The New Sin City

Visas have arrived!! :-)

So yesterday we headed to the Portugese colony of Macau an hours jetfoil from Hong Kong. Unfortunately it was a really rainy miserable (albeit 25 degrees) day so I couldn't really get many photos. On first inspection I would say the place is completely insane! I thought Hong Kong was crazy, but this place really is bonkers. It's like going to Portugal, the streets are cobbled and there are loads of colonial European style buildings. And well the general organisation of the place is a little more European than Hong Kong. The traffic doesn't seem to follow any rules (much like France ;-) ) and there are millions of mopeds! Every other street is lined with thousands and thousands of parked mopeds, and on the street they swarm through the traffic without a care for the law or their safety. Obviously all the signs are in Cantonese and everyone is Chinese. So the place is just really confusing, it feels like Portugal but it's Chinese.

We took a bus from the Jetfoil terminal to the centre of town. Well thats where we thought the bus was going. I think I could have navigated better than the driver I swear we went down the same street twice! On arrival in the central square (which looks a lot like that famous one in Venice... whatever its called) we realised it was pouring down with rain, we had left our umbrellas at home, and well it just got a little intense on the streets. It was sooooo busy, like Princes street on a busy saturday before Christmas but on every street! So we decided to head to one of the casinos.

The other side of Macau is the gambling. Macau is the most popular gambling destination in the world and has the biggest casino in the world. It's not very well known in the west, but it's much bigger than Vegas, and no less spectacular.

This is the Grand Lisboa, the second biggest. The biggest, The Venetian, has 3 full sized canals inside it with real life gondoliers for hire! It was a half hour bus journey away on another island, so we settled for the MGM Grand, no cameras inside...sorry.

It was a bit odd to be honest. You really do get lost inside these places. I thought we had been in for an hour maybe, but turned out to be three. I think I started with beginners luck on the slot machines and roulette. I was at one point $300 up. But as is the way with these things I lost it all again in no time. All the crazy chinese tables were crowded with screaming gamblers. This is the town of high stakes, on the cheap tables the minimum bet was $200, but on most was more like $1000. Some of the people looked like they had been in there for days, and some certainly had been making use of the free drinks a little too much. I'm sure some of these people practically live in the casino and just gamble all day to escape their real lives. It really is a hideous place, but god it's addictive.  I think we're going to head back at some point and maybe see the Venetian.

Well just before catching the jetfoil back to HK we stopped for dinner. It was one of these crazy Cantonese places where you get presented a menu in Cantonese and you tick what you want. So we just had to tick and hope for the best. I got chicken, and some egg and some onion or something, it was really nice, and Sean managed to get something edible also.

The Jetfoil was pretty awesome actually. They're huge hydrofoiling ferries that fly at 40 knots between HK and Macau every 15 mins. They are made by Boeing, and are powered by two 800 horsepower jet engines! I think Calmac should get some. ;-)

The only ferry I've been on where they ask you to wear a seatbelt!

Tomorrow we have to go back to Wan Chai to get our Hong Kong ID cards, and then we will officially be temporary workers! I'll probably do another post next week once we have begun work, I believe we are being put on support first. Which means we'll be helping with some of the land based expeditions out hiking for a few days at a time in the New Territories.

Ciao for now.