Macau

After a brief stop in Hong Kong, we took the ferry across to Macau. If you don’t know: where Hong Kong was British until 1999; Macau was Portuguese.  Like Hong Kong, it was a great trading port which also enjoys ‘Special Administrative Area’ status. Which means it’s China but not really, as it has its own currency, laws and border controls.

It is actually a series of islands, linked by bridge or reclaimed land.  Cotai, the area we were staying in,  has been summoned back from Neptune at some point.

"I remember when this were nowt but industry-contaminated sea water" 

The biggest draw to Macau is gambling.  They take six times more money from gambling revenue than Vegas, which is rather a lot. The Chinese don’t have casinos, so they take weekend breaks here to get their fix.  Their game is baccarat – a game I don’t play because I wasn’t written by Ian Fleming.  We could find blackjack tables, but the lowest bet was HK$500 per hand – which is about £50 or US$75. Fuck that. We don’t mind allocating a couple of hundred dollars of written-off money to a night out in Laughlin or Vegas, but those stakes would make any normal budget vaporise in ten minutes.  The casinos here are owned and styled by the same companies  who run Vegas so,  accordingly,  there is a Venetian, a 1/3 scale Eiffel Tower, an  MGM, a Sands, etc.

The Venetian does have an M&S, however.

It becomes very obvious, very fast that the Chinese are not here for fun; they’re here as an investment. So the atmosphere is decidedly less jovial. Whatever. We save more money that way.  They do have the normal casino trappings of bars, clubs, restaurants and shows, so there is other entertainment to be had.

So, our normal source of decadence denied us, we took one of the free shuttles across to the mainland to look at the Portuguese old town.  This really does look air-dropped in from Europe, with plazas, churches and whatnot.  What breaks that illusion are the Hong Kong-style ultra-dense apartment blocks sprung up all over the horizon.

Popping into the museum, it was refreshing to walk through an actual museum, curated and designed by actual academics, rather than the Politburo.  They have a rather nice part at the beginning where they compare the religion, philosophy and technology of Europe and China on opposite but parallel walls, tracking like-with-like thorough the ages.

The Museum is set in the base of the old citadel and finishes on its ramparts.

Pictured: temptation

The local delicacy is the custard tart, by the way. Yes, the same ones they sell in Nando's. The Portuguese influence there runs deep, with tarts, biscuits and cakes of European origin being touted by competing Chinese-run bakeries all over town.

We stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel (pictured further above) which was part of the City of Dreams complex which also hosts the $250 million show 'The House of Dancing Water'.  We’ve seen several of the Cirque du Soleil shows in Vegas and elsewhere, and this was similar, albeit minus the annoying french clowns molesting each other with foam blocks.  It was closest to ‘O’ at the Bellagio in that it involved an incomprehensible plot, acrobatics and water.

For some reason the penultimate scene involved motorbike stunts, which was a bit odd given that the rest of the show had been set in some manner of contortionist watery Narnia   Anyway it was a good show, and what the mainland Chinese lack in ability to stand in a queue, they make up for as an enthusiastic audience.

Back to Hong Kong, to wrap this whole thing up.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Macau ist der Ort, an dem Festland-Chinesen am Wochenende zu spielen fahren. Wir bevorzugen Las Vegas.