Macau is a strangle place. At the risk of rolling out all the old tropes it is one the first places on earth where East really did meet West. First leased as a trading outpost in 1557. Walking down the streets of old Macau, cobblestoned, framed with elegant street lights, European style buildings everywhere, the charm is still very much evident. That being said the signs are mostly bilingual, Portuguese and Mandarin, when they are trilingual English comes a distant third. Yes it was handed back to China in 1999, two years after Hong Kong. Portugal actually tried to return it as early as 1974. It is clearly part of China now even though it is considered a special administrative region. A glance at the airport’s departure board shows 90% of the planes are going to destinations in mainland China, with Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia getting minor mentions. Stand at the Border Gate and you will see how many people are crossing into Macau over land. That being said it works. The people are friendly, they know enough English that we can communicate and lets be honest they don’t have to. Macau is part of China, us white guys are the minority, the days of colonial rule are long gone. It’s the Chinese century and it’s their rules and I’m just pleased I can be a small part of it.
It didn’t take much incentive to leave the soulless casinos. They are impressive in their over the top kind of way. It’s kind of like what you’d expect if you let Donald Trump decorate your house and he didn’t have to foot the bill. It’s all about scale. Everything is huge, 1000’s of hotels rooms, extravagant fittings and fixtures, over the top shopping options, amazing live shows, once in a lifetime experiences with more gaming tables and poker machines than this small stretch of land could reasonably be expected to contain.
They call it the Cotai strip however walking between even adjoining casinos means you will clock up close to a kilometre on the old nikes. There are 41 casinos to choose from with more on the way. In 2014, the peak year for betting, a staggering $45,000,000,000US was gambled. Once you get in the casino they make it extremely hard to leave but once you’re out there are shuttle buses to pick you up and drop you off at all the major venues.
I’ll try and give some insight into how they look. Picture an empty airline hangar, one that could hold a few of those massive Airbus A 380’s. Then imagine you asked a group of North Korean generals for their decorating tips, you know the ones they have awarded themselves so many medals they not only fill their dress jackets but also go down their trouser legs as well. There is more bling in these places than you’d find at a dodgy discount jewellery store. After a very short period they all start looking the same and the people who frequent them take on an all too familiar hue. There is that quiet look of half expectation and half dread. These people have saved up money for this trip, in some cases hundreds of thousands. They all expect they will go home millionaires, but as we all know the house always wins.
I had a small flutter in each of them, looked at their loyalty programs, saw how they set up and laid out their machines, evaluated the incentives they were offering to see what I could see. A guy sat down next to me and put $30,000 Hong Kong dollars into a machine (that’s about $6,000 Australian), placed about five $200 HKD bets, won about $5,000 HKD and moved on to the next machine.
Anyway, it didn’t take much to make me want to leave. This time we hoped on to the correct shuttle and took ourselves into old Macau. The traffic here is horrendous by the way, not only are there vast throngs of people but the main strip is just one massive construction site. The six kilometre journey took 25 minutes. We wandered up and down, took a ride on a tricyclos, saw the waterfront and visited some of the main sites and prayed at another famous Buddhist temple, the A-Ma. We ended up in the traditional part of the city and ascended the steps to see the ruins of St Paul’s, we then pushed on further up the hill to see the view from the fort. The Grand Lisboa, a garish hotel that channels all the worst instincts of Las Vegas, dominates the skyline. From the fort you can also see across the Pearl River into mainland China. It’s so close you can almost touch it.
We spent about 4 hours channeling all the best that old Macau had to offer and headed back to our overblown digs for some well earned rest.
There is an old village that is “almost” walking distance from the hotel that still to hold much of the old charm, that is our next target. The Asian Odyssey continues.
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