Macau

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After the night train from Xiamen, I took the bus to the coach station in Guangzhou. That went very well and by that way I had a nice tour through the outskirts of Guangzhou. The bus stopped right at a ticket booth for the bus to Zhuhai, the border town to enter Macau. So within no time, I was on the next bus. Then I had to take another bus to the real border. It was a bit of a search, but finally I found it. Having crossed the border, I realized that I didn’t write anything down of the hotel I had booked beforehand, so I tried to find a place where they have internet or wifi, but these two things are very scarce in Macau (strange!).

When I finally found a tourist information office, they could show me the way to the hotel quite easy. At that moment, I was already walking with my backpack for about two hours. When I arrived at the hotel, I realized that the room I’d got was not as described on the internet. So I went back to the reception and after some discussion and some phone calls to the booking office, I got a much nicer room (still not very high standard though).

After all the travelling, searching, and persuading, the first thing I did was to have a small walk around in Macau (the city center) and took a bus to Taipa Village. There and in the rest of Macau, similar to Xiamen, the colonial influences by the Portuguese are clearly seen. The thing what really struck me was that there were so many shops closed.

At the bus stop I met a girl, who lives in Macau, and she advised me to go to the casinos that night. I wasn’t dressed at all like a gambler, but that seems not to matter in Macau. I first went to the Grand Lisboa, then to the older version, the Casino Lisboa, and I also went to a third one, the Wynn (if I have the name correct). They were all very different and especially the first and the third one were huge. I didn’t gamble myself because of my empty wallet. Next time when I do have a lot of money to spend; perhaps.

The next day, I took a bus to Coloane village. It supposed to be the place to show how Macau looked like before all the concrete was placed there. China was very visible, but for the rest I thought it was quite boring. Just a small village where you can see that not all is glitter and glamour in Macau. The bus ride back to Macau (city) was a good one again; it went by the airport, by a cemetery, by a industrial compound and by the sea. So it was a good sightseeing trip again.

The last thing I did in Macau was visiting the Macau Museum, which showed the history of Macau. I liked the museum, but it was much smaller than I thought. Overall, Macau was more boring than I had actually thought and I decided to go to the best place of my whole trip, the place I had started my trip; Hong Kong. I took the ferry and within an hour, I was back ‘home’ (as far as that goes in Asia).

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Photos

Taipa Village V
Much seen in Macau: closed shops

Coloane I
View on China

Macau IV
The Grand Lisboa