A day trip to Macau

Day 57 - 21/07/2010 - 22:06 - Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong

We woke up this morning and looked out the window. All was calm, no rain nor wind so we decided to go to the ferry terminal to see if we could make it to Macau. Turns out we could and we both got the ferry from Hong Kong island at 11:15am to Macau, which took an hour. The vessel was actually a catamaran, which was good because you could hardly feel it was on water (except when the engines were off in HK harbour, my oh my it was choppy, we both felt quite queasy).

So we arrived into Macau just after noon and by then it was raining quite heavily - this was an intermittent feature of today unfortunately, but we were well prepared with our raincoats!

Macau is very strange. We decided to walk to the old part of town from the Ferry terminal, which is on the other side of the mainland Macau. The first part of the island we saw was FULL of Casinos and various gambling dens, and wasn't very pleasant. We stopped for lunch at a Macau restaurant just outside of the old part of town - partly to get out of the rain and try and dry a little bit. We went for a Macau based meal - Macau chicken, macau fried rice and we each had a cold coffee which is supposed to be a Macau style drink. It was OK, but I certainly prefer Chinese food.

Old town was like stepping back into Europe though. It was amazing. Cobbled squares, Christian churches, square centerpieces (fountains etc). Then we would walk around the corner and we'd be back into the narrow side streets with cafes and small businesses, just like Beijing. Incredible.

We made it to the other side of the island in pretty good time to be honest. we couldn't believed we'd walked the width of a small country but it was pretty cool, and you could see mainland China on the other side of the water. After looking around for a bit we headed back to the other side of the island via bus and bought a ticket for supposedly the 5:15pm ferry back to HK, although it had been cancelled.

We hoped it wasn't because of the weather - the cyclone warning had been upgraded to 3 - strong winds and thunderstorms but it was OK - I think it was cancelled because there wasn't enough demand, and we'd all been placed on the 5:30pm ferry, which was about 3 times the size of our cat coming out to Macau. Whilst in departures I got asked to do a survey by the Tourism board in Macau. I felt bad answering questions on how much money I'd spent - practically nothing! But I got a free pen out of it - a nice souvenir eh!

Even though the ship was bigger, you could feel the waves this time. Obviously the storm was getting closer. Nevertheless, we still made it back to HK safely and an hour later, although this time the HK harbour water was so choppy it made Laura ill and I've been feeling queasy all evening. Fun fun.

Macau was nice, it certainly feels more authentically Chinese AND European than Hong Kong does. It's a bit more worn down and rough round the edges, but nice. The only thing that annoyed me were the amount of bloody casinos there were!!