Macau and Hong Kong

Macau and Hong Kong weren't really on my list of backpacking destinations, but as with most places I've been to, I figured why not?  My flight into Macau was delayed, so I didn't get there until the early evening.  Luckily I had my hotel name written in Chinese, otherwise it literally would have been impossible to take a cab there.  There's not a lot of English spoken in Macau outside of resorts an casinos.   There is even a ban on hostels/guesthouses/anything cheap, making Macau one of the most expensive places to visit in the world.   What was the cheapest place I could find on Agoda for a Friday night?  $141.  Holy bajesus.  Prices on weekends are double, but I really wanted to spend a night there so I just said screw it and treated it like a mini-vacation from my rough life of backpacking.

After dumping my bags, I tried to get directions to the main part of town with the casinos, but no one at my hotel spoke English.  However, the city isn't that big so I just wandered around for an hour and ended up finding it on my own.  Macau is basically the Asian version of Las Vegas, but it's way classier.  The streets of Macau are clean, there aren't homeless people everywhere, and there aren't dudes handing out prostitute cards every 50 meters.  It is a lot more expensive though, sometimes the cheapest tables in casinos were around $100 minimum bet. 

This is what $141 gets you in Macau on a Friday night....

Sometimes Asia doesn't feel like Asia

We'll walk around the city like we own the streets, we'll stay awake through summer like we own the heat.  We're singing everybody wake up, it's time to get down.

Just like Vegas, Macau is filled with casinos that have various light shows on the side of their building and fountain shows with colored lights outside them.  There was really only one thing I needed to see though; A craps table.  When a man comes to Macau, he comes here to gamble. Luckily I was able to find a table at MGM Grand that fit my budget: $5 minimum bets.  Things were looking grim, but I ended up having a hot roll and turned what would have been a $30 loss into a $35 gain!  That was enough cash to cover my boat to Hong Kong, so I quit while I was ahead.

Ordering food proved to be a challenge as menus aren't in dual languages, so unless you understand Chinese, it's just a guessing game.  I couldn't really afford restaurant food anyways, so I feasted on random buns from alleyway bakeries, 7/11 chinese food, and Circle K hot dogs.  I spent the entire next day exploring since it's cheap and easy to get around Macau.  The public bus lines are $.50 and all the major casinos have free shuttle buses running to and from the harbor, so you can pretty much go anywhere you want for free.  

Grand Lisboa was the original big casino in Macau

Spinning and spinning, do you believe in what you want?

I close my eyes and believe...

I had to go to the Venetian (the world's largest casino), which is on a separate island from Macau city, but accessible via shuttle bus.  $3 and a slot machine later, I can now claim I've gambled in the largest casino in the world!  After losing my money I explored the casinos on that island before making my way back to the hotel to grab my bags so I could catch the ferry to Hong Kong.  They ended up selling me the first class ticket, which was $40 instead of the cheap $20 economy seat, but I just figured whatever and took the fancy seat. After all, I was finally crossing a border check by sea, so I might as well do it in style!  I even got a free smoked salmon sandwich meal... Rich people like me have it good ;).

Overall I definitely recommend going to Macau.  It's a very safe city; I was walking around alone past midnight with my camera out and never once felt in danger.  It also has the energy vibe that Vegas has where you don't need to sleep and every moment is worth observing because something amazing could happen.  It may be a little expensive, but if you plan it right I think you could find a room during the week for $40-50, or even head there in the afternoon from Hong Kong, pull an all-nighter, and then head back the next morning.  

Inside the Venetian

It has an artificial river/sky and looks pretty identical to the version in Las Vegas

So what do you do for a living?  I play the harp...in a casino mall...while wearing an angel costume....Also, I might be locked in a cage

You best believe that papa's got a brand new bag...

If you ever go to Macau, you must try one of these, they are epic

Casino skyline...This picture is terribly slanted, I'm never going to be able to fund my travels as a photographer

Planning isn't really a strong suit of mine (which is ironic since I used to be in charge of strategic planning at my last job), so I didn't really know which port I would arrive to when I got into Hong Kong.  I arrived into the one on Hong Kong Island vs. the one on Kowloon island, so I had to figure out how to get to my hostel on Kowloon.  Luckily HK has the most amazing subway system I've ever seen and I was able to find the route to my hostel's nearest subway station with no issues.  The hostel was in a gigantic building complex that housed several other hostels and various stores and there were no signs indicating where it was, but with the help of some friendly locals I was able to find the hidden entrance.

After dropping my bags, I grabbed dinner with a girl in my room and then had an early night.  I spent day two exploring town.  I have a cousin that occasionally resides in Hong Kong, so he sent me a list of things to do and I ran with it.  I had no idea which subway stop or even which island most of the activities were on, so I just took the subway to central station and roamed around.  The city has an awesome set up for tourists, with information signs in English pointing the way to the main tourist destinations, so without any planning I was able to find six items on his list with no hassle.

The stairwell to my hostel

The view that stairwell led to...One night in Macau meant slumming it for 5 nights in HK

The skyscrapers are so massive they get lost in the fog

Hong Kong's metro, the MTR, is by far the most impressive public transport system I've ever seen.  The subway runs at a 99.99% on time ratio and operates at a huge profit level, whereas the majority of the world's public transport systems operate at a loss.  It's so profitable, it was transitioned from being government run, to being held by the private sector.  They also have an innovative payment system that runs off an "Octopus Card", which runs off touchless RFID technology.  Meaning you can scan into any subway without removing the card from your purse/wallet and then scan out from the subsequent stop.  The card will automatically deduct the balance of the trip from your card.

You can add money to your card, so it just works like a declining debit card that you can recharge whenever it runs out of money.  They can also be used for the other public transport systems, such as ferries or buses, and can even be used in 7/11s and McDonald's among other places.  There's also no eating or drinking in any public transport vehicle or transportation area, so everything is super clean.  It blows every other public transport system I've been on out of the water... In case you couldn't tell from my two paragraph rant of adoration, I was a huge fan of it :).

Macau broke the bank, so I was happy to find some cheap tourist activities to do.  For less than a dollar you can take a round trip ferry between Hong Kong island and Kowloon. For about thirty cents you can ride a tram across town.  On the MTR you can get to most places for a dollar or two.  In other words, sightseeing is cheap and getting between sights is a breeze.  There are also subway stops every kilometer or two, so you never have to worry about getting lost, you can just wander in whichever direction feels right.

View from the Star Ferry

Hong Kong has an amazing system of escalators, underground tunnels, and elevated walking paths to bypass crossing traffic

The Tram - $0.25 to go across town

The Central Mid Levels escalators - the largest such system in the world.  Transports the working sector from downtown to their homes up the hill

Real mannequins don't wear pants

Temples are a huge part of Asian culture, so I headed to one of the most popular, Wong Tai Sin.  It's such a bizarre spectacle, as it's in the middle of the city and surrounded by skyscrapers;  A strange homage to ancient life in the midst of the most futuristic city I've ever seen.  The temple is also a little different than most, as it serves three separate religions in union; Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.  I have to say the Chinese temples are pretty bad ass, they're built as giant complexes with different buildings for prayers, meetings, meditation, etc.  They have a totally different vibe than the temples of Southeast Asia.  The amount of tourists in HK is definitely on a different level though, you're constantly wading through a flood of pedestrians.

One of the friends I met in Laos, Andreas, had actually spent half a year in Hong Kong, so he was also able to provide me with some advice on what to check out as well.  Since I have a deep love of all things food related, I took his advice on the best dim sum restaurant in Hong Kong and headed to One Dim Sum.  Most people seemed to order two or three items each, but I went with four!  Not only was that place delicious, but it was incredibly cheap, each dish was around $2, so I feasted like a king for $8.  Steamed shrimp dumplings, barbecue pork and egg custard buns, rice noodle rolls, eff that was some tasty grub.  It was so good, I went back a second time!

Wong Tai Sin Temple...I like my pictures like I like my t-shirts, with a deep V

Asian tourists are the worst tourists.  They budge, shove, and have an average walking speed of three inches per hour.

It says Litter, Cum, Recyclables.  So naturally I made an appropriate deposit of each kind.  Apparently they allow naked mannequins but a man masturbating in public is a criminal offence.  Dear Hong Kong, I'll see you again when my 15 year ban expires

Dim Sum is not a particular dish, it just means "touch the heart".  You order the mini-portions and enjoy them with hot tea

As with most places in Asia there are also a lot of random street markets, but Hong Kong has crazy amounts of them.  They have fish markets, which can range from goldfish in plastic bags to massive buckets of freshly caught fish/squid/eel, bird markets, flower markets, electronic markets, and of course night markets.  I didn't find the markets to be too substantially different from any I'd already seen, but no backpacker trip is complete without scoping them.  I tried to do some fancier activities as well to gain some class, learn a little more about the culture, and become a respectable human being.  Thus I went to a famous old hotel, The Imperial, to get a cup of tea, but the line was insanely long and the place was clearly too fancy (expensive) for someone of my (economic) stature to endure, so I crossed the road and went to the $1 museums instead.

When you see something called, "Space Museum", how can you resist?  But here's the deal, if you're called space museum, I'm not really interested in space.  I'm expecting to see a dead alien, some UFO propaganda, and a movie on how the aliens built the pyramids, I don't want to be educated about space.    Since I was near the art museum, I checked that out as well, but I'm not really into art, so it wasn't too terribly interesting to me.  However, directly behind the museum was Hong Kong's version of Hollywood road, The Avenue of Stars.  So I got to walk around and check out all the hand prints from famous Chinese celebrities, of which I knew 4.  Thus in my quest to gain class, I deserted the fancy tea time, ditched the museums, and then gawked at celebrity hand prints and statues... Sophistication at it's finest.

The bird market, it's cool to see all the colorful birds, but it feels very wrong.  The birds are all in tiny cages and are restless in trying to crawl out.

The underground entrance to the Hong Kong Museum of Art

The past is told by those who win.  My darling, believe your voice can mean something

If me an Lee and KG could be free, flying free tenaciously. Skinny dipping in a sea of Lee, I propose on bended knee. Cha-Lee-Lee-Lee-La-Lee-Lee (Tenacious D reference, drink!!!!)

I still had a few more days before my flight to South Korea, so I visited a giant Buddha, trekked to Hong Kong's highest accessible peak, saw the only pandas outside of mainland China, and grabbed drinks at the world's highest bar, but those are stories for another blog...

Random GoPros

I'm on my feet, I'm on the floor, I'm good to go.  All I need is just to hear a song I know.  I wanna always feel like part of this was mine, I wanna fall in love tonight

While the city sleeps, we rule the streets

I tried to mount this noble steed, but the guard spotted me and slyly said, "Hey, no horseplay!"

I'm the real Subway SensaSean

Pretty cool, a gigantic temple in the middle of the city

Lead on to save me or lead us somewhere. Find me some answers, one nation beware.  Can't tell the difference between myth and man, or what's necessary, or where I should stand...

I feel like this is the quintessential photo showing I'm not the kid from the start of this trip; That life is long gone, I'm someone else now

Hong Kong is peppered with "vertical towns" where there are 20ish of the exact same residential skyscraper forming a little village.

My main man, Jackie Chan!!!

Enter the Dragon