If you go to Macau - go hungry

There were only first class tickets available on the Cotai jet ferry to Macau for the price of $236 for a single. Initially I balked at the price and was tempted to wait for a later ferry until Melissa pointed out it was about $40 US. Sometimes where foreign currency is concerned I can be hopelessly slow on the uptake for a trained mathematician.

The fast ferry takes about an hour and soon we’d arrived at the ferry terminal in Taipa, the smaller of the two islands in Macau Special Administrative Region, and hopped on the free shuttle to the Venetian hotel on the Cotai Strip. At the moment the strip is essentially the Venetian and Four Seasons hotels; the rest is still a building site

Melissa told me that China had clamped down on providing permits for the Chinese to visit Macau, the only place in China where gambling is legal, owing to concerns about the amount of money pouring out of China and flooding into Macau’s, often American owned, casinos. Apparently gambling revenue in Macau has been growing at a rate of more than 20% per year and in 2006 overtook Las Vegas as the most profitable gambling centre in the world.

Wow!! Who’d have thought it.

The Venetian hotel is the spit of the one in Las Vegas. Macau’s quite freaky that way as whether you’re visiting the casinos or the old town you have to keep reminding yourself that you’re in China.

After a quick look around the Venetian we took a cab to Senado Square, a pedestrianised hub of activity in Macau lined with beautiful neoclassical buildings.

After a quick pitstop at Leitaria i son for egg custard pudding and red tea with almond milk (strangely delicious) we headed for the Ruínas de São Paulo, the facade St. Paul's Church, which was built between 1602 and 1640 by Jesuits and destroyed by fire in 1835.



After a stroll around the ruins of Fortaleza do Monte we decided to check out the Wynn Casino. Along the way we walked down a street chocka-block with food stores and vendors offering tastings, such as this woman who was snipping off strips of some sort of cured pork with scissors and handing samples to passersby. We were wary of eating samples off the street at first, but took the plunge and were glad we did. It was soooo good!!

Dessert was also on offer in the form of these teensy cookies that Melissa was quite partial to. They were a bit on the dry side for my taste.

On the way to the Wynn we passed the Casino Lisboa, one of the most famous hotel casinos in Macau built in 1970 by Stanley Ho who held a government granted monopoly of the gambling industry in Macau for over 35years. The older Chinese casinos provide an interesting contrast to the newly opened western owned casinos. The chinese casinos were also packed unlike the Wynn, but that could have been because we were there on a Monday or because its probably costlier to gamble at the Wynn than across the street at the Lisboa.

The Wynn in Macau has dancing fountains similar to those at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, with one crucial difference, the Wynn fountains also have fire, or they do when they dance to Bonnie Tyler's "I need a hero". They were pretty impressive as fountains go.

We rounded off our lovely day in Macau with a fabulous dinner at the beautiful Pousada de Sao Tiago.