Quick disclaimer: I apologize for the lack of pictures...my hard drive crashed and I lost everything. Thankfully I have all my Hong Kong/Macau pictures backed up on an external in Canada, but it'll be over a year until I get to them...so, I only have one or two pictures to share with you right now.
So...I got to Macau via a cool hydrofoil boat from Hong Kong...they leave every half an hour or so, cost 20 bucks and take an hour...back home, something like this would leave every 6 hours and cost three times as much. Once you get to Macau, you have to check in with immigration (even though technically both HK and Macau are part of China, they're self-governing and thus have their own borders)...I went to Macau twice, which meant a flurry of stamps, filling up a page and a half of my beloved passport.
Once in Macau something profound hit me: It's soooooo much quieter than Hong Kong! It's like a sleepy little town. I definitely wasn't expecting that. My first day there, I got there at around noon and it was all quiet with just a handful of people milling about...I walked the casino district, and set about wandering around. There are some really interesting things there...it looks like Macau's fortunes have declined in the past few decades. A gigantic modern statue (some sort of "Welcome, Outsiders" statement) is slowly decaying in an abandoned part of the harbour not far from a playground even the kids with cans of spraypaint have grown bored of. It's pretty interesting.
It's also immediately obvious that Macau (despite it being a world-class destination for gambling) is much less affluent than Hong Kong. The parade of Ferraris, Rolls Royces and Lamborghinis is replaced by sensible Hondas and Mitsubishis. Designer suits give way to classy, but distinctively more affordable clothing.
And yet...as much as I liked Hong Kong, I loved Macau. HK was great...no complaints. But...it was a bit sterile. It was a place that was modern, fast, busy, flashy, expensive, and it knew it was all of that. Macau, on the other hand, had something HK lacked: Charm. It was a very charming place. From Macau Tower sitting seemingly pointlessly in the middle of nowhere to the Portugese buildings, it was a thoroughly warm and accessible place devoid of any kind of pretentiousness.
Tucked away between the water and a residential area - seemingly completely out of its element - is the Macau Tower:
As with Hong Kong, the smog was a major bummer. It doesn't show so much in this picture, but I have a shot of the tower casting a shadow through the smog...it's crazy! I was going to go up the tower, then I realized it was pointless...I'd just see a washed-out, milky expanse.
Of course the major attraction - for me, anyways - in Macau was the architecture. A Portugese colony for centuries, Macau's official buildings, churches and even a fort and lighthouse were built in the European styles right down to the patterned cobble-stone streets.
The mixing of cultures and influences is even more apparent here than in Hong Kong. Cobble stone streets lead to temples and there are parks where yellow Portugese-style buildings look across ponds to face red, Chinese-style pagodas. It's really cool. What's more is that if you look up, you'll see expensive high-rises to your left and crumbling tenements to your right. I don't think I've ever seen so much diversity so close together in my life!
Another interesting thing about Macau is you can pay with Hong Kong dollars everywhere, but you get change in Macau dollars...it's really interesting at first. (They're roughly on par and the two currencies are tied to each other...the HKD is a bit higher, so it works out a tiny bit better for them).
That's it for now...I'll update this in a while when I get my pictures up! In the meantime...here's a panorama shot from an old nunnery! The crazy building that gets bigger near the top is the Hotel Lisboa....and of course that's Macau Tower off to the right...thanks for reading!
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