Macau in "not crap" shocker!

For our last full day in China, we took a daytrip to Macau, which, as it turns out, is pretty much divided between lovely Portuguese architecture and seriously bling-bling casinos.

After buying our tickets, we had to wait about four hours for our ferry, so we explored Honkers a little more. We rode the giant Central Escalator all the way to… nowhere in particular. Then we checked out yet another market – Graham Street, the best food market in Honk Kong, according to Lonely Planet. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were right. I love all these food markets, especially the rather exotic seafood shops. Seriously, anything in the sea that can be fit into a box can be sold; we saw absolutely everything swimming about, waiting for the inevitable; the highlights were rainbow parrotfish, cuttlefish, and… horseshoe crabs! They’re so weird and cool.

Four hours later, we had our first-class ferry tickets and a one-hour ride to Macau. Some advice: don’t just go to Macau for the ride and the passport stamps. Getting off at the ferry terminal, you could quickly decide that it was crap and head straight back. That would be silly, because a little walking shows how lovely it is. Indeed, we did a little walking trying to find the historic centre of Macau, and find it we did. The older parts of Macau are seriously lovely; the squares, churches, fountains, grand buildings painted green, yellow, pink, and who knows what else – it’s fabulous. Macau is also the second most densely-populated territory in the world (17,699 people per square km; Australia – 2.6), so there are lots of tiny little alleyways winding among rather packed apartment blocks; and every single alley, staircase and driveway has a street name in Portuguese, nicely labeled with a ceramic sign. We wandered for a couple of hours and managed to cover about a third of Macau, I think. On the way back to the ferry at the end of the day, we took a different route past some of Macau’s rather ridiculous casinos. One had a very fancy show out front of fountains and flamethrowers choreographed with that tacky “Hero” song – “I need a hero!” something something – which was certainly very bling. And not to be a miserable wet blanket or anything, but upon seeing such insane extravagance, I can’t but think, “Rachel’s going to Cambodia to build rainwater tanks so that people can drink without dying of cholera. And then there’s this.” It’s all a bit silly, really.

And that, pretty much, is that. We ferried back to Hong Kong, the next day we flew back Japan. And to top it all off, I made it from Kansai Airport and onto the last train of the night to Takebe with about 5 minutes to spare. Phew.

This is what Macau looks like, provided you ignore the casinos: