Macau

The hydrofoil to Macau was fun, just a few minutes shy of an hour and you’re in Macau and just kilometres to the border with mainland China. I mention the border because I did something ridiculously stupid. I put us on the bus to that border. I thought we had got on the bus to do the run around the main casinos instead we joined the bus to get back to the mainland. Lucky Macau is so small, the entire round trip even waiting for the bus and the return bus took a little over an hour. It turns out that there are plenty of day trippers from the mainland, enough to warrant a 100 plus bus trips a day going in both directions to all the casinos.

Before we had jumped on the wrong bus we had grabbed dinner in the Casino. We white guys are thin on the ground here so European/American style food is a bit hard to come by. We ate at this spectacular restaurant The Northern Noodle House in the City of Dreams Casino and I had this amazing chicken and turtle Szechuan dish that just blew me out of the water. At least we were well fed before our little sojourn to the border.

Later in the evening we tried our luck in a very small manner here at the City of Dreams, then the Wynn Palace where we arrived by cable car gondola and finally we hit the famed Venetian with its over the top decorations and many thousand slot machines. From a professional view point it is an interesting exercise. There is basisically no low denomination stuff (1c and 2c) and even 5 cent machines are hard to find. The ATMs dispense $1,000 notes (equivalent to about $200 Australian) and if you split them and you get two $500 notes, which you then have to split to $100 so you can play with $20. Plus there is no $10 cap on the bets. It is possible to bet very large amounts here so you must be very careful, or very rich.

Tomorrow we will head to old Macau to see the sights and no doubt explore some more over the top casinos.