After a whole semester of procrastination, a few friends and I finally made the quick day trip over to Macau from Hong Kong in December 2017. We booked ferry tickets through Cotai Water Jet which leaves from Sheung Wan and arrives at the Macau Taipa Ferry Terminal. The ferry itself is about an hour journey and we hopped right onto a free bus that took us to the Parisian!
I’ve never been to Vegas, but I imagine it to be something like Macau. The strip in Macau was full of massive casinos. I’ve never been in such giant and gaudy buildings before. The mall in the Parisian and Venetian had waterways with legitimate gondolas going around in them. Even though we arrived in the morning, the casinos were packed.
After soaking in all the mayhem on the strip, we jumped in a taxi to go across the bridge into the older portion of the city. Macau was awesome because it was a weird hodge podge of Vegas, China, Portugal, and some sort of beach town. Macau was colonized by the Portuguese, a history that seemed to come with a certain level of cultural pride. There was still a lot of Portuguese architecture in the city that blended seamlessly with the packed buildings I was used to from Hong Kong. We started off checking out the biggest attraction in Macau: the ruins of St. Paul’s.
We also doodled around a courtyard that just behind the ruins which are home to some of the Wall of Macau which used to surround the city. The tiny Na Tcha Temple was also tucked away behind the ruins of St. Paul’s.
We then popped into a little Portuguese restaurant for lunch and ordered a lot of veggies and potatoes covered in melted cheese. Yum yum YUM!
We didn’t really come with a plan for the day. The two main goals were to see the ruins of St. Paul’s and to eat some Portuguese egg tarts. We spent the greater portion of the afternoon roaming around window shopping, sampling food, and checking out different neighborhoods.
We took a quick coffee break mid afternoon to sit and rest our very very tired feet. Macau uses a different currency than Hong Kong so it was a bit of a guessing game to take out the right amount of cash and use it all before the day was over.
The best find of the day was the Lom Lim loc garden which we stumbled into completely by accident. Walking in felt like being transported out of the busy city into traditional China. We walked around there until it was time to start heading back.
Macau is known for its pork chop buns, so the three non vegetarians had those for dinner. And dessert was (of course) the renowned egg tarts from Lord Stow’s, which had a location conveniently in the Venetian. After that we hopped back on a free bus and got on our ferry back to Hong Kong.
Macau was a perfect day trip from Hong Kong! It would have been fun to stay a night and go out on the strip, but my wallet was probably better off without any drunken gambling.