingly long for such a small country. Though considering I technically walked from France that doesn’t sound so unreasonable.

The Palace is located in an old-timey area way up a hill overlooking the entire country, which was nice.

The Palace was performing the changing of the guard, which was kind of neat to see but mostly a pain in the ass to get around without looking like I was there on a plot to throw an old donut at the Prince.

My main point of interest in the area was Saint Nicholas Cathedral, down the street from the palace. This is where Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, married the American actress Grace Kelly in 1956, making her the Princess of Monaco. Monaco’s current leader and prince, Albert II, is their son.

The cathedral is also where Grace Kelly is buried, behind the altar. It’s sort of normal to see royalty from a billion years ago interred in a church like this, less so to see a movie star from our lifetime buried in such a place. It felt surreal to stand there and look at her grave.

In 1982, Kelly suffered a stroke while driving and drove off one of those crazy Monégasquan roads, her 17 year old daughter trying unsuccessfully to grab the steering wheel before they plummeted down a cliff. Kelly died at the age of 52, her daughter survived. After her wedding had been broadcast on TV and watched by 30 million people, it was only natural that her funeral was broadcast on television as well. I found it fascinating to think about the weird mix of people this clash of worlds had turned out for her funeral. Cary Grant was there, as was Nancy Reagan, Princess Diana, a grab bag of foreign royalty... and Jimmy Stewart. Just seems like a fascinating mash-up to me.

And that’s… well then, I saw all of Monaco. OK. Time to move on.

Thanks Monaco, you were fascinating but I have to leave now so that I can eat and not die. Let me know when you find out about veganism and we’ll hang out again. Love, that hobo.