No, it's not a monorail for taking prostitutes down Las Vegas Boulevard to the Tropicana. Instead, it's a $4.2 billion casino-based destination resort planned for a strip of Vietnamese coast, 50 miles southwest of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City for the politically correct amongst you; I remember the Vietnam War as a nightly presence on our martian-head TV, so it'll always be Saigon to me.)

With 2,000 slots and 180 tables, the casino proper should be comparable in scale to Bally's Las Vegas and it's expected to eventually service five resort hotels (or vice versa), plus other bells and whistles that include a dolphin-swim park, rolled out over the course of a decade. The starry roster of consultants includes Glenn Schaeffer and Jeffrey Soffer of Fontainebleau renown, which certainly makes me wonder if F'bleau has some stealth equity in this project. I mean, you've got to penetrate the booming Asiatic market somewhere, right?

The parent company, Asian Coast Development, has posted several videos, although if you've seen one, you've seen them all. Overlong and poorly edited, they establish that, yes, there is a beach (with impressive mountains in the distance) and a lot of bumpy scrubland, too, but not much else at present, save for a road. But great resort communities have been built on even less -- just look at Las Vegas.

However, considering it just broke ground in May, ACD was going to really have to haul ass to make its projected September '09 opening, which has now been pushed into 2010. Even if all goes according to plan, the developers won't have the benefits of seeing how the rollout of Las Vegas Sands' Singapore casino goes and learning therefrom. While Macao had a preexisting gambling draw and Singapore is a business/tourism hub, rural Vietnam is an untested commodity.

The 10-year buildup at least ensures that, as market realities manifest themselves, ACP can upsize/downscale the project as need be, and adjust to what its customer base is, can afford and expects. Also, the $65 million/year gambling market in Vietnam will be approaching the $100 million mark by the time Phase One opens (even so, project Chairman Michael Aymong expects to rake in 6X that amount).

However, while Singapore discourages play by locals, Vietnam will forbid it outright, giving ACP a tough Strip to hoe. Also, Aymong's list of target markets (Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan) seems a trifle hallucinatory, as two of those may soon legalize casino gambling and all four enjoy greater proximity to Macao than Saigon.

However, he can cite Vietnam's unlikely status as a golfing mecca and its affordability. Still, expecting visitors to the Ho Tram Strip to rusticate for four to seven days out in the middle of practically nowhere is rather optimistic, at least until the full array of amenities is eventually rolled out.

Aymong has a mixed record in the gaming industry. Vancouver-based Starnet crashed and burned while he was CEO. Once it moved to London as World Gaming PLC, Aymong was able raise this particular phoenix from the ashes. (It later collapsed again, long after Aymong had gone elsewhere.) He's also dabbled in the lottery business.

Whether any of this has prepared Aymong to run a bricks-and-mortar casino -- let alone a megaresort in an untested market -- remains to be seen. But there's only $4.2 billion riding on it.