There is at least one other Kiwi in Monaco this week: he is one of 705 poker players who know when to hold 'em, and when to fold 'em, and hopefully how to take the helicopter out with €2 million (NZ$3.5 million) and a metre-high Lalique vase from the European Poker Tour final.
They'll work hard for the money. Today's first hand of 300 entrants will play seven rounds of 90 minutes. Another 300 qualifiers take their seats tomorrow. After five 14-hour days the last table of eight will do their chips.
Professionals or amateurs who have qualified in their bedrooms online through the Pokerstars.com website, they have come from all over Europe, from America, Australia, to a mirror-balled nightclub.
Time to play. Black drapes part to reveal a sunny afternoon on Lavrotto beach; high-rises, corniche roads, chalky mountains and intense blue Mediterranean sky.
But only for the TV cameras to capture the scene. The drapes are drawn. Dry ice billows, the Also Sprach Zarathustra anthem booms. My ears rattle to a strange, menacing noise: the sound of 305 hands clicking. Poker chips.
Later, after vainly searching for the Kiwi, I talk to Jason Melross. Two years ago he was a 22-year-old customs broker in Geelong. Logged on to the Pokerstars site at work one day. Six months later he quit the day job, figuring he could support himself without leaving the lounge.
However, to win the big money you have to get out more. Jason's played Vegas twice, in his country's richest tournament, and now he's in Monaco with other professionals: glamorous Isabelle Mercier, formerly a Canadian lawyer known as "No Mercy"; Joe Hachem, once an Aussie chiropractor; Lee Nelson, who won the A$1.4 million Aussie Millions, quit medicine and escaped to New Zealand.
The poker stars are coming to a casino near you. TV3 has picked up the rights; there'll be a tournament at SkyCity in October.
Watching the first hands, I sense cultures clashing. These players in their hoodies, jeans, football scarves, are at odds with elegant, old-world Casino Royale Monaco. So is this Monte-Carlo Bay resort, a sprawling confection of Japanese gardens, nightclubs, artificial lakes and fountains that makes Vegas look suburban.
The New World invades the Old. The Old World strikes back by giving the pohutukawa a coiffure.
In this beach town a dinghy means any boat under 200ft and four storeys. A bach is something under 12 storeys, and there aren't any.
Remember I'm in Europe, look right crossing the road: don't want to get knocked down by a Ferrari. I ask directions from a cop. She is wearing gun, handcuffs, Dior sunglasses and a lot of Chanel No 5.
The world's second smallest state is a small town. In Auckland terms, the country starts at the overbridge below Parnell Rose Gardens and runs to Westhaven; by the time you've walked up to the hill to K Rd you're in France.
Monte-Carlo is the posh suburb, a la Parnell. Le Condamine is around the port, the CBD. Lazrotto, the beach and apartments, Mission Bay.
It's an engineer's dream designed to extract every euro of stamp duty from each square inch of the world's most expensive real estate. Built into hills, over sea and under ground are hotels, apartments, galleries, carparks. Out of land? They're towing three storeys of apartments from Spain to float in the harbour.
It is a stunning setting: the Med for a front yard, apartments and hotels climbing up sheer mountain faces, the chalk rocks of Provencal mountains behind.
This is home or holiday home to the world's most conspicuous consumers. They shop for Prada, Gucci, Hermes on ritzy and refined Boulevard des Mougins or the Galerie du Sporting shopping mall. ("Mall" translates as Chanel, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Piaget).
In one art dealer's window I enjoy two Magrittes and a Chagall; his competitor next door has five Renoirs and a nice little Degas bronze.
They lunch on the terrace of the Cafe de Paris, where Edouard Michelin crashed during the first Nice to Monte-Carlo race. They dine with Michelin-starred chefs - Alain Ducasse, Joel Robuchon and Jacques Lambert - in the Casino square. When the sun goes down, they party in the cocktail bars, nightclubs and casinos.
Gambling or gambolling, chances are they will hand their credit cards to the Societe des Bains de Mer, the remarkable company that controls almost every pleasuredome in the principality. Created by Prince Charles III as he re-created his realm as an international resort in 1863, it is the financial arm of the state. For "state", read "the House of Grimaldi". This is one place where the House always wins.
Photos of His Serene Highness beam from every shop window (is this the only city in the civilised world where one shows one's Prince Albert in public?).
On Saturday I realise I should do the decent thing and pay my respects. Like every other tourist I stroll up the broad path to the Palace for the Changing of the Guard, precisely on the dot of 11.55am. It's Toyland stuff: two drummers, one commandant and six blue-helmeted, blue-jacketed soldiers march up and down, present arms, and the old guard march off, all for the benefit of digital cameras.
The royal residence is little more than a suburban semi compared with Versailles or Buck House. This midday it's dwarfed by a blue crane: the Prince must be doing a bit of My House, My Castle.
There is an old town around the precincts: pizza restaurants and depressing souvenirs. Everywhere, Monaco measures its mana in the Grand Prix and its team of football mercenaries.
In the Legoland cathedral, saints - rather, their relics - are clothed in gold; previous monarchs lie buried under plain marble stones in the floor. Grace is covered in flowers: so is Rainier, surprisingly a couple of vaults away.
Beneath the castle rock, the world's tiniest zoo is cramped into a cliff-face. The postage stamp-sized Coin and Stamp Museum and little Naval Museum are dwarfed by the vast royal collection of classic cars.
Rainier serenely aggregated 105 horse-drawn and motorised carriages, famous names, one-offs, numerous Rollers, Formula One racers and memorabilia. One Renault is labelled as "being used" by his wife: presumably not on THAT drive along the Corniche.
In the hollowed rock underneath, unconsciously incongruous, is the country's biggest supermarket, some chain stores, the only McDonald's - and the best baguette and beer bar in town.
After four days, after all but giving up, I've found where the ordinary people hang. Or, as ordinary as Monaco gets. Most workers come in and out of nearby French cities each day.
Nearby at Le Condamine is a tiny market. Like so much in Monaco it seems a model of the real thing, to show the tourists they're in a Mediterranean town in case they've forgotten, which would be very easy to do.
Walking around the city I'm constantly reminded that the real business of Monaco is pleasure. From the arts - Diaghilev's ballet, Garnier's opera, Grace's legacy of theatre and public sculpture - to extremely expensive hobbies.
Every night of my week's stay, another kilometre of street was uplifted, levelled, tarsealed, its gutters repainted with the red and white stripes of the Formula One track: the Grand Prix circuit is renewed every year. My hotel's forecourt was the famous hairpin, my room slung over the even more famous tunnel.
Trevor Mallard might consider a fact-finding trip to the remarkable waterfront stadium. So remarkable that many don't realise the Stade Louis II is a stadium: it looks like a carpark and small office block.
I stroll the public footpath running through the building at ground level, past a swimming pool and gym. I'm above a carpark, inside an international university and underneath the suspended stadium where 18,500 fans watch one of Europe's leading soccer sides. Eden Park neighbours would enjoy floodlights hidden inside the grandstands.
The footballers are playing away this week but Federer, Nadal and pals are coming to the tennis club down on the beach. There's a big-name golf tournament, too, but the Monte-Carlo links are 18km into France, where the real estate is cheaper.
Le grand fromage, of course, is the casino. Jacket and tie please, gentlemen. And don't forget your passport. It has to be validated on an airport-style security system before buying the 10-euro entry ticket.
Surprisingly small, the fin-de-siecle casino, all marble, heavy brocade drapes and massive chandeliers hanging from faux-Michaelangelo ceilings, makes me laugh again at the contrast. The poker players' decor is left over from Boogie Nights. The casino is styled on the Sun King at Versailles.
It's early evening. Only four or five roulette and one chemin de fer tables are in play. Each is presided over by four dinner-suits a dealer, a banker, and a third referee at the table and a bored pit-boss on a raised chair. Most punters are German. They've interpreted the dress code as anoraks.
It's not quite the Bond movies. A long gallery is home to ranks of one-armed bandits. On some you can play poker.
Breakfast in Italy, lunch in France? From the railway station - outrageously straddling a ravine between two mountains - it's minutes to either, whistling past Riviera bays and little ports and huge resorts.
"Ici Cannes, ici Cannes," the canned woman's voice says. It is icy Cannes, spitting rain. It's bustling, upbeat, and I wander to the Old Port, past the red carpet on the Festival centre stairs where tourists pose. The port is not quite as old as it used to be. It's been made over for those superyachts not big or ostentatious enough to be given berth in Monaco.
Just one street back from the tourist bars and souvenir shops the Old Town is a warren of butcheries, patisseries, cheap clothes, fishmongers, boulangeries and more souvenir shops: one of the most charmant tourist traps you'll find. And there is a market and real bistros, crammed with so many lunching locals that there is little space for tourists.
Telling the owner that I really did want my steak sanglant (rare), not well-done as the English demand it, I could feel that I was in France. No: I knew I was in Provence.
Back in Monaco I took l'ascensceur down to the port (they're all over town. You walk into a marbled or tiled tunnel and an office lift whisks you six or 10 storeys inside the mountain to the next suburb). On an evening stroll you're watched by a security camera on every corner. You pass public defibrillators every 100m (people dropping dead in the street wouldn't be good for tourism).
And that's Monaco, somehow. There might have been an individuality, a personality, but it seems to have been lost along the boulevard to becoming an international playground, all things to all millionaires. Vegas. Rotovegas. Monte-Vegas.
CHECKLIST
Facts:
* The world's second-smallest state after the Vatican, Monaco straggles down the hill from a Genoese fortress built in 1215.
* The Grimaldi family secured control and established the principality in 1338.
* Monaco boomed in the late 19th century with the opening of the railway to France and the casino.
Population: 32,671. Average income: Who knows? They don't publish economic statistics.
Chief of state: Prince Albert II.
Head of government: Minister of State Jean-Paul Proust, appointed by the prince from three French candidates nominated by French Government
Area: 1.95 sq km
Land boundaries: 4.4 km
Coastline: 4.1 km
Further information: If you like the idea of breaking the bank at Monte-Carlo you can enter free satellite tournaments at pokerstars.com to win buy-in and travel to many such tournaments around the world.
Ewan McDonald travelled to Monaco as guest of PokerStars.com.
